Category: Mario Penton Martinez

The doctors were quickly transferred to neighboring Somalia, where Al Shabab, a terrorist group linked to al Qaeda, is fighting to topple the central government and establish Islamic law. The doctors performed surgeries and cared for the local population, including in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia and Somalia.

Kenya had difficulties sending national doctors due to the dangerousness of the area, where there are frequent attacks by Al Shabaab to pressure the Kenyan government to withdraw its troops from Somalia. In January, the terrorist group organized a major attack on a hotel complex in Nairobi in which 26 people died.

This has been the second kidnapping of foreigners in five months by the extremist group Al Shabab. Last November, the Italian aid worker Silvia Costanza Romano, 23, was kidnapped by armed men in the town of Chakama, near the tourist town of Malindi (east). To date, her whereabouts are unknown despite army searches.

The Government of Kenya has deployed its elite troops to search for Cubans, so far with no results. The governor of Mandera, Ali Roba, condemned the attack and asked the elders to initiate talks with their counterparts in Bulahawa and to ensure that the doctors are returned to Kenya, reported The Star.

“We call on the security agencies to do whatever is necessary to save the lives of our Cuban doctors and to bring them back from captivity. I sent my condolences to the family of the deceased officer,” he said.

Landy Rodríguez Hernández and Assel Herrera Correa are part of the contingent of 100 doctors Cuba sent to Kenya in June last year amid heavy protests from medical unions in that country.

According to the digital site Mwakilishi, Kenya pays  4,000 per month for each doctor, a higher figure than paid to their local counterparts. Generally, the Cuban government keeps 75% of the doctors’ salary. The export of health services is the main source of income of the Island, according to official figures, with an annual income of close to 10 billion dollars.

The Ministry of Public Health said in a brief official note published on Friday afternoon that it was keeping in touch with the Kenyan authorities and had created a “governmental working group” to follow up on this “sensitive issue.”

National Assembly Deputy Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of former president Raul Castro, said on Twitter that the kidnapping of doctors was “another hoax of imperialism.”

“The Islamic State responds to them, but they got into a swamp by kidnapping the Cuban doctors,” said Castro, a leader of the government’s National Center for Sex Education.

Assel Herrera Correa is a native of Puerto Padre, in the province of Las Tunas. He graduated as Integral General Practitioner he has participated in “missions” of the Cuban Government in Botswana, Brazil and Venezuela. In Cuba, he has a 17-year-old daughter, Sheyla Herrera, who attacked officials of the Ministry of Public Health in an interview with Radio and TV Martí.

“I do not know anything yet, we do not know anything,” she said, adding that no Public Health official has informed the family about her father’s condition, or what measures will be taken to return him home safely.

Landy Rodríguez Hernández is a surgeon by profession, born in Placetas, province of Villa Clara, in the center of the country. In Cuba he worked in the General Hospital of Remedios. According to the information on his social networks, he is married and has a five-year-old daughter.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

In a conversation with this newspaper, Del Rosario described the stamped visa and the tourist card as “very positive” tools and expressed the desire of the Panamanian Government to simplify the procedures to increase the visits of Cuban entrepreneurs.

The security minister also stressed that the new measure does not eliminate the sale of the tourist card, an option for tens of thousands of Cubans who travel to the Central American country every year to make purchases for private businesses on the island.

The sale of tourist cards was announced by Panama Migration last October to facilitate shopping tourism, without the need for a visa. It can be purchased by the self-employed and artisans of the Island or by those who present evidence of having traveled previously to any other country. The cards have a cost of 20 dollars, allow a single entry into the country and are valid for 30 days.

Since former Cuban president Raúl Castro expanded self-employment in 2010, the private sector in Cuba has not stopped growing. There are more than 589,000 self-employed workers on the Island, which represents about 12% of the nation’s workforce.

According to a recent report from the The Havana Consulting Group, self-employed Cubans took more than 2.3 billion dollars out of the country last year alone. The consulting group says that Panama is the second largest market for purchases by Cubans after the United States.

Cubans who already have a tourist card and want to obtain a stamped visa must meet four requirements:

• Fill out the online application form

• Present a current passport and a copy with the general information and entry to Panama.

• Show a round trip flight reservation as well as the sum of 50 dollars.

• Meet an economic solvency test never lower than 500 dollars.

Cubans who have a visa stamped on their passport can also opt to get a new one if they fill out an application form, pay $50 and present their passport, as well as a copy of the previous visa.

“This is a great advantage, I have traveled three times to Panama for purchases in the Free Trade Zone and every time I had to stand in long lines to get the tourist card,” says Ángel Álvarez, a self-employed man from Las Tunas who sells air conditioners, speaking to 14ymedio by phone.

Alvarez is among the more than 17,000 Cubans who have visited Panama so far this year, a number that is increasing. Last year, there were 57,251 Cubans arriving in that country, leaving Panamanian merchants a profit of more than 100 million dollars in the Colon Free Zone, according to figures offered by the authorities of that commercial epicenter.

“Panama is a safe country, the dollar is managed, it is much closer than Peru and you do not have to complicate your life with as many formalities to get a visa as with Mexico,” says Álvarez. Mexico, Peru and Haiti are other destinations popular among Cubans for shopping.

Despite the facilities that Panamanian immigration authorities have granted to Cubans in the last few months, there are still those on the island who are critical of the difficulties in getting an appointment at that country’s consulate in Havana. Achieving an interview via the internet is extremely complicated and in the informal market appointments to request a visa are sold for more than 300 dollars.

“We were lucky that a Panamanian friend interceded for us and they gave us the appointment at the end of last year; this week we have finally managed to obtain the visa,” said a retired Cuban couple who received the good news on Friday. They now have a Panama visa for five years of multiple entries.

“We want it, especially, to bring merchandise home to sell, because the money we receive for our retirement is very low,” says Maria. She still does not know how she will be able to compete in the informal market for clothes, footwear and household appliances, but this 64-year-old Cuban woman is happy because “at least we will be able to breathe twice a year.”

But not all Cubans go to Panama to make purchases, others also use the country as a springboard to reach the southern border of the United States through Central America and Mexico.

Angel, speaking from the city of Acuña, in Mexico, is waiting for a turn to ask for political asylum in the United States. He arrived in Mexico after crossing all of Central America on a journey that started at the Tocumen International Airport in Panama where he arrived with a tourist card for purchases.

“I filled out all my papers as self-employed and, with the money I was able to make selling my possessions in Cuba, I took to the jungle,” he says through WhatsApp. Rodriguez says he lost his job in the media on the island when he dared to criticize the system.

The number of Cubans who show up at the US border to ask for political asylum has increased. A recent report from the Border Patrol reported that, between October 1, 2018 and the end of February of this year, 6,289 Cubans had arrived on the southern border. Through the entire previous fiscal year (October 1, 2017 to September 30, 2018) there were 7,079 Cubans who showed up at the border requesting asylum.

Panama is also on the obligatory itinerary of hundreds of Cubans who use the routes of undocumented migration from Chile, Guyana and Uruguay to reach the United States. Recently the country faced a migrant caravan of Cubans that was transfered to the border with Costa Rica through the “Controlled Flow” operation.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

“Cuban doctors who work in Ecuador as part of bilateral agreements do so voluntarily. These are highly qualified specialists with long careers, who receive not only remuneration in Ecuador, but also their salary in Cuba, for the time they work in Ecuador,” the Cuban ambassador wrote.

Dausá also noted that the Government covers the cost of accommodation, vacations, transportation, health insurance and housing. “Cuban doctors do not displace Ecuadorian personnel. All the places and specialties covered by Cuban doctors are those in which there are not enough Ecuadorian professionals to meet the needs of the country,” said the diplomat.

In a telephone conversation with 14ymedio, Sandoval Córdova refuted the reply of the Cuban ambassador. According to the surgeon, as of 1970 there has been a law in Ecuador that forces new graduates to perform a social service in the field.

“In Ecuador there are 4,000 new doctors per year and there are no more than 3,500 rural health posts. Obviously there is total coverage with national doctors even in precarious conditions,” explained Sandoval Córdova. The doctor also accused the Ecuadorian government of not knowing how to manage public health and neglecting the field.

“Correa’s government wanted to support the Latin American school of medicine in Cuba from which many Ecuadorian doctors graduate. Correa wanted to get as close as possible to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Obviously the arrival of Cuban doctors responded more to a political imperative and is without any technical or scientific purpose. I hope that today’s Government will take action on the matter,” he said.

Although the current Ecuadorian government, headed by Lenin Moreno, has not ruled on ending the Cuban medical missions promoted by his predecessor, many Cubans do not dismiss the likelihood that the president will displace Cuban professionals to offer these jobs to the local doctors.

Cuba maintains more than 700 health professionals in Ecuador. The beginning of the Cuban medical presence dates back to 2006 when Rafael Correa’s presidency inaugurated the first three ophthalmological centers of Operation Miracle, a program against blindness which was financed from Venezuela.

Under the scheme of internationalist missions, which is the main source of income for Cuba (according to official figures it brings in more than 11.5 billion dollars annually), the Cuban government keeps about 70% of the salaries paid for its specialists based in Ecuador.

Of the 2,641 dollars monthly salary agreed upon for each specialist, Havana only gives the doctors between 700 and 800 dollars for their living expenses.

Responding to Dausá, Duniel Medina Camejo, a doctor and a resident of Ecuador, said, “As always, the manipulations of the defenders of the indefensible are outrageous. Mr. Ambassador, we, the doctors that make up the community of Cuban emigrants in Ecuador and the free Cubans with whom we share our fate in half of the world, do not agree with the permanence in Ecuador of modern forms of slavery.”

Medina Camejo also noted that Cuban doctors who dare to leave their missions are punished by being denied the right to enter their own country for eight years: “They are neither volunteers nor free to choose, do not deceive our Ecuadorian brothers with that cheap speech.”

*Translator’s note: The doctors’ salaries are paid directly to the Cuban government from which they receive only a small share of the total.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

The same source told this newspaper that none of the five spies living in Cuba will receive payments for the rights. After their return to the Island (three of them after being pardoned by former President Barack Obama in 2014), the spies became government officials and members of the National Assembly.

In 2014, Obama exchanged the three agents, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to commit murder, for a US intelligence officer imprisoned on the island. The gesture was accompanied by the restoration of relations between the two countries.

The Cuban-Canadian co-production, with a budget of more than seven million dollars, was inspired by the book What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of The Cuban Five, by Canadian journalist Stephen Kimber. The film will be shot mainly in Cuba, but also in Colombia and Miami, and production will be finished next year.

Kimber, a fierce defender of the innocence of the five spies, wrote the book after a trip to Havana where a Cuban friend told him that “nothing will change between the United States and Cuba until they solve the problem of ‘The Five’.”

The journalist traveled to Miami, Washington and Havana to gather information about the spies. He also began to meet with them in prison and participated in meetings and conferences in favor of the freedom of the five spies in the United States.

“Receiving Stephen’s letters in prison in 2010 was encouraging for us because we knew he would tell our truth, which we believe he has done through his book,” says René González, one of the five spies.

“We believe that Stephen’s is the best book about The Five, Canadians have become our great friends and we can not think of better partners to help share our history, through cinema, with the world,” he added.

In Miami, however, the reactions to the movie have not been as warm. Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, president of the Democratic Directorate, a group of anti-Castro organizations, said it was “an infamy.”

“You can not rewrite history that way, the real heroes were the four boys they helped to kill,” Gutierrez said in reference to the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by the Cuban military as they patrolled international waters to rescue Cuban rafters.

“You have to read the transcripts of these individuals with their bosses in Havana to realize that there is nothing heroic about them, they are terrorists, of course, and the objective of that group was to commit violent actions against nonviolent opponents of that regime,” adds Gutiérrez Boronat, who was a part of the Cubans in exile who were under surveillance by Cuban intelligence agents.

The second film dedicated to the five spies will be called Wasp Network and will be directed by the Frenchman Olivier Assayas. The film will feature the performances of the renowned artists Gael García Bernal and Penélope Cruz.

Morais, a journalist and author of the book on which the film is based, investigated the case of the five Cuban spies and published his book in 2012. From the beginning he tried to show an independent perspective of Havana that included not only ‘The Five’ but also to other nine characters of the Wasp Network who collaborated in the United States and some of whom fled to the Island.

Morais has complained that his relationship with the government was not fluid and that he was not always able to interview or access the people he needed for his book.

However, in 2013, surrounded by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then president of Brazil and a close ally of Havana, and Armando Hart and Ricardo Alarcón, Morais presented a translation of his book in Spanish at the Third International Conference for the Balance of the World, a kind of gathering of the internation left in Cuba. At that time, Morais said he hoped to “celebrate the return of The Five to Havana soon.”

“The trial against the spies lasted several months with an irrefutable amount of evidence,” said Mario de la Peña, father of the pilot of the same name who died after the downing of his plane in international waters. “They try to justify sending the spies because they supposedly protected them from violent actions on the part of the exile,” he said.

“Those spies tried to infiltrate American bases and penetrate peaceful organizations of the exile whose only sin was to be against the Castro brothers’ regime,” he added.

“Gerardo Hernández and the others were convicted not only for espionage, but for conspiracy to commit murder. They can write whatever they want now, but the evidence that they are murderers is there,” said De la Peña.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.