Category: Lilianne Ruiz

HAVANA, Cuba, 14 January 2014, www.cubanet.org.- How has the Cuban political scene changed for human rights activists and leaders of the political opposition who have left and returned to Cuba? Is the day after the fall of the Castro regime close? To answer, Cubanet contacted some of the protagonists of this story.

Miriam Celaya (blogger and independent journalist)

Why is immigration and travel reform so important? Well, because we know that until that time you needed a permit to leave; and of course the dissidents, opponents, nonconformists, independent civil society members, anyone ’uncomfortable,’ if you don’t sympathize with the government, they simply forbade you to leave and you didn’t leave.

I believe it’s a positive measure in the sense that it opens up for us the possibility of traveling when we’ve been invited. We have been able to have direct contact with institutions, with other governments and with free societies in the free world. It has strengthened our voices, people have met us personally.

But one can’t overestimate these things, because I don’t think this has substantially changed the Cuban political scene. Yes, we have been able to get solidarity, to find support, there have been groups that have now found sectors aligned to their respective activities, to the spheres where they operate as activists and they are receiving more effective support.

To me, this seems very good. But on the other hand I don’t see that these trips have significantly changed the Cuban political scene. It also tends to focus attention, to give to large a role to what the government does. The measures the government takes, which could mean some real opening on the road to democracy.

I think it’s time for civil society and all of us to understand that what we do doesn’t completely depend on what the government does, because the government is on the defensive: why give them that role?

To the extent that we can’t understand our own political reality, our own position toward the interior of Cuba and occupy a place in the political game of the country… I don’t think that because there is travel it’s going to substantially change the political situation in Cuba; we can’t change outside of Cuba, we change the interior of Cuba.

Guillermo (Coco) Fariñas, winner of the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize in 2010, General Coordinator of the United Anti-totalitarian Forum (FANTU) and spokesperson for the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU)

The timid reforms, including the immigration and travel reform, implemented by general-president Raul Castro’s government on 14 January 2013, should not be perceived as an advance of achievement, but rather as the fulfillment of a long postponed or delayed right. We must have the civic courage to demand other rights that they still don’t recognize. continue reading

HAVANA, Cuba, January 2014, http://www.cubanet.org.- The police operation started at 5:00 in the morning of January 3. They knocked on the door of Hector Maseda’s house, one of the former political prisoners from the 2003 Black Spring Cause of the 75, husband of the late Laura Pollan — the site of the national headquarters of the Ladies in White movement. Opening the door, Maseda saw in the street a group of 20 officers, led by a Lieutenant Colonel accompanied by a prosecutor, the president of his neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and the secretary of the Communist Party “nucleus” in the area. The warrant was signed by the commanding officer: Katia M. Morales Jarrin.

The entered the house like people who knew ahead of time what they were looking for. They wanted to operate simultaneously on the lower floor and on the “barbacoa” half-level. They brought metal shears and broke the hasp of the lock on the door of the room where the joys were stored.

They took everything: 160 bags of toys labeled with children’s names; all the food they found (including what was in the fridge for preparing a cold salad: hot dogs, spaghetti, mayonnaise, chicken, pineapple, apples); a piñata full of candies and suckers; 2 laptops, 3 home printers, children’s clothes, women’s clothes — including those Laura Pollán wore — four painting by friends, rosaries, 57 chairs used by the Ladies in White to hold their literary teas; and other things so small and because of this so important, things that would only interest the family: mementos, symbols. continue reading

The search lasted no more than 15 minutes; they collected everything and took it away. They arrested Maseda and took him to what had been the police station at Picota and Paula. Inside, he could see that it had been remodeled and converted into a kind of “Instruction Center,” like that at 100 and Aldabo.

They kept him sitting in a chair while they recorded and counted everything they’d taken. At 1:00 in the afternoon they released him.

Laurita’s arrest

As she walked to the site at 9:15 in the morning on the same day, Laura Labrada Pollán, Laura Pollán’s daughter, didn’t know what had happened. Three blocks from the house, a State Security car stopped dramatically, and a fat blue-eyed man got out who didn’t identify himself. “Laura, you can’t continue, you’re under arrest,” he said. Two officers dressed in olive-green also got out of the car.

The procedure applied to those arrested by State Security starts with establishing a sense of familiarity in how they address you. The key is considering this the first step to achieving total domination of a human being: removing their legal personhood. Confronted as she had been other times with an arbitrary arrest, Laurita — as Laura Pollán’s daughter is known to her friends — didn’t ask where they were talking her. After many turns the car stopped. They made her get out and walk down a passage, go up two steps and enter an office. There they told her she was at 100th and Aldabo.

Laurita understood the magnitude of what was happening when she read the list of confiscated articles, in a document drafted in terms that, she thought, were worth copying, but unfortunately she was unable to get a copy. The official who showed her the document presented himself as “Reinier.” He told her that at 5:10 in the morning at 963 Neptuno Street they had performed a search and taken everything, that there would be no party, because, in his words, it was “counterrevolutionary.”

From the document, Laurita remembers phrases such as “Cuban children don’t need the toys of counterrevolutionaries.” They repeated ad nauseum the ideological justification for the sterile social sacrifices in favor of the parasitic State: The expensive toys, which languish in the shop windows because of the outlandish prices, are the fault of “the blockade.”

Since November, with Lady in White María Cristina Labrada Varona and in the name of the whole movement, Laurita had begun to collect the names and ages of the children. In the State stores, at a very high cost totally inaccessible on the salary of a Cuban worker, they were able to buy toys for more than 150 children, thanks to help from Cubans in exile.

When the operation invaded the house, every little bag had more than one toy. And the guests were not only the children and grandchildren of the Ladies in White, or of political opponents or activists. The neighborhood children were also invited, with the permission of their parents.

The party

The Ladies in White managed to engineer a party for the children as scheduled, where they received much love, even though the toys were missing. Some parents in the neighboring houses offered to get some jams. The cake which had been commissioned well in advance, couldn’t make it out of the oven, because, according to the baker who paid for his license to be self-employed, at the last minute there was no gas.

Some Ladies in White couldn’t come because they were arrested; others were visited by State Security and read the riot act, resorting, finally, to threats. On Aranguren and Hospital streets they set up a police cordon as is their custom, blocking off Neptuno Street, all led by State Security’s Section 21.

They are not uniformed police. They dress in plain clothes although they are armed with pistols. The worst impression is that of their morphology. They deal in violence and impunity. The impression they create and that they try to create is that of lurking and having the ability to jump out and cause every kind of injury of the high command orders them to.

The Feast of the Three Kings at the Ladies in White headquarters goes back to 2004. It was created by Laura Pollán to give some joy to the children and grandchildren of the the 75 peaceful opponents, human rights activists and independent journalists who were unjustly imprisoned in the repressive wave of March 2003, which has gone down in our history as The Black Spring.

Chanel is 6. Her parents are prisoners: her grandmother is a Lady in White. When she learned that “a thief” had taken all the presents brought by the Three Kings she broke into tears. Like her, more than 150 children were left with empty hands after having been fed an illusion that dared to cross the desert on the hump of a camel.

Lilianne Ruiz

Cubanet / 6 January 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, Novemer 2013, www.cubanet.org — Back then there were images of abundance. Our elders say it was a gift to the senses. Memory arouses a nostalgia for a kind of lost paradise.

El Mercado Único. Amelia, 80 years old.

“It was quite a city, quite a city. It was cheap, cheap… All the fruits and vegetables you could want. Cuban fruit (frutas de caney). The Chinese brought in apples. There were apples from California in wrapped in Chinese paper. They were in a basket that said they were from California. The fish was fresh. The fishermen went around with zinc coolers where they kept the fish on ice. They got the fish fresh off the boats. You could find fish anywhere. If you wanted lobster, they would sell it to you live. There was parguito, the best fish I ever had. And bass cut into steaks. There were Chinese and Italian restaurants. I remember, when my husband and I would go to a cabaret, we would stop there at one or two in the morning to have some wonton soup and it would be full of people. All that is gone now.”

Nowadays the Mercado Único (One-of-a-Kind Market) is known simply as Cuatro Caminos (Four Roads). The downstairs looks as though some Lilliputians launched a “Haitian revolution” and exiled Gulliver. The only horn of plenty to be seen is the one carved in stone on the face of the building. Remarkably, it remains intact. In spite of Raul Castro’s economic reforms legalizing self-employment, there are only a few small, almost invisible businesses. Outside a CADECA currency exchange office, with its sign advertising 90 convertible pesos for 100 dollars, there is only a liquor salesman and someone hoping to find customers for a few animals at the building’s perimeter.

The building itself is falling apart. The roof, supported by steel-reinforced columns (well-worn Herculean columns), is damp and the trapped water seeks an escape route through cracks in the ceiling, threatening the structure with collapse.

Fruits and vegetables are still sold in one wing of the market. The vendors swear that you can find products there that are not for sale in any of Havana’s other “agros” or farmers’ markets — fruits like canistel and guanábana. Seventy-year-old Angel says, “Those of you who were born later don’t know about Cuban fruits. So much has disappeared that we no longer even have names for things.”

At the entrance on Manglar Street (now Arroyo Street) there are large cages with live poultry for sale. A young man wearing an attractive necklace of red and black beads approaches us. His name is Ronald Rodríguez, but tells us we should call him by his religious name, Eshu bí, which means Son of Elegguá. In Afro-Cuban mythology this orisha, or Yoruba deity, is the protector of travelers and the deity of crossroads. After saying hello, he proposes a barter exchange: “Put my photo on Facebook.”

“We sell animals to Santeria followers and practitioners, who use them in their rituals to save people,” he says.

An animal vendor (who asked not to be identified) says that on average eighty people a day make purchases there. He notes that the sale of goats and sheep is illegal within city limits, which makes it more difficult to get animals. Now the “animaleros,” as they are called by Santeria followers, only do work on special request.

An interesting phenomenon in the vicinity surrounding the market is the number of traditional Cuban Yoruba religious articles for sale. What previously had been modest businesses selling these items have become veritable boutiques, with windows displaying art associated with Afro-Cuban sects. A wood carving might cost 900 CUC (or roughly 900 US dolllars).

One of the store owners

According to Yoruba tradition, public plazas are where one finds both the living and the dead. In Cuatro Caminos residents of Havana turn to the four street corners (the four cardinal points) to ask the blessing of Olofi and the spirits who live in the plaza. The most popular items for sale here are herbs, coconut and candles, which are used to “make a saint,” a rite of initiation. Some people shop for herbs for use in spiritual cleansing rituals.

Materials come from Mexico

“There are seamstresses who make priestly garments. We bring in the materials from Mexico. Artisans make the beaded necklaces and bring them to us. We have everything here that people need. Everyone has a retail license. In the old days, until the early 1960s, herb vendors used to operate out of pushcarts. You can’t have pushcarts on the street anymore, but the herbalists can sell out of their homes. Cuba has created a Yoruba religion with the hope of prosperity.”

Cuatro Caminos is still an exceptional place, a point of confluence with access to any location in Havana. Calle Cristina (Cristina Street) leads to Avenida del Puerto (Port Avenue) where there used to be a ferry with daily roundtrip service between Havana and Key West.

After 1959 the new revolutionary government banned private property along with civil and political liberties in the name of a dubious majority. With them went citizens’ freedom and rights.

Lilianne Ruiz

Cubanet, November 25, 2013

On Tuesday we learned of the beating of Marta Beatriz. They didn’t just beat her, they also dragged her up the stairs, 31 steps, beating her neck and whole body. I did not ask Marta’s age but she is an older woman, perhaps older than 60. She was the only woman in the group of 75 (from the Black Spring of 2003), imprisoned for her activism and for publishing her opinions against the regime.

She, a group of activists and friends, had been standing in front of the Zanja police station to protest the harassment she suffers from some of her neighbors.

That morning Marta had refused to let her house be fumigated with smoke and oil, an invasion on the pretext of doing away with the mosquito that carried dengue fever. There are other methods of fumigation, which here they call “special” that also eliminate the larva and the mosquitoes, but that was not available and the smoke was spreading into the house through the slats of the blinds, and the smoke is toxic for people with asthma and any respiratory problems, like her.

I can’t stand even the noise these smoke machines make and also that any stranger can come into our rooms. Sometimes they must enter our houses along, because if the smoke injures us they assume we have to leave for them to fumigate, and trust they won’t touch any of our personal things.

To me, it seems like a form of violation of our spaces. On the other hand, the city is full of trash dumps and potential breeding grounds for mosquito larva, huge deposits of stinking water. But our houses are preferred by the State.

Marta had spent the whole night in front of the police station, protesting. At 7 in the morning a police car stopped in front of her she was taken by force by two of those rude women who join the Ministry of the Interior — it’s sad to see what they turn into because of their envy and hatred, attacking without scruples any enemy o the government.If the order was to kill they would kill. It seems they have no conscience.

They are the result of ideological propaganda and the zone of ignorance fed to them by the free education of the State. Later you see them coveting any trinket, proudly receiving some jewelry, probably the fruit of Customs forfeitures, as a reward for their cruelty.

The two MININT women were beating Marta the whole way, stopping at the entrance to the building where she lives, on Belascoain, and dragging her out of the car. They continued dragging her up the stairs without allowing her to stand up, the 31 steps to the door of her house.

Since then her home has been under siege by the police. The second day didn’t let her 17-year-old nephew come up to bring her juice. The two activists with her happened to be in the house because they went there to make coffee to take to the Station, and were surprised to see Marta beaten, swollen and bruised, with the veins of her arms and legs on the point of splitting from so much trauma. They won’t let them see her, which seems to be the point of the siege at the house; perhaps they are waiting for the bruises to fade.

But Marta Beatriz hasn’t been able to be seen by a doctor. She is taking anti-inflammatory pills that have begun to damage her stomach. Yesterday they were arresting all those who came to visit.

21 November 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, November 2013, www.cubanet.org.- Giraldo Rodríguez Comendador, 76, can’t cross the avenue because cataracts cloud his vision. Every day he has to decide whether to seek the evidence of this 42 working years (to initiate a process that would culminate in a 250 peso pension — Cuban pesos, not the ones convertible into dollars, about $10), or to set himself to the little “errands” — as he calls them — to survive.

Most of the time he’s forced to the second option, not just because hunger is an undeniable fact, but also because he is losing hope.

In 2006, when he retired — from the Ministry of Construction in Las Tunas where he worked as a driver — they told him that his record didn’t appear, that it might even have been devoured by flames. I’ve heard, on other occasions, of people with a problem like his, but until today I didn’t understand that a lost work record multiplied by zero equals the sacrifice of an entire life.

To alleviate his desperation a little, a social worker appeared and offered him the assistance of 142 Cuban pesos, but Rodríguez Comendador expressed his indignation.

“Like me there are a few, at least in Las Tunas, who have demanded and taken the charity given to them. And they are satisfied with that. I am not a beggar. To me they must give what is mine.”

To get “his” he has to go to every place where he worked and get them to sign documents that support his having been on the payroll, and then go to the Collective Law Firm and hire a lawyer to make his claim. One of the inconveniences he confronts is that most of his peers have retired. Others have changed jobs. He says that once he met the boss he had when he was working on the El Cornito dam.

“He said to me, ’Boy, go to Los Pinos, to the human resources department of Removal and Construction, and I’ll send you a truckload of witnesses.”

But the witnesses weren’t enough to authorize paying the pension, which is processed through documents like the work record. They will only certify, in an extreme case like his, that he worked in a specific place for a determined amount of time.

“Seven years ago I was on the ropes. Even my knees gave out when I was walking. I was convinced I’d lost my working years. For nothing, because they mistreated me like they are mistreating me today. I worked to have what’s mine, for myself I don’t worry that there’s a law that obliges children to take care of their parents,” he says.

As for hiring a lawyer, the fee for labor processes isn’t very high. But Rodríguez Comendador asks:

“How amI going to hire a lawyer? I don’t know the medical prescriptions I’ve lost out on because I can’t buy medicines that cost 19 pesos.”

He went out again to look for work, but no one gave him any; because he’s of retirement age he doesn’t have valid documents and can’t do temporary work.

Also, as blind as I am, they put me on the truck to throw dirt, mud, cow manure, and I do it because I need the pesos. He knows that I’m blind, so what he’s going to do is take off. My situation is absolutely terrible situation.”

When asked if he’d been hungry, he remains silent for several seconds. And then answers, like someone who rising above his honor made a stack of old crumpled papers:

“Imagine it; if I tell you no, I’m lying. Charity doesn’t solve the problem: They’ve given me a blanket and I had to sell it to eat, a pair of shoes and I had to sell them to eat.”

So there is no doubt when he says,

“Me, you tell me to take an iron bar to the train station for 10 pesos and I hoist it on my shoulder and I take it.”

But the urgent question is, how long can he continue to take his body to the extreme of exhaustion with such bad nourishment?

This doesn’t seem to worry him more than how he is going to get by day-to-day.

“I’ve caught myself at six in the morning, thinking. And what can a man think when he’s at a crossroads like I am?”

The little light fades and he says,

“I’ve thought about hanging myself, girl. Five hundred times I’ve looked at an iron bar back there where I can hang myself, but I see this fat woman you see sitting over there, that’s my wife, and I change my mind. Anyway, I have to die of something.”

By Lilianne Ruíz

Cubanet, 12 November 2013

I tell my daughter that being responsible is a privilege. I don’t know from what deep part of me this form of rebellion emerged. I find that it is not something I’m fully aware of. It is not the education I received in school, nor at home, where the most important thing was to be obedient. To be guided by others.

In the blink of an eye she’s turned 7. In the same period that we have spent together — unquestionably the best part of my life — she will be 14, then 21… By then I will have taught her the best I have to give. I’m not sure about having been free. And I think you can only be happy from there.

Amid the crap that goes on in Cuba today, my daughter and I are really lucky that her teacher from the first grade is pretty good. But you can’t teach someone to be free, and so, she can’t be educated to be truly responsible. The teacher, whether by conviction or obedience I don’t know, but undoubtedly because here we all play down the importance, must teach my daughter about other heroes who are not her mother’s, if I ever had any.

And she must indoctrinate her from the time she’s little in the political religion, and I swear no one has ever asked me if I agree with this model of children’s awareness. And it’s taken for granted that if the education is free I have to accept that the values they teach my daughter are the same ones that have brought about the profound crisis in human rights of our country since the seizure of power by the Castros, who have made it a place that most people dream of escaping from.

Can we do nothing other than play down the importance of the the way others, whom we did not choose, educate our children? Content ourselves with their learning to read and write and perhaps one day going the University and becoming members if they annul their consciousness, their will, their responsibility and their freedom? Who comes out ahead with the education offered free from the State. The family or the State dictatorship?

The day my daughter was born I understood that I could not continue to disengage myself from my responsibility. She taught me the rudiments of freedom with her first cries. That day, in the room where we were waiting to be discharged the next day, Palms and Canes was showing on TV, a program from time immemorial, after the State News. And I told myself I did not want anything like that for her, that her life was going to be different from mine, that all the times I had shut up about my small truths, I had lost the opportunity to carve out a future. But I didn’t realize I would have to do my part to give her a better life.

A few years ago I opened the blog Jeronimo, falling under the spell of an engraving by Durer, and in the act of finding my own expression I started to listen to my heart, the same voice that tells her that being responsible is a privilege that she earns and that she should do so, for love of herself.

A country where people are silenced in so many ways, that blocks the path to the internal truth of each person, cannot produce individual growth, flourishing, creativity, wealth, happiness.

A friend has a 3-year-old daughter in daycare. She told me one day the girl came home with directions to paint Che’s cap. So she took the black crayons and as best she could painted a cap with a star. The following day the girl was supposed to paint Camilo’s sombrero. And the same thing happened. On the third day, while she was climbing the stairs to the house, the little girl announced that that night she was supposed to paint, for the following day, Fidel’s trousers. My friend looked at her husband and the two of them, in chorus, said, “Don’t fuck with us!”

But outside of pretending to be demented and forgetting a task that carries so much political weight, and arriving late for the morning assemblies which are also political, there’s not much more you can do as long as the school system belongs to the State. Every day that passes I ask myself what is the path to regaining the freedoms our parents sold and without wanting to, postponing their responsibility, they passed it on to us.

12 November 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, November 1, 2013, www.cubanet.org.- The trial of the White Lady Sonia Garro, which had been scheduled for today, was suspended yesterday without explanation by the authorities.

Her lawyer, Amelia Rodriguez Cala, appeared before the People’s Court to finalize the details on Thursday, October 31, and no one could explain the cause of this last minute decision.

Looking for first-hand information, Cubanet spotted Yamilé Garro, sister of the accused, who had visited her that morning in Guatao women’s prison.

According to her sister, Sonia is optimistic about her defense by the attorney Rodríguez Cala, who historically has defended those prosecuted for political reasons.

Remembering what happened on March 18, 2012 — the day that assault troops stormed Garro ‘s house, within a few hours of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the island — the sister of the defendant contends that she did not commit the crimes for which charges have brought by the prosecution.

“It all began with an act of repudiation,” she explained.

A crowd organized and led by State Security stationed themselves around the Garros’ house, in Marianao, to repudiate them. The Garro couple reacted by shouting “Down with Fidel!” and placing anti-government posters in the doorway of their home. This provoked the troops to violently storm their house. Sonia was injured in the leg with a rubber bullet.

It’s worth remembering that, on the eve of the visit of the Supreme Pontiff to the Island, all the human rights activists and political opponents ,who State Security and the top leadership of the country thought would attend the Papal mass in the Plaza of the Revolution, were detained.

Garro ‘s lawyer also filed a request Thursday for a change of custody, which would involve the immediate release of her client who is awaiting trial.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Rodriguez Cala, told this reporter, “I place my hopes in the Court. The fact that these people are political opponents should not determine the sentence. Ideally the trial would have already been held.”

Sonia’s 17-year-old daughter, Elaine Bocourt Garro, is waiting for her at home. When asked what she can tell us about her mother, she struggles to hold back her tears and then tells us, “I miss her greatly. I love her, she’s my mother. I need her. Also, they’re holding her on a whim… she hasn’t done anything.”

Inconvenient for the Jailers

Garro has been in prison without trial for one year and seven months. In all this time, she has experienced very harsh conditions. From being locked up in solitary confinement for 20 days, to the gunshot wound in her leg being infected by Staphylococcus aureus, to suffering beatings by several armed guards.

This latest incident, according to her sister, dates from a few months ago, but she can not remember the exact date. It happened when Garro forgot her card to make phone calls and had to return to the detachment where one of the officers was mistreating a prisoner. Garro said facing the jailer who, if he was in such a bad mood, it would have been better not to have gone to work.

“It wasn’t even a minute before several guards jumped on her and she was beaten with batons,” Yamilé said.

Incredible as it may seem, she adds, “On the medical certificate which was issued several days later, it said Sonia was the aggressor and she had attacked the guards, who were victims.”

Since a month and a half ago, Garro has been suffering from a kidney infection. She still hasn’t received medical treatment.They just put her on painkillers and send her back to her cell.

The prison authorities tell her sister that they don’t have any budget for this type of medicine.

“This isn’t new. When she was infected with staphylococcus, they said it was due to lack of vitamins and it was just a matter of taking vitamins and iron. Now she had Staphylococcus aureus on her skin and boils erupt periodically,” says her sister.

She also says that, in prison, Garro witnessed and reported an unfortunate event known as “the Mutiny on the Mattresses.”

The guards didn’t allow a group of prisoners to leave the laundry area and they began to protest. The reaction of the guards was to lash out against them. Therefore, the prisoners rebelled burning a mattress.

Lilianne Ruiz, Cubanet, 1 November 2013

The first 100 yards toward Avenue 26 is defined by the neighborhood bakery. The eternal line of neighbors with their little nylon bags and ration books, waiting for the five centavo bread, sour and with the texture of cement. Most of the time they come out unhappy, laughing at their misfortunes. Why they laugh at what insults them, I don’t know. To stay calm? Many of them haven’t eaten breakfast in a long time, not even a cup of coffee, nor a slice of palatable bread. Their lives are elsewhere. I don’t know where their lives could be.

Following the road to 26th Avenue. The panorama changes in the Kholy neighborhood. The houses, which before 1959, belonged to comfortable families, not have modern cars in front with olive green license plates. When these people restore their houses, they really do it. With an abundance of materials and brigades of bricklayers from some State ministry.

Not like those people in the little house at 216 Tulipan — where you come to walking in the other direction — who put some wooden boards and a cement-fiber ceiling in one of the roofless rooms in the old mansion, with the risk it will fall in on them, and three generations live there who don’t know what breakfast is. Do at least the children under 7 eat breakfast? It hurts to ask the question and not be able to do anything. The grandfather told me that if someone, from charity, gave him some old shoes, he would prefer to sell them to kill the family’s hunger.

It’s the worst lie. Because socialist governments, where the State is the ruler to the ultimate family corner (with the story of free education they shape the conscience of our children) they sell themselves as givers of social justice. And it is precisely this condition as “providers,” as “deliverers of benefits,” without respect for individual rights, which makes them the worst enemies of freedom, of happiness.

The cause of the poverty of the neighbors at 14 Tulipan — who are like the majority of the Cuban people — and the immoral prosperity of the olive-green thieves of the Kholy neighborhood, is not the American embargo. The Island’s government says it is Cuban but is only Castro and is not disposed to listen to the Cuban people’s demands for freedom, without sending their repressive commandos from Section 21, who beat “scientifically” — enough to do damage without leaving too many traces nor causing too much of a scandal — or they send their rented populist mobs in their ignorance or ill will.

31 October 2013

We walked down Tulipan Street toward Calzada del Cerro. Victor had said that Manual Sanguily, who I only remember from story books in elementary school, had lived at No. 14 Tulipan and received Maceo there. Tulipan is not that long of a street. After Calzado del Cerro it ends at another street called St. Teresa.

The house was the most beautiful there, despite being in ruins. Luz took photos.

It was then that the lady sitting in the destroyed doorway called out to us. I think she was anxious to tell her story. She let us enter her home, in what would have been, before, one of the rooms in the mansion, and let us take photos. The roots were hanging from the ceiling. That was impressive. The same vitality of the house, where the seeds prospered, is what led to its end.  But with people inside, who have nowhere to go.

And to our surprise, people are convinced that this is the same house we were looking for, Sanguily’s house.

Victor works wonders. He invented a XIX century periodical, he prefers to call it an apocryphal libel. And on page 2, there is stamped an image of the house, the house in the resurrection of the image. Great, right?

See related story of visit to the house here.

25 October 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, October 2013, www.cubanet.org – Amid the ruins, the people living in No. 216 Tulipan, in El Cerro, are convinced they inhabit the same house where Manuel Sanguily lived.

“Sanguily lived here. On the terrace he had coffee with Maceo,” they’re heard to say, excited.

Beyond the myth or the truth, the house is falling to pieces with its inhabitants inside.

Leonila Mirtha Cruz is 61 and was three when she moved into the house. “My grandmother was the rent collector for the rooms.” Her eyes light up when she says, “Indeed, I know the history of this house.”

When it rains she leaves the one room to which her ownership has been reduce, and takes cover with a nylong bag under the eaves of the house across the street, until the rain passes.

If there isn’t too much water, she puts the bed in the corner by the door into the room, where there is still a good piece of roof and falls asleep there listening to the sounds of the stones falling in the false ceiling. “The only place that doesn’t get wet is this little corner.”

Cruz explains the reason for the falling fragments of the roof:

“What I have up there is a grove of trees. A yagruma, a paradise tree, a capuli, and the roots grow at night.”

The roots hang down through the roof and the walls of the abode. Even more than its extravagance for the perception, the growing vegetation of the house, which retains the majesty of the ninetheenth century, contains the exact path to its end.

Uninhabitable patrimony

With the imminent danger of collapse, the house has a demolition order, but the authorities haven’t offered a way out other than eviction.

Cruz relates that, years ago, “they gave homes” to some families living in the rooms of the old mansion. But the bad luck of not having been on this list is to blame for her being alone. Her children left as rafters in 1994 and she hasn’t heard from them. “They left because they couldn’t take it any more,” she says.

According to her account, the house was to be declared a heritage site in 1979. On that occasion, they were told the property couldn’t be touched.

“I’m content with a tiny little room like this,” she says, bringing together the tips of her index finger and thumb. And she adds, “Sometimes I tell myself it’s better to live in a cardboard box, because it’s less dangerous. Living here, a stone could fall on you and kill you. When the dead person has no one to mourn them, it’s worse.”

To shake off the sadness that has overcome her for a moment, Cruz says impishly, “Sanguily, get me out of here please. Find me a better room.”

“A coffin is cheaper”

In another room of the house a family of three gneerations lives together. The children, 10 and 11 years old, were bornthere. When the roof collapsed, they built a small house of roof panels and shingles inside the room.

The two children attend school. The clothesline with clean clothes and a few pots and pans, give a homey touch that speaks of humanity, which resists misery.

The children’s grandfather tries to fix a chair, straightening some nails with a table knife. He breaks the silence, “We have asked for help to fix the house, but it seems a coffin is cheaper.”

He points to the street, “The bosses come by here, the Housing boss, the Sector (police) boss. They say they’re going to tear it down, but without telling people where they’re going to take them.” He concludes, sadly, “This is abandonment, and they treat us as if we were animals.”

Tulipán 14

According to historic data, Manuel Sanguily received Maceo in the No. 14 Tulipan house on the latter’s visit to Havana. Both had fought in the Ten Years War.

In the pause before the War of ’95, specifically in 1889, they organized gatherings at this house, where the patriots discussed the future of Cuba. Sanguliy was considered by Maceo to be the exemplary figure of democracy.

With urban growth, the street numbering changed on Tulipan. What was once No. 14 Tulipan, now might be No. 216. But they no longer speak of democracy there. Its inhabitants are content to have survived the last downpour.

Lilianne Ruíz

See related story of the “1889 Newspaper with a photo of the house” here.

From Cubanet, 23 October 2013

Havana, Cuba, October 2013, www.cubanet.org – Humberto Real Suarez is another of the men who disembarked on the night of 15 October 1994 on the coasts of Caibarien, along with Armado Sosa Fortuny.

Today he is serving a sentence of 30 years imprisonment in “Kilo 8” maximum security prison in Camagüey.

The group of seven men, under the command of Sosa Fortuny, had sailed from Tavernier, Florida. They belonged to the Democratic National Unity Party (PUND), but they had received minimal military training, barely knew each other, and they were inferior in number and materiel to the army they intended to fight when they got to the Island.

It’s been 19 years since the night when an accidental shot from Real Suárez’s rifle cost the life of a man and thwarted the plans of the command to create a guerrilla front in the Escambray Mountains.

“I came here to fight against the government army, not to kill any civilians. The man’s death was an accident. But the reasons that made me return to Cuba, ready to engage in armed insurrection, are still valid,” he says in a telephone interview with Cubanet.

After a year and a half of psychological torture at the Villa Marista prison, he was tried in 1996 and sentenced to death. He was then 26 years old.

Independent lawyers from the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, after analyzing the prosecutor’s file, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge Real Suárez for the death, and issued a call to human rights organizations to intercede with the Castro government for his life.

The pressure exerted by the appeal of his parents, Graciela Suarez and Humberto Real, calling for international support to preserve his life, alongside the work of human rights organizations and the declaration of renowned intellectuals like Mario Vargas Llosa, resulted in Real Suárez not being executed. In December 2010 the initial sentence was commuted to 30 years in prison.

The document in which the sentence was given in 2010 again stated that no explosives were found among the weapons taken. That did not remove what was in the prosecution’s description of the alleged intentions — without any proof: “to carry out violent actions against schools and public facilities.”

On the other hand, several paragraphs describe the accused as anti-social elements, imitating the propaganda the Spanish government used against the mambises — at the beginning of the Ten Years War — painting them as “highwaymen” to the Cuban public. And much later — in the sixties of the last century — against the rebels fighting the Castro autocracy, calling the extermination of thousands of Cubans in the Escambray mountains, “a fight against bandits.”

Demanding Dignified Treatment

When asked how how he endured for so many years a death sentence staring him in the face, Real Suárez replied that faith in God allowed him to live those 16 years without fear of execution.

Today his life is spent in a cell in the Kilo 8 prison, but shares the day with other prisoners. At 6:00 am, the guards open the gate and let him walk up and down a 40 yard corridor, until 6:00 PM. Each day, the prisoner is entitled to one hour of sunshine in the courtyard of the prison.

Recently, Humberto Real Suarez’s launched a new public petition. This time before the Archbishop of Havana, begging Cardinal Jaime Ortega to arrange the transfer of their child to a prison in the province in Matanzas, as it very difficult to travel to the province of Camagüey, given the difficult conditions of transportation in Cuba and the advanced age of both parents. Graciela Suarez and Humberto Real, have as the only purpose in life to alleviate the prison hardships of their son, through family visits that have been held during these 19 years.

Humberto Real’s father, also interviewed Cubanet, related that when he saw his son for the first time after the 1996 trial, he only managed to say, “Here is your father.” Graciela, the mother, says she has never been able to sleep a full night.

Justice in Cuba looks after its own interests

The speech that served as an ideological alibi to the court that convicted Real Suárez – in 1996 and 2010 – is a discourse of extreme violence, exemplified in the slogan “Socialism or Death,” among others.

On July 13, 1994 (the same year of the failed landing), 41 people, some of them children, died at sea as a result of the deliberate sinking of the tugboat “13th of March.” The responsibility for these deaths was never acknowledged by the government, which instead of bringing forward those who were guilty, responded to the popular protests known as The Maleconazo (August 5, 1994) with more repression. Later they justified it, in the face of national and foreign public opinion, with uninterrupted ideological propaganda in all the mass media, a maneuver known as the Battle of Ideas.

Humberto Real Suárez and his companions were not tried with all the procedural guarantees, but none has asked for clemency. They, along with many inside and outside the island, continue to hold on to the dream of freedom and human rights for all Cubans.

Lilianne Ruíz

Cubanet, October 18, 2013

Heartbreaking, repulsive, are adjectives that describe the act of repudiation of Monday outside the headquarters of the Ladies in White on Neptune Street between Aramburu and Hospital. Many who were mobilized there to shout insults and threats were young university students, members of the Federation of University Students (FEU) and the Young Communist Union (UJC), as they themselves declared as they chanted their their slogans.

An event to verbally assault a women’s Movement fighting for the release of the political prisoners, didn’t seem an obviously wrong act to them. Their sense of what is humanly correct or incorrect was annulled by ideology or by an instinct for self-preservation.

This morning I spoke with a former political prisoner who had been jailed for 15 years, and a good part of those 15 years he spent in Kilo 8 Prison on a maximum severity regimen, which meant greater cruelty and impunity on the part of the guards.

I wonder if there is another place on earth like Cuba, where the confusion, the perversion of the ethical meaning of life is greater. Because I want to think that those people who were there on Monday, in front of the Ladies in White headquarters, supporting a regime very dangerous to the human condition: Do they really know what they are doing?

18 October 2013