Olea Gallardo – Translating Cuba

Patients Go Through an Ordeal To Be Treated in the Calamitous Cuban Hospitals

A doctor working without light, in a polyclinic in Centro Habana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, November 30, 2023 — The bursting into tears last Monday of Dr. Yoandra Quesada de Bayamo (Granma), who is being tried along with five other colleagues for the death of a 23-year-old patient, is nothing but the vivid image of what remains of healthcare in Cuba, the eternal jewel in the crown for revolutionary propaganda.

What the surgeon said to the journalist Ernesto Morales – “all your colleagues leave, you are working alone and without materials, exposed to being killed one day by a desperate relative” – is verified daily by any Cuban who steps into a healthcare center. The situation of primary services is especially dramatic.

“There are no syringes, there are no reagents for the tests, there are no nozzles to give aerosol, there are no esfigmos [sphygmomanometers] to take blood pressure.” Aleida, who unravels this litany, is still young, but she is beginning to have problems with hypertension, a condition that leads to the number one cause of death on the Island. continue reading

“One day when I arrived at the hospital with high blood pressure, they wanted to give me oxygen, but there were no mouthpieces, so the doctor gave me the hose and said: ’don’t put it in your mouth, put it close, so that you feel the oxygen.’” Aleida couldn’t do it, because of the stench that the instrument gave off and out of shame. “I took it and told him: look, this doesn’t smell good. But in addition, I felt ridiculous, with that oxygen escaping everywhere.”

That day, she was lucky, because she usually has to walk miles and make a pilgrimage through several centers before finding one where a device to measure blood pressure is available. “The first time I went to the polyclinic near my house, where there were no esfigmos anywhere, the doctor told me: I can’t take your pressure, little girl, but come and sit here, the only thing I can give you is a long talk.’”

There are no syringes, there are no reagents for the analyses, there are no nozzles to give aerosol, there are no sphygmomanometers to take blood pressure

Who does have sphygmomanometers? “Foreign residents often have them and are always given a more pleasant treatment than Cubans by the way,” says Aleida. Faced with the exodus of specialists, outside the Island or to other jobs that provide them with better salaries, the Government tries to solve the lack of labor with exchange students, who cover the emergency rooms.

Luis, who is only 40, is frightened. He has been urinating blood for a few weeks and still doesn’t have the results of the tests he was finally encouraged to do. He was unsuccessful the first time he went to the hospital because “they didn’t have reagents,” but they did the second time. “But then I had to bring the syringe myself because they didn’t have them either.” Now he waits anxiously for an appointment with a specialist: in eight months.

Mild diseases and once-luxurious centers are not spared from the debacle. The 19 de Abril polyclinic, in Nuevo Vedado, for example, the favorite place to take foreign visitors on an official trip to the Island, has serious infrastructure problems.

“There are cracks at a 45-degree angle on several important walls, even cracks that can be seen on both sides of a window,” observes Juan, who for many years dedicated himself to construction and recently had to go to that health center for rehabilitation due to a dislocation. “The building was built during the Revolution, so it is no more than 65 years old.”

The wave of indignation over the trial of the six doctors of the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes hospital accused of negligence not only made the Ministry of Public Health react, which had to clarify that the process is carried out “with adherence to the guarantees established in the laws,” but continues to have echoes.

In the face of the exodus of specialists, the Government tries to solve the lack of manpower with exchange students, who cover the emergency rooms

Thus, in the midst of the controversy, the Communist Party of Cuba in Granma province decided this Wednesday to dismiss its first secretary, Yanaisi Capó Nápoles, and to put in Yudelkis Ortiz Barceló instead. The official press did not detail the reasons and highlighted Ortiz Barceló, who comes from being a member of the Executive Bureau to “attend to ideological political activity” in the Provincial Committee of the PCC in Santiago de Cuba.

This Wednesday, four doctors residing abroad signed a harsh letter addressed to José Ángel Portal Miranda, Minister of Health, in which they sympathize with the doctors “unjustly accused.” The letter, signed by Alexander Jesús Figueredo Izaguirre, Arnoldo de la Cruz Bañoble, Sergio Barbolla Verdecia and Jorge David Yaugel, describes what happened in Bayamo as a “national shame.”

“The accusers should point out those really responsible for that death. These doctors are also victims of the conflict between their professional commitment and the impossibility of succeeding in the conditions in which they are forced to treat their patients,” the doctors said in the text. “The ones responsible for diverting the resources provided by the medical brigades” are the ones who should appear before the courts.

The regime has received “billions of dollars” in the last decade, money that “has not been invested in the Cuban health system as was argued at the time to justify the arbitrary deduction of between 70% and 90% of the salaries* of the brigade members during all these years.” With this, they continue, “there would have been more to keep the health system in optimal conditions and pay decent wages to professionals in the sector.”

These doctors are also victims of the conflict between their professional commitment and the impossibility of succeeding in the conditions in which they are forced to treat their patients

Among their demands is that from now on they pay health workers “the full salary when we go out to provide services to other countries and not just give us a minimum stipend from it,” as well as an “immediate” salary increase for all those who work in the health system.

They also commented on the case of Amelia Calzadilla, who from Spain, where she managed to escape a little more than two weeks ago, asks doctors to refuse to work in such terrible conditions.

She is not the only one who thinks like that on the Island. “The situation requires a general strike, but if you say this in public they’ll put me in prison.” The woman, who doesn’t want to be more precise, predicts: “One day everything will stop working; the doctors will not go to the hospital to work; the teachers will not go to school; the ration-store shopkeepers will not take care of the ration stores; and then the system will collapse. Because if there’s nothing anywhere, what’s the point of all this?”

*Translator’s note: Cuban medical personnel serving on ’brigades’ or ’missions’ in foreign countries are paid a very small percentage of what those countries pay Cuba for their services.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Two Buildings Renovated with Saudi Money Now Occupied by Friends of the Cuban Regime

Armed with walkie-talkies, security agents control access to both properties. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Nelson García and Olea Gallardo, Havana, 22 November 2023 — Judging from the buildings at 202 Obispo Street and 653 Cuba Street in Old Havana, one would never guess it has been sixty-five years since the Cuban revolution. Neat and tidy, with smooth walls and new paint, the buildings — recently renovated with Saudi money — contrast with the surrounding buildings, which remain on the brink of collapse.

Local officials were present at the inauguration ceremony on Saturday, which marked the the 504th anniversary of the city’s founding. The state-run press covered the event with its usual fanfare.

Tribuna de la Habana reported that the reconstruction was carried out by the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana with help from the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD). The eleven renovated homes at 653 Cuba Street – the former Palace of the Marquis of the Royal Proclamation – and another thirteen at 202 Obispo Street are to be occupied by “families who were facing difficult housing situations.”

It seems, however, that the apartments, described by the newspaper as “renovated and very comfortable,” are not being occupied by people of modest means. “No way,” said a local resident on Wednesday who has been observing the comings and goings. “What few families like that there are were very carefully chosen.” Security agents armed with walkie-talkies control access to both buildings.

Neat and tidy, with smooth walls and new paint, the buidings — recently renovated with Saudi money — contrast with the surrounding buildings, which remain on the brink of collapse.

Inside, all is luxurious, pristine and quiet. “You think they’re going to give these homes to someone who isn’t shouting ’Viva Fidel’?” the woman asks rhetorically. “These are not for average people.”

As Tribuna de La Habana reported, the FSD also financed the Havana Aquarium, located in the city’s historic center. That project was also managed the Office of the Historian, which had become its own power center under the command of the late Eusebio Leal until the Cuban armed forces took it over after his death and depleted its resources.

What the newspaper did not say is that this same fund also financed the grandiose Fidel Castro Ruz Center, which opened in Havana’s Vedado district in late 2021. At the time, a source from the Office of the Historian confessed, “The money was supposed to be for housing but some of it was used for the center and for the Capitol restoration as well.”

Inside, all is luxurious, pristine and quiet. “You think they’re going to give these homes to someone who isn’t shouting ’Viva Fidel’?” (14ymedio)

In 2017 the SFD loaned Cuba 26.6 million dollars for the Office of the Historian’s building restoration and social welfare program which, officially, was supposed to help alleviate Havana’s ongoing housing crisis.

14ymedio has learned through unofficial sources that another the project made possible by the SFD is the Práctico del Puerto building, which has views of the Plaza de Armas, the Royal Military Fortress and Havana Bay.

Of Práctico del Puerto’s former residents, who were evicted at the start of construction, only one — Francisco Muñoz — has returned. Neighborhood residents claim that the apartments, which enjoy a spectacular view of Havana Bay, went to employees of the Ministry of Health.

Thirteen units have been “allocated” at 202 Obispo Street. (14ymedio)

Muñoz told 14ymedio in late 2021 that he was able to return to his former home in late 2021 because he spent “eight years living in front of the building, inside a container, without moving.” He also had help from Eusebio Leal, with whom he worked for twelve years as construction manager at the the Office of the Historian. “At one point a military officer even came to evict me and [Leal] came to my defense with a copy of the law in his hand,” he said at the time. As for his former neighbors, “there were people here who went to the shelter and weren’t able to return. I hear there’s a married couple still living at the shelter.”

The SFD began operations in 1975 and has as its principal objective the financing of projects in developing countries. It has approved loans to Cuba for projects related to rehabilitating hydraulic networks (122 million dollars in 2016), improving the Camagüey sewage system (40 million dollars in 2014), overhauling Havana’s water system (30 million in 2013) and acquiring medical equipment for maternity care centers (in 2010).

Of Práctico del Puerto’s former residents, who were evicted at the start of construction, only one has returned.

In 2013 the island signed an agreement to send Cuban doctors to Saudia Arabia in exchange for 10,000 dollars a month per doctor, of which each individual physician receives only 1,000 dollars in compensation.

The Prensa Latina news agency reported that Ricardo Cabrisas, the minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment, paid a visit to Saudi Arabia in October to “review” the state of bilateral relations. It appears they are as strong as ever.

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The Cuban Regime Seeks Its Salvation in the Investments of Emigrants

La Carreta restaurant, located on 21st Street on the corner of K, in the heart of El Vedado, in Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, 19 November 2023 — Those who for decades were called “worms,” “traitors” and “counterrevolutionaries” have become the great hope of the Cuban regime to save the disastrous economy. A main objective seems to guide the Government of Cuba at the conference it is holding with emigrants this weekend in Havana: to attract them to invest in the Island and legalize a process that has already begun stealthily with small entrepreneurs from the diaspora.

Despite Cuban law and the U.S. “embargo” that prohibit it for the time being, several exiles have opened businesses in Cuba using the names of residents on the Island and, in some cases, in association with local authorities. Among them are the private restaurants La Carreta, Antojos and some others in Havana, in addition to the Diplomarket shopping center, all controlled by U.S. residents, with the approval or participation of the regime.

Although he did not allude to the current situation, the director general of Consular Affairs and Cuban Residents Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, Ernesto Soberón, spoke openly in an interview with Juventud Rebelde last Sunday.

Similarly, Reuters confirmed it by quoting a “senior official” of the Foreign Relations Ministry: “Cuba wants to take advantage of its growing population abroad in search of new investments that boost the economy.” continue reading

Despite Cuban law and the U.S. “embargo” that prohibit it for the moment, several exiles have opened businesses in Cuba using the names of residents on the Island and, in some cases, in association with local authorities

In the Nation and Emigration Conference, the first in 19 years, more than 400 people are participating, many of whom — no less than 40%, according to Soberón — have double residence, in Cuba and abroad. (According to the EFE agency, most of the participants whose identities transcend national boundaries are people linked to solidarity with Cuba groups abroad). “This did not happen before, which is the result of the modification of the Constitution that now recognizes effective citizenship, and there can be several,” the official insisted, talking about the 2013 constitutional reform.

Soberón added to this the measures taken last July – the extension of the validity of ordinary passports from six to ten years, the elimination of the mandatory extension every two years and the reduction of the price to apply for it – as part of the same strategy of approaching Cubans abroad. He did not name another one, which many consider as an extension of the penalty applied to most nationals who left the country: the requirement to show the Cuban passport for exiles before 1971, who were exempted from the perpetual control exercised by the political police over the emigrants).

Most have set up hotels, restaurants and other shops, many of them with remarkable success

The authorities now publicly insist that Cubans abroad must invest in their country of origin, but the truth is that it has been happening stealthily for years.

Most have set up hotels, restaurants and other shops, many of them with remarkable success. One of them is Frank Cuspinera Medina, vice president of Las Américas TCC Corporation, based in Miami, a group to which Diplomarket belongs, called, sarcastically, the “Cuban Costco.”

Cuspinera Medina is domiciled in Florida but also in El Vedado. His name appears in a letter that several Cuban entrepreneurs sent in 2021 to U.S. President Joe Biden, asking him to lift the sanctions against the Government of the Island, which harmed their businesses. In the letter he did not appear as a member of Las Américas, but of Iderod Servicios Constructivos, based in Cuba.

This last firm is not on the list of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) of the regime, but it is a company with his name, Cuspinera SURL LVI, dedicated to “providing e-commerce platform services,” the same as a branch of Las Américas TCC.

Al cubano Obel Martínez, dueño de La Carreta, le fue concedida la nacionalidad estadounidense. (Facebook) — Cuban Obel Martínez, owner of La Carreta, was granted US nationality. (Facebook)

Reinaldo Rivero is another Cuban resident in the U.S. with a tentacle in Havana: although his business is registered in the name of his mother, he is the real owner, with a foreign partner, of the busy Antojos restaurant and bar and a security agency that serves the establishments of the Espada Alley, on Peña Pobre Street in Old Havana.

A third name, with a dazzling triumph, is Obel Martínez, owner of La Carreta. Remodeled and with a rich gastronomic offer, the emblematic restaurant of El Vedado reopened in private hands last June and immediately became a place among the habananeros for the emerging middle class.

By then, Martínez had opened another business, Mojito-Mojito, in the heart of Old Havana, praised on travel pages for the owner’s enthusiasm and kindness.

His signature is in place 5,639 of the registration of MSMEs with the name Mojito Martínez and was approved in the last quarter of 2022. Precisely in December of that same year, Cuban Obel Martínez was granted U.S. nationality. In fact, according to a close source who requests anonymity, he continues to retain his residence in Miami, Florida.

“Obel fled from Castroism and now lives from it, enjoying at the same time all the benefits and opportunities of the American dream: he plays at capitalism from Havana, with the support of the local authorities,” says the same source, who echoes the discomfort created by this situation in some sectors of the regime itself, particularly within the Communist Party of Cuba, where there is a debate about the privileges granted to this new class of businessmen.

As a local development project, the source adds, Obel received a loan of 10 million pesos from the municipal government, specifically at the 250 branch of the Metropolitan Bank, located on Línea Street in El Vedado. As confirmed by official television in a report last September, La Carreta “was restored thanks to the collaboration with the government of the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución.”

Obel fled from Castroism and now lives from it, enjoying at the same time all the benefits and opportunities of the American dream: he plays at capitalism from Havana, with the support of the local authorities

The governor of the municipality, Rolando López Jiménez, explains that “he assumed the responsibility for rescuing the facility to provide a better service,” in addition to facilitating the hiring of employees and rehabilitating the apartments located above the establishment.

Obel Martínez does not appear in the report, but 14ymedio has verified that he is the one who receives the clientele of both La Carreta and Mojito-Mojito, presenting himself as the owner.

Cuban law does not allow a U.S. citizen to own a company on the Island, although the words of Ernesto Soberón in Juventud Rebelde suggest that this is about to change. However, there is another greater inconvenience, if possible: according to the embargo laws, as a U.S. resident a person is also banned from doing business in Cuba, unless they have a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

So far, the only American who has OFAC’s permission to establish a company in Cuba is John Kavulich, and he keeps his business secret, in addition to Hugo Cancio, from the online shopping site Katapulk, who has obtained a license to export vehicles from the United States.

As U.S. Treasury officials explained, following a meeting of Cuban businessmen in Miami last September, several conditions must be met in order not to break the law. Entrepreneurs residing in Cuba cannot create companies in the U.S. to sell their products or buy goods directly from U.S. companies. Similarly, Cuban-Americans cannot establish businesses on the Island unless they achieve permanent residence in the country through repatriation.

Cuba has been hoping for months that the U.S. will approve measures to help the MSMEs on the Island that, far from materializing, do not cease to provoke controversy.

Cuba has been interested for months in the U.S. approving measures to help the MSMEs on the Island that, far from materializing, do not cease to arouse controversy

Without going any further, on November 8, Senator Marco Rubio questioned the Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, about the fact that Cubans who arrive in the U.S. and seek refuge end up living between the two countries.

“You’re supposed to be fleeing political persecution, so you are automatically a candidate to receive money for being a refugee, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid,” said Rubio, who compared the privilege of Cubans who can obtain these benefits after one year to the situation of refugees from other countries who have to wait five years.

“Some return to Cuba for three months at a time, and they have only been here for a year. How, if you are fleeing persecution, can it be that a year later you spend the summers in Cuba? How can it be that you travel between six and eight times a year to Cuba? I have never heard that people who flee persecution return to that place repeatedly. There’s a problem here, isn’t there?” said the Republican senator.

Perhaps Cuba will take immediate measures to regularize the situation of its businessmen with dual nationality. It is less clear that the U.S. will do so with respect to the embargo restrictions. What is a fact is that the owners of these companies continue to operate without problems.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Diplomarket, the ‘Cuban Costco’, in the Hands of a Front Man for the Regime

Diplomarket is heavily guarded: “Yes, that looks like a military unit.” (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez/Olea Gallardo, Havana, 11 October 2023 — The opening of a wholesale supermarket in Havana under the name Diplomarket in December last year went unnoticed. Only an ad on Instagram for the company, dedicated until then only to online purchases and shipping, gave an account of the opening of the establishment, located at kilometer 8 ½ of the Carretera Monumental, in the neighborhood of Berroa, more than 6 miles east of the center of the capital.

A tweet last week from Patrick Oppmann, a CNN correspondent, put the focus of current affairs on commerce. “After years of having to look for the most basic products, it’s a bit surreal to see how a private entrepreneur has set up what is basically the first Costco in Cuba,” said the journalist on the network now called X, without specifying the name of the supermarket and assuring that Cubans can pay in pesos, dollars and euros, even with U.S. credit cards.

And yes, the images that accompanied his text verified the resemblance to the American wholesale firm: huge corridors with wholesale products placed as in a warehouse, the distinctive red color and, more revealing, the sale of Kirkland brand products, marketed exclusively by Costco.

In a visit to the store this Wednesday, 14ymedio verified that, in fact, the place is similar to the Costco franchise, which is in more than a dozen countries. It is also true that the Kirkland brand populates its shelves, but no more so than Goya, the largest food company of Hispanic origin in the United States, which just three years ago was involved in a controversy for defending the then-president, Donald Trump. continue reading

It’s designed for cars, and you always see luxurious cars and the rich people who fill those huge cars

For the rest, the differences between Diplomarket and Costco are obvious. In Costco, when buying wholesale, the products are cheaper. In Diplomarket, very few customers were seen with the large packages. Most preferred to buy the items separately, at stratospheric prices: a small bottle of Goya oil for 7 dollars, a small can of grated Goya coconut for 4 dollars, a bar of soap for 2 dollars (the complete package, 16 bars, $32), toothpaste for a little more. As for cheeses and sausages, prices exceeded 20 dollars, as for a large jar of mayonnaise. Tools and household items are also offered at an unattainable price given the country’s average salary.

Diplomarket does not require a membership card, as Costco does, and is supposed to be open to any customer, but the stratospheric prices and the remoteness of the location deter any ordinary Cuban. “It’s designed for cars, and you always see luxurious cars and the rich people who fill those huge cars,” says Mayca, a young woman from Central Havana who went once with a friend who has a private food business.

The establishment is also heavily guarded. At the first checkpoint, they take the data of the vehicles at the time of entry, and then there is another booth with guards before you enter the store. At the door, two individuals look everyone up and down. A large screen shows the movement of the security cameras, placed everywhere with warnings. “Yes, that looks like a military unit,” Mayca concedes.

Inside, a kind of “persecution” by the employees begins. You are not allowed to take photos or record videos, and the workers walk behind the customers watching every movement, disguising their zeal with kindness: “Can I help you with something?”

You are not allowed to take photos or record videos, and the workers walk behind the customers watching every movement, disguising their zeal with kindness: “Can I help you with something?

Mayca says that whenever she has gone she has felt very uncomfortable: “Not only because of the vigilance but because of the humiliation with which they treat you. “A lady almost had to return the merchandise because she didn’t bring dollars and thought that everything could be paid in Cuban pesos. At the last minute she was saved by her friend, who loaned her some American bills.”

Didn’t the U.S. correspondent say that you could pay in all currencies? Doesn’t it say that in the firm’s own ad on Instagram? The cashier laughed at our reporter’s question: “That’s over, people pay in cash in dollars.”

As for the ownership of the supermarket, neither does it have the same transparency as the capitalist brand that it intends to emulate. They do not indicate on the web or on the premises any clear information about what causes the most mistrust: who actually owns Diplomarket, a gigantic, well-stocked and clean store, guarded like a government enclave?

The firm is not on the list of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) approved by the Ministry of Economy and Planning. Moreover, according to its corporate website, Diplomarket belongs to an American company called Las Américas TCC Corporation, founded in 2011 and based in Florida.

The vice president of Las Americas is the Cuban, Frank Cuspinera Medina, who is domiciled in the United States. Two years ago, his name appeared as a “specialist” in a meeting between self-employed workers (TCP) and the National Association of Economists and Accountants of Cuba.

On that occasion, he told the Cuban News Agency that “this type of exchange allows the institutions to know first-hand the interests and needs of the TCPs” and that the official association was “an efficient way to raise the approaches presented at the meeting to the authorities in charge.”

This last firm is also not on the regime’s list of MSMEs, but a company with its name is: Cuspinera SURL LVI, dedicated to “providing e-commerce platform services

Cuspinera Medina, whose current address is in El Vedado, Havana, also appears in a letter that several Cuban entrepreneurs sent in 2021 to U.S. President Joe Biden, asking him to lift sanctions against the Government of the Island, which were harming their businesses. In the letter he does not appear as a member of Las Américas, but as part of Iderod Servicios Constructivos.

This last firm is also not on the regime’s MSME list, but a company of the same name is: Cuspinera SURL LVI, dedicated to “providing e-commerce platform services.” It is also a branch of Las Américas TCC.

The issue is not a minor one, given the U.S. embargo against Cuba. As U.S. Treasury officials said, following a meeting of Cuban businessmen in Miami a few weeks ago, several conditions must be met in order not to break the law. Entrepreneurs residing in Cuba, for example, cannot create companies in the U.S. to sell their products or buy goods directly from U.S. companies. Similarly, Cuban-Americans cannot establish businesses on the Island unless they achieve permanent residence in the country through repatriation.

It is not clear in which category Cuspinera Medina, which maintains a low profile on social networks, belongs. About Diplomarket, Mayca is blunt: “It is not private.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Varadero Resort For Cubans ‘All Inclusive Scam’

The once luxurious resort of the Hicacos peninsular has been feeling the shadow of what it once was for quite a while. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez and Olea Gallardo, Havana, 14 September 2023 – In the bus back home to Havana from Varadero, Manuel and his wife, like many other local tourists, talked about nothing else. Every one of them, though having stayed in different hotels, felt that they had been swindled; that despite the stratospherical amount of money they had had to pay for their holiday, in return they had seen only food shortages and terrible service.

Manuel doesn’t even want to remember the name of the establishment where he stayed for four nights in August and payed almost 40,000 pesos for “all inclusive”. “All inclusive? All inclusive scam. All that was available to eat every day was cod or chicken in fricassee, or in sauce, but no pork or beef”, he tells this paper. And he goes on: “The rice was hard, the soft drinks weren’t even the normal canned ones but made up from squash, and the beer was warm, with just a whiskey here or a rum there, terrible, that was all there was to drink.

So, in the end, the couple ended up spending an extra twenty-odd thousand pesos on food from other restaurants, “which in themselves weren’t any big deal”, says Manuel. Even there they didn’t find much satisfaction as the ones that accepted Cuban pesos were the ones that offered limited menus and smaller portions.

In addition, the man lamented: “The room they gave us was dirty, full of hair, with just one tiny towel and nothing else to dry ourselves on. It doesn’t surprise me that we hardly saw any foreign tourists, if they go to Varadero they’re going to be shocked. continue reading

“The room they gave us was dirty, full of hair, with just one tiny towel and nothing else to dry ourselves on”

The once luxurious resort of the Hicacos peninsular has been feeling the shadow of what it once was for quite a while. The most recent decline began during the Covid pandemic, when the country’s borders were closed and the tourist industry was paralysed worldwide, and the residents of Varadero were confined in their homes to avoid infection. The resort has not yet managed to crawl out of this hole, a hole which the so called Tarea Ordenamiento — the ’Ordering Task’* — itself has contributed to, as reported by this paper repeatedly in recent years.

Foreign tourists have abandoned the option of Varadero, says a Spanish tourist, Francisca – who travelled to Cuba in July on a tour which took in the entire island but didn’t include the resort in the Matanzas bay area. “We didn’t go there, on the advice of a relative who had just been there and told us that the beach was disgusting, with a lack of services”, she said. “And actually all the ones we did go to – Costa Verde (in Holguín) and Cayo Santa María (in Camagüey) – also seemed very dirty to us”.

In the face of depleted numbers of international tourists, hotels tried to throw themselves into internal tourism, which, viewing general commentary on social media, hasn’t resulted in a satisfied clientele. And the complaints are not limited to Varadero.

One customer of the Starfish Hotel in Cayo Largo said that the buffet at this five star establishment left “much to be desired” and she did not reccomend the place. Another said: “I’ve just come from the Starfish Cayo Guillermo and there was no sugar even for coffee, I had to bring my own flour so that they could bake me a mini cake because they didn’t have flour either, and they were using honey as a sweetener”.

A third Cuban settled the matter of the island’s beach hotels saying: “My opinion is don’t go to any of them. They’re all bad and what’s more, expensive. There’s no correlation between what you pay and the actual quality, especially with the food”.

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

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The Other Cuba: Luxury, Good Taste and Outrageous Prices from the Hand of a Successful Italian

The new Home Deli store in El Vedado, Havana, is a magnet. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez and Olea Gallardo, Havana, 26 June 2023 — The new Home Deli food store on Calle 12, between 21 and 23 in the heart of El Vedado, Havana, was inaugurated at the beginning of June and is not like the ones you usually see in Cuba. Clean and stocked, decorated with a certain European “rustic” style, it became a magnet days after it officially opened its doors. The emotion waned when checking the prices of the products, almost all imported.

A bag of bread, with six pieces costs 800 pesos, a small bag with washed and cut lettuce, 70 pesos, and 2,100 pesos for a small cheese. The cost of the meat was stratospheric: 20 pork skewers for 1,400 pesos, 4,500 pesos per kilogram of beef, 2,000 for chicken breast, 2,000 for ground beef, 3,000 for Italian sausage.

The powdered milk bag, similar to the one sold in other places, looked repackaged, unbranded, and cost 1,900 pesos for a kilogram and 950 pesos for half a kilo. As a curiosity, they had “artisan” pasta for sale, pumpkin and moringa, at 450 pesos a bag.

Home Deli looks clean, stocked, and decorated in a certain European “rustic” style. (14ymedio)

Promoted as a store specializing in Italian products, they offer Arioli oil (3,600 pesos a liter), Balocco and Mulino Bianco biscuits, De Nigris vinegar, De Cecco pasta, Lavazza coffee or Scotti rice. Also, other import labels, such as the Spanish Vima or Carbonell and the Japanese Kikkoman.

The store employees, all young and good-looking, are lavish with attention and kindness towards any possible client, although they do not stop watching the slightest movement and discourage taking photographs with a severe gesture. continue reading

Most of those who entered the store, dazzled by the variety and quality of the products, left discouraged after a tour of the shelves. “It’s very pretty and well put on, but this is the most expensive market I’ve seen so far,” said one woman as she left empty-handed.

Arioli brand olive oil is 3,600 pesos per liter. (14ymedio)

However, the law of supply and demand is implacable even in Cuba: if they set those prices, it is because someone pays them. This newspaper is aware that Home Deli has a large clientele among diplomats stationed in Cuba, in addition to emigrants who, through pages such as Katapulk or TSO, buy food for their relatives in the country in hard currency.

Those who can shop at the store are happy, despite the costs. “It’s the only place where I can get the products that a true Italian recipe requires,” says Lucía, a Cuban who lives in Milan and is on vacation in Cuba visiting her parents.

In addition, she praises her loyal clientele, “they make really tasty and unique spinach tarts in Cuba, not to mention the desserts. It’s not like other private companies, who live by reselling products.”

Homemade pumpkin and moringa pasta sold at Home Deli for 450 pesos a bag. (14ymedio)

The success of Home Deli has been amazing. Not only does it have that new store in El Vedado, but another in the municipality of Playa (19 avenue between 74 and 76) and a third in Cerro (318 Daoiz street, between Colón and Pizarro). In addition, they have a point of sale at the 3rd and 70 market. An efficient home delivery system makes it as modern a business as any in a country where the free market rules.

The company, however, does not only operate with that brand. Directed by the Cuban Diana Sainz and her husband, the Italian Andrea Gallina, as they appear on their social networks, is registered under the name of Mercadiana in the list of micro, small and medium-sized companies (MSMEs) and with the purpose of “gastronomic services”. In Italy, they have the company Gainz SRL, a name that combines the surnames of Gains the owners and that at the time is the provider of Home Deli.

Café Bohemia, adjacent to Estancia Bohemia, is a meeting place for cultural officials. (14ymedio)

Together, they also run the Café Bohemia and the adjacent hotel, Estancia Bohemia, in Old Havana, as well as the Paseo 206 Boutique Hotel and the café on the ground floor, Ecléctico, in El Vedado. It is not uncommon to see them in one of these places, serving the clientele with exquisite treatment, as this newspaper has verified.

“The word standard does not exist for us,” Gallina declared for a report published in “OnCuba” about his establishment on Paseo 206, which they define as “a place with its own stamp, born from the combination of both cultures” and “a warm hug between Cuba and Italy”, and where luxury and good taste are evident.

The same is observed in Estancia Bohemia (San Ignacio 364), where a one-night stay costs 187 dollars, according to the reservation pages. The Café Bohemia is, moreover, a meeting place for culture officials, ostensibly from the Office of the Havana Historian, according to its own publications on networks.

Since they began to proliferate in the streets of Havana, more than a year ago, private businesses generate, in the first instance, mistrust. The fact that some of these (MSMEs) operate in state premises without any type of announcement or public tender, only increases suspicion.

Diana Sáenz, at her Café Bohemia. (14ymedio)

If we add to this the agreements between Cuba and Russia, the last of which were ratified last month at a business forum between the two countries in Havana and which show that Moscow wants to play a leading role in the imminent economic opening of the Island, doubts are difficult to dispel.

On the other hand, especially in all private and successful businesses in the country, since self-employment was allowed, they always raise questions: “They don’t let just anyone do this, what influential figure will be behind it?”

It is not uncommon to see both Diana Sáenz and Andrea Gallina serving their premises with exquisite kindness, (14ymedio)

In the case of Home Deli, its owners have never hidden themselves, on the contrary, they boast of their achievements both in their networks and in business forums and even official media. “Diana is a Cuban entrepreneur who has established important guidelines in the leisure and food sector in Cuba,” they extol in an Instagram post.

The firm has given sensible capitalist advice: “Mercadiana, a food marketing and production MSME, emphasized the need to eliminate bureaucracy when managing business procedures, as well as a review the high tax amounts that go with how prominent they are, since it could jeopardize the survival of companies”, indicated as an example Cuba en Resumen last year.

However, Diana Sainz has not said why she suddenly decided to change the surname that she inherited from her father, Ricardo Sáenz, one of the founders of the Prensa Latina agency and the Bohemia magazine.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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Unpaid Salaries and a Limit of 5,000 Pesos in ATMs Due to the Shortage of Banknotes in Cuba

Lines to withdraw money from ATMs at the Metropolitan Bank of 23 and J. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, 11 May 2023 — For six days Roberto has been trying to withdraw cash from an ATM in Havana, the last one this Thursday. In vain. One by one, he verified what all the inhabitants of the capital say this week: you can barely extract money.

The announcer Yunior Morales posted this Wednesday with humor on his social networks. “You go to any ATM and there is no money. And tremendous cristóbal colón,” he joked, referring to the immense lines [colas in Spanish]. At the time of making his transmission, an acquaintance greeted him: “What’s wrong, Yunior?” He replied: “Here with hunger, boy, I’m hungry.” “Why don’t you eat something then?” to which he replied: “I have to withdraw money first and no ATM works.” And he ends his video jokingly exaggerating: “I have a CDR [Committees for the Defense of the Revolution] meeting about my hunger in my stomach. CDR because, you know, the CDR is hunger, gossip and conflict.”

The situation seems to spread to many other cities in the country. In Holguín, a teacher tells 14ymedio that Education workers now have their salaries divided in two: “one payment on the 5th and another on the 28th,” because “there is almost no money.” In addition, she says that “not even the employees of a bank know when there will be cash at the ATMs.”

A doctor from Sancti Spíritus says that in Public Health they are only paid by electronic transfer: “They deposit on the card, but for those who pay cash for things there is no money.” continue reading

More serious is what a state worker points out. “With payrolls made and everything, the bank does not accept payment through the cards because they don’t have money; the railroad is not an isolated situation,” he says referring to the unusual spontaneous strike organized on Tuesday by Artemis railway workers, in protest against the non-payment of their salaries in the last two months.

In Santiago de Cuba, complaints proliferate that “there is no money in the ATMs,” while groups in which human ATMs operate have multiplied on social networks. “Will exchange money in transfer for cash. I have the cash,” some say; “Will exchange CUP [pesos] transfer for cash,” say others. Some include the precise amount, such as 17,000 pesos, something unthinkable to extract in a bank.

Roberto from Havana tells this newspaper that he has verified in ATMs of “at least three municipalities” that, where before up to 10,000 pesos could be withdrawn in an operation, “and then there were 500 or 1,000 bills in the ATM, now they only allow 5,000 to be extracted,” and only in 20-peso bills.

This newspaper was able to verify this in the branch of the Metropolitan Bank (Banmet) on 23rd and J, in El Vedado, with such a central location that until recently it guaranteed any withdrawal, but the situation was chaos this Thursday. To begin with, you had to endure a gigantic line, divided into two: one to enter and another, the longest, for the ATMs. Of the six ATMs only two worked.

Inside the branch, for those who chose to extract money at the counter, the uncomfortable atmosphere was widespread and contagious. The employees were rude to people and arguing with each other; the customers were tremendously disgusted. Two elderly ladies were about to come to blows when one of them lost her place in line to go visit her sick daughter in the hospital and the other refused to let her back in: “Right now we are here,” said the latter, who lowered her voice when the threatened woman called the police.

A cashier rolled her eyes when an old man asked her what denominations she had, because he didn’t want the “little ones.” The man intended to get 40,000 pesos [$1,667] and he couldn’t. “That can happen because there are very few large bills,” the employee told him.

“Every day the same thing,” said another lady in line. “They let people pass in front who are going to deposit pesos, and if you are going to extract them, no matter the amount, they give you bills of 20 pesos.”

“They are giving priority to those who are going to deposit national currency, but almost no one comes to do that. “Do they let someone who comes to deposit pesos go first because there are none?” asked another woman who had just arrived from another cashier, from which she had tried to withdraw cash unsuccessfully. “Let them tell the truth: there is no money.”

However, the authorities are silent these days. Last month, in the face of the citizen rumor that state workers would not be paid, the Sancti Spíritus government was in a hurry to deny it. On those days, however, 14ymedio verified that cash could not be extracted at the city’s 11 ATMs.

The problems were repeated in Havana, where the provincial government reported that 150 of the 521 Banmet ATMs in the capital (30%) were broken. Then, they also said that from April 8 to 14, cash withdrawals exceeded 200 million pesos per day.

No one knows what is happening in May, but citizens are increasingly desperate. “We are going to have to pay with cocoa seeds, because paper cash is an illusion,” says Roberto, who fears that “the entire country could be paralyzed at any time.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Poverty and Hunger are Spreading in Cuba

The scenes are comparable to the previous great crisis, which at least was baptized with one of the greatest euphemisms that Castroism ever came up with: “the special period in time of peace.” (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez / Olea Gallardo, Havana, 30 March 2023 — The crisis that Cuba is experiencing is not only reflected in the official data, independent reports and the unstoppable exodus. In the streets, at every step, the poverty is evident. Ana María, a middle-aged neighbor of Central Havana, mentions an example: “A few days ago, on Infanta Street, a man in his 50s was going to pick up some croquettes from the floor, and when he saw that I saw him, he was embarrassed. The truth is that I was more ashamed than he was.”

These scenes are comparable to the previous great crisis, which was at least baptized with one of the greatest euphemisms that Castroism ever came up with: “the special period in time of peace.” It was common then, in the 90s, to see its imprint on the wrinkled and emaciated bodies of Cubans. Thousands of them suffered from diseases like neuropathy, which left them blind and was caused by malnutrition and the abuse of homemade alcohol.

Today’s crisis has no name, but it does have the same face: the increasingly empty cities, especially of young people and those who fall down unconscious from drinking “train-spark” (homemade alcohol), and the elderly (and not so old) who rummage through containers or beg on the street.

And it doesn’t just happen in Havana. Jorge, from Holguín, says he encounters a similar situation every day. “It has increased a lot, but a lot, the number of people on the street who are rummaging through the trash and asking for money. Today I was having a pizza and soft drink in a private place and a 70-year-old man with crutches, who couldn’t even walk, came in begging, and I bought him the same thing I was eating. Yesterday a woman who saw me counting some money on the street approached and said: ’oh, give me something for the peas’. Right after, another woman asked me if I could buy her some cassava fries. I wanted to give her 100 pesos but she asked me to buy them for her: ’They scammed me,’ she told me crying. And what breaks my heart the most is the children who implore: ’could you give me five pesos?’” continue reading

Jorge attributes the scarcity mainly to inflation, which does not let up: “One pound of pork is 400 pesos ($16.70), and you buy four pounds and they are two of meat and two of bone and fat, which doesn’t work. A carton of eggs here is worth 1,500 pesos ($62.50), a liter (33.8 ounces) of cooking oil is 1,300 ($54). People make it to the end of the month almost without oil, without rice.”

To have something to put in their mouths, people even eat the impossible.. (14ymedio)

Caption – The scenes are comparable to the previous great crisis, which was at least baptized with one of the greatest euphemisms that Castroism ever came up with: “The special period in time of peace.” (14ymedio)

Thus, families are reducing the quantities. They eat rice with a little bit of vegetables, they eat only a banana, they get used to not having animal protein. “I have a neighbor who stops having lunch to give it to her son, who is in high school. Many times I see that they eat rice cooked in bean sauce with two tomato slices because they don’t have a main course,” Jorge explains.

Something similar is told by Lisandra, from Sancti Spíritus. “I recently brought a friend a picadillo that I cooked, after lunchtime, and I realized that her boy had been given rice with beans and she had not eaten anything.”

To have something to put in their mouths, people even eat the impossible. “My mother discarded a horrible picadillo that she had boiled in hot water because someone told her that it looked like ham and she wanted to give it to the neighbor’s dogs. The neighbor let it dry because she wanted it for herself.”

Sometimes, as happened to Ana María with the man who picked up the croquettes in Centro Habana, there is shame for both parties. “When I went to say hello to a friend from the university, at lunchtime, her children interrupted her all the time while we talked: ’Mom, I’m hungry’. And I realized that she didn’t want me to see what they were going to eat,” continues Lisandra, who says: “People don’t say it, but they are going hungry.”

From San Antonio de los Baños, Artemisa, the epicenter of the mass protests of July 11, 2021, Caridad recounts: “The famine is widespread. Soon we will not exist, because we’re going to starve, and we won’t have a doctor to help us.”

The woman, in her thirties with a young daughter, lashes out at the Government: “They can’t solve anything, and they want us to keep electing people we don’t even know. Last week the power didn’t go out because there were elections, and now that there are no elections? If only we could eat all the blackouts.”

Caridad’s list is long, from electricity (“without electricity you can’t live”), to water (“we haven’t had it for five days”), food (“milk is a forbidden product and soon we’ll be talking about beans at 200 pesos [$8])” to increasingly precarious health services (“there is no medical assistance because doctors have no medicines and they are not magicians.”) “I can’t really explain how we are still alive,” she concludes.

“It has increased a lot, but a lot, the number of people on the street who are rummaging through the trash and asking for money.” (14ymedio)

“My sister and I bought a yogurt that cost us more than 250 pesos [$10] for 1.5 liters [53 oz.], and we had to pay on the informal market. When a state truck comes, it’s a slaughter, with the cost of yogurt close to 100 pesos [$4], or 70, 80, 90 pesos. You don’t have any meat, a chicken thigh, or a piece of pork. There is no onion even if someone can pay for it,” she lets fly and continues with her litany of sorrows.

Rice, she says, is a “hot item.” “Here in this town they are selling a speckled rice, I don’t know where they get it, which contains transparent pebbles. It’s enough to make God weep. Not only do you have to spend two hours removing these particles, but on top of that they can break a tooth, and then where do you find a dentist? Everything is a stack of dominoes, and now the game is over.”

For Caridad, the moment that Cuba is experiencing could be called “minute zero,” because “we have no options at all.”

There is another widespread comment: what is most worrying are the children. “I suffer bitterly because I have a girl under the age of seven and I worry about the day to day. Even the schools don’t function now. The teachers don’t want to work because they are also hungry,” says Caridad.

For Ana María, the situation with the children is “a disaster,” and she recounts the torment of her grandchildren, who not only have to endure an insipid rice with peas every day but all kinds of propaganda in their classes. “My girl has to show something tomorrow, after a week sick with asthma,. One homework was about the tax system, nothing more and nothing less, and another about Fidel’s life as a child until he was a revolutionary leader,” the woman says. “And the boy had to talk about the Zanjón Pact and Martí’s attitude at that time and also about the elections. Tell me something I don’t know!”

Neither propaganda nor servility nor ordinary work frees Cubans from suffering. “A relative of mine, retired military and doctor, that is, with an above-average retirement, has just celebrated his 80th birthday, and between his brothers-in-law and nephews they collected something to celebrate, because he barely has any money,” says Ana María. She gives another example, her own sister, now retired from the state sector, who was “once pretty but now is skin and bones.”

Another neighbor of Ana María, a health worker, went to her house recently to implore her for something to eat, even if it was only chicken skins, because she couldn’t buy anything.”

As if that were not enough, it’s no consolation to have money to spend in stores in freely convertible currency (MLC): “Even those who have people abroad [who send them hard currency] can’t get food, because the stores are empty. Everything has to be paid to the people who steal it from state places, buy it in Havana or I don’t know where and sell it here so that people can live,” protests Caridad, the young woman from San Antonio de los Baños.

All in all, she, like Ana María, Jorge and Lisandra, are part of that 30% of Cuban families that differ from the rest because they receive help from abroad, the most paradoxical inequality created in 64 years of communism. The rest, most of them, have to settle only for what comes through the rationed market, which is not enough to last the month.

Ana María, who has no way to leave the Island, laments: “I’m now depressed when I go out on the street, the poverty, the grime, the miserable people, the starving animals. I want the aliens to take me, because it makes me want to cry.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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New Stores are Born in Cuba with a Strange Alliance Between the Private and State Sectors

La Bodeguita de San Rafael, on the Boulevard of the same name, in Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez/Olea Gallardo, Havana, 20 February 2023 — A new market in the heart of Centro Habana, a ration store with various items, a stationery store in the Miramar Trade Center, a fabric and upholstery store in El Vedado, a re-opened Italian pizzeria in the same neighborhood… these establishments have three things in common: they have recently opened or reopened in the capital, they have very high prices, and now — with a new or former name — they are in private hands.

In the middle of Boulevard de San Rafael, the colorful poster of a large and well-stocked shop, inaugurated this Saturday, La Bodeguita de San Rafael, is a surprise. “The best of all I’ve seen so far; it’s one of the most beautiful,” said a customer, surprised at what the state clothing store that used to exist in that place had become.

But what left most people speechless were the prices: 34-oz. soft drinks at 450 pesos ($19), condensed milk at 550 ($23), a small tetrapack of tomato puree at 380 ($16), a pound of lentils at 400 ($17), a kilo of wheat flour at 590 ($25), two pounds of rice at 650 ($27), a simple glass of yogurt at 120 ($5).

“A woman spent almost 33,000 pesos ($1,375) in front of me,” said another man who went shopping. “I don’t know what she had in her shopping bags.”

Inside the store, a couple, a foreigner and a Cuban woman were talking. He asked her: continue reading

“Why do you go to the store in MLC [freely convertible currency] if they sell here in pesos?” She replied: “Because the prices are much higher; they are inflated. For example, that package of rice will cost 2 MLC or $1.90, and here it costs 600 Cuban pesos ($25).”

“It looks like they are reselling things from the MLC stores, but that’s not supposed to happen because it’s not allowed,” speculated an old man.

What seems clear is that, once again, the same scheme of the recently inaugurated grocery store of the Miramar Trade Center is being repeated, the same as what happened with the branches of the Sylvain chain and before that, the Fress. A variety of businesses have now gone from state hands to private hands overnight, without competition or prior notice.

Therefore, the inauguration the same Saturday of a “sodería-hamburger” shop called Complejo Zapata y 12, in that same municipality of Plaza de la Revolución, was striking. It was attended by Luis Antonio Torres Iríbar, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party, and Reinaldo García Zapata, Governor of Havana.

Tribuna de La Habana reflected the same thing in a note published this Sunday. The initiative, reports the official press, is due to the “productive chain” between the state Provincial Company of the Food Industry (EPIA) and the private company Epcc, “with one person responsible.”

In this association, the text released by the director general of the EPIA, Abdelín González Mesa, explains, “The state entity provides the premises, the labor force and the technological infrastructure, while the private company supplies all the imported raw material and is involved in the manufacturing process.”

With this joint production, Tribuna continues, “the private actor has fewer costs and therefore can set more affordable prices for customers,” alluding to the surprising financing of the private company with public resources.

As stated with pomp, the establishment offers “several varieties of ice cream made in the unit itself, using natural fruits collected in the country and from imported components (chocolate, lemon, strawberry, orange and pineapple).” In addition, they boast that the offer “is marketed at prices lower than those currently set by other forms of private management”: the ice cream scoop costs 35 pesos ($1.45), and the simple hamburger costs 150 ($6.25).

This is one of the few occasions in which the official press publishes something related to new private businesses, whose proliferation was ratified by the meeting, last January, between Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Kremlin adviser Boris Titov.

As revealed by Russian media at the time — not by Cuban officials — both parties agreed to transform Cuba’s economy into a “private enterprise” one. For voices in exile such as the Cuba Siglo XXI ideas laboratory, this means an imminent transition from a “state-controlled economy model” to the “old elite oligarchic Soviet scheme” of taking control of numerous businesses.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Cubans and Foreigners Linked to the Regime Take Over State Companies Without Competition

Sylvain de Zanja and Belascoaín, in Centro Habana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez/Olea Gallardo, Havana, 26 January 2023 — A tetrapak of fried tomato sauce weighing 8 ounces for 630 pesos, some even smaller containers of mayonnaise at 280 pesos, and packet of cookies for 380 pesos, a 3.5 ounce bag of chips for 150 pesos… All imported and at reasonable prices unattainable for the average Cuba, is the new product line at the Sylvain establishments, which used to sell sweets and bread. And on some vague day at the end of the year they went from being state-owned to ending up in private hands.

Or at least, in part. The store on Zanja and Belascoaín, in Centro Habana, located on the ground floor of the famous building known as Super Cake – for the pastry shop it housed before 1959 – is divided into two, according to an employee speaking to 14ymedio: one state-owned and the other private.

In the first, the only thing for sale is garlic paste and the occasional spice for seasoning, but it is closed. “It’s empty because we don’t have materials or products to work with,” explained the worker, who, like other women, is working in the private area “to guarantee us a job while supplies arrive on the other side.”

On the private side, “there is everything,” as the neighbors marvel, “but we cannot afford it.” Not even the powdered milk: at 1,800 pesos for 2.2 pounds.

The Sylvain store on San Rafael Boulevard, in the same Havana municipality, has also been “privatized,” offering imported and expensive products similar to those at Super Cake, and the the store at San Lázaro and Hospital, which sold food before, now offers office supplies, as does as the Belascoaín branch between Monte and Campanario.

The case of the Sylvain chain is not unique, and it is part of a list that has been growing for months: that of state establishments that become rented by individuals overnight, without any kind of notice. continue reading

The same thing happened in the so-called Mercadito Ideal at 23rd and C, in El Vedado, whose outdoor area is occupied by a private stall where the items are, according to the visitors, “for the elements.” Namely: umbrellas at 2,300 pesos, soda bottles at 350 pesos or shopping bags at 850.

The Sylvain de San Lázaro y Hospital branch now offers office supplies, as does the Belascoaín branch between Monte and Campanario. (14ymedio)

Another example is the Coppelita ice cream parlor within the Hola, Ola complex, reopened last July, which a few months later accumulated several complaints on=line about the high prices of ice cream – 170 pesos for two scoops – the turbidity of having “reemployed” state workers and the scarcity of products to sell.

“How do they give that place, in a privileged area, just fixed up, to people who have nothing, who offer nothing?” some onlookers wondered at the time.

But if there is a place that has passed to a private owner and offers a service with stratospheric costs, it is the Palacio de los Matrimonios [Wedding Palace] in El Vedado. Nestled at 25th and N, in an old mansion from the early 20th century that fell into disrepair little by little, a couple could get married at the cost of just a 5-peso stamp.

Now, and after a slight remodeling that, according to the neighbors, was carried out by a foreigner to whom they “gave” the business, the place is called ModaHabana Novias, and sold as “Havana’s Italian atelier.” It offers the following, according to information sent to its clients: “We are dedicated to the rental of wedding dresses and men’s suits, the organization and coordination of the entire wedding, venue management, we also offer micro-wedding services in private residences, photography and photoshooting around the city, makeup and hairdressing, catering services, buffets, wedding cakes, management of alliances in jewelry stores, among other options.”

Mercado Ideal at 23rd and C, another of the state premises leased to private hands. (14ymedio)

The firm’s offers range from an “economic line,” which consists of a wedding dress between 8,000 and 10,000 pesos and the “maid of honor” dress included, to a “luxury” line: a wedding dress for 70,000 CUP and, “free”, an “Italian” suit for the groom, from the Carlo Pignatelli brand, the tornadoda (reception) dress, those for the bridesmaids and the ladies and gentlemen, make-up and hairstyle service at home, the bouquet with imported flowers and a garter belt.

In addition, the company offers a hairdressing service for 4,000 pesos and a bouquet with five imported roses for 5,000 pesos, prices that are equivalent to the monthly salary of a state worker.

“They are privatizing the country little by little and silently,” lamented a client who left the place in terror after asking about prices. “What worries me is that they are the ones keeping things for themselves. Nothing is said in the state media or on television.”

Last week’s meeting between Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Kremlin adviser Boris Titov confirms this trend that has been seen on the street for months. The meeting showed not only that Cuba wants to take its relationship with Russia to “a higher moment,” as the island’s president declared, but this consists of letting Moscow guide in a future opening.

Coppelita ice cream parlor, inside the Hola, Ola recreation center, in Havana. (14ymedio)

As revealed by the Russian media – in no case by the Cuban officials – both parties agreed to create a center to transform the Cuban economy “from private companies.” This means, for voices in exile such as the Cuba Siglo XXI [21st Century Cuba] think tank, the imminent transition from a “model with a nationalized economy” to the “Russian market mafia scheme,” in which the old Soviet oligarchic elite took control of numerous companies.

In reality, there are rules on the Island that regulate the bidding for the rental of state premises by individuals, but the truth is that the official press, always given to propagating any trifle that suits the regime, has not publicized this.

The Official Gazette of April 21, 2022 specifically establishes the procedure in detail. Among its articles, there is the one that indicates which principles should govern the tender: transparency (“the knowledge of the actions and decisions of the tender that the participants have for an effective social and popular control”), equality (“that the participants have equal rights and opportunities”), publicity (“that the different actions and decisions of the bidding procedure are public”), concurrence (“all those who meet the general conditions that are established have the right to participate in the bidding”), competition (” the possibility is guaranteed to all potential bidders to participate in the process, without being able to introduce limitations that have no technical, legal or economic basis”) and “reasonable efficiency” (“that the selection is most convenient for the public interest”).

The process, in any case, requires the “existence of establishments that it is decided to lease, working or closed” and that “the Council of the Municipal Administration or the Governor, as appropriate, make the call for the start of the bidding process for the lease of the establishment,” according to an official website in May. Everything can take a minimum of 15 business days.

Curiously, the day after the publication of that Gazette, and to date, no public tender or the name of its owner has been known, Fress reopened in the Plaza de Carlos III as a restaurant and store in Cuban pesos.

Three days after the publication in this newspaper of that news and of numerous complaints on-line due to the high prices of the premises, the establishment was closed “due to technical problems,” and the company’s premises in Playa, a restaurant with home delivery, also suspended activities.

Wedding Palace, in the Havana neighborhood of El Vedado. (14ymedio)

“They held an emergency meeting here in Carlos III because of the criticism on social networks, and starting tomorrow they can only sell processed food,” some workers explained to 14ymedio, which collected the testimony of several customers during those days.

The general opinion was summed up in the following: “I have nothing against the privates, but the problem is not that it is private, but that it was impudent. Why some yes and others not?”

The questions remain unanswered. Last August, the newspaper Sierra Maestra published a list of state premises that were going up for tender in Santiago de Cuba, the results of which is unknown. Some of them were Soditos, the state-owned cafeterias spread over various neighborhoods that sold everything from ice cream to condoms, including bread, tea, juices and soft drinks, with great success among the population.

Just a few weeks ago, the Habana Radio website reported the tender for three other properties by Gestión del Patrimonio: Obispo 328, O’Reilly 107 and Obrapía 107. All of them are historic buildings located in Old Havana.

The call for the first, however, expired on November 24, 2022. The second expires on February 5 and corresponds to the establishment where the Sargadelos store was located, a Spanish firm from Galicia that disassociated itself from that project on the Island about five years ago. Finally, the term of the third call ends on February 8.

To find out all these details – property, conditions, dates – it is necessary to opt for the tender, and to follow the intricacies of several clicks, something far from the “transparency” and “publicity” that the law establishes.

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A Depressed Employee Among Empty Shelves, a Reflection of Cuba’s Misfortune

The Pan-American Store at Boyeros and Camagüey, in Havana, this Monday. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez/Olea Gallardo, Havana, 16 January 2023 — A few years ago, through one of those entertaining TED conferences that spread like wildfire on social networks, Barry Schwartz popularized the expression “the paradox of choice” which can be summed up as follows: choosing between too many options produces paralysis and dissatisfaction, which can cause a kind of very negative stress in modern industrial societies.

None of this will happen to the customers of the Panamericana store on Rancho Boyeros and Camagüey avenues, in Havana, where the shelves looked almost completely empty this Monday.

“How come it’s like this!” a surprised customer remarked — one of the very few in the store which requires payment in freely convertible currency (MLC). An employee responded, sighing with resignation: “Do you see how it is? The last time there was a more or less decent assortment here was in December and we’ve been like this ever since.” continue reading

On the shelves there were hardly any very expensive products that people do not usually buy, such as beef that is unaffordable to the average Cuban, or Christmas munchies at 16 MLC, or the occasional wrinkled and expensive package of beans.

Gone are those images of the establishment in which the refrigerators looked full and the lines at the door stretched four blocks. That was in July 2020, just after the Government announced the sale of food and toilets in MLC, a measure harshly criticized by the population, a large part of which does not have access to foreign currency.

Although a year later the same market, one of the largest in the capital along with Cuatro Caminos, in Centro Habana, and 3rd and 70th, in the municipality of Playa, was in crisis due to shortages, it cannot be compared to its present state. .

“There’s nothing, this is stripped, let’s go,” a couple commented among themselves.

To explain the “paradox of choice” there are scientific studies that speak, for example, of the damage of an “overload of alternatives” in the brain if there are many options to choose from. Thanks to the Revolution, the Cubans’ brains are safe.

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Lopez Obrador and Cuba, a Honeymoon that Doesn’t End

The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel. (Presidency of Mexico)

14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, 28 December 2022 — Miguel Díaz-Canel’s first public statement on Wednesday was a message to his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “It was very pleasant to talk on the phone with Brother President López Obrador,” the Cuban president wrote on Twitter, reiterating “the deep gratitude to the people and Government of Mexico for the generous and supportive help provided to Cuba.” Both expressed, he said, “satisfaction with the excellent state of bilateral relations.”

Díaz-Canel did not specify what “generous and supportive help” he was referring to, but he did note one fact: despite the historic cordiality between the two countries, bilateral relations have never been so “excellent.”

The latest milestone is the hiring of 119 more Cuban doctors, as announced on Tuesday by the director of the National Social Security Institute of Mexico, Zoé Robledo, at López Obrador’s usual “morning” press conference.

These health workers will arrive in January “to provide their specialized services,” said Robledo, who recalled the 491 additional doctors who are “in 11 states, in very difficult and marginal places, helping to provide coverage every day and at all times in the hospitals where they are prominent.”

At the beginning of December, this newspaper found that one of those areas for which these doctors were promised, the inaccessible and violent Montaña de Guerrero, still does not receive Cubans. continue reading

Beyond that, neither of the two countries has made public how much money Mexico has spent on Cuba since López Obrador took office, on December 1, 2018. The Mexican president’s affinity for the Cuban Revolution is evident, in speech and in action.

The honeymoon began on another honeymoon: the one that López Obrador took with his first wife, the late Rocío Beltrán, in Cuba, in 1979, and continued with the import of the Sandino housing construction system — extended on the Island after the triumph of the Revolution — when the current president was a member of the official PRI party and director of the National Indigenous Institute of the state of Tabasco, at the beginning of the 80s.

After his election as president, the man from Tabasco gave free rein to that old love, which, in the midst of the deep crisis in Venezuela, supplier to the Island for the last two decades, was immediately reciprocated.

For example, the first official visit of Miguel Díaz-Canel after being appointed president was to Mexico, in October 2019.

Since then, the closeness has been characterized by controversy and opacity. In April 2020, medical brigades began to be sent in support, according to the Mexican authorities, of the fight against the COVID pandemic. Schools and public opinion questioned them for not being prepared to face the health emergency and for doing little work. It would then become known, thanks to the investigations of the press and the opposition, that their presence in Mexico cost almost eight million dollars. The official Cuban press itself has given the exact number of health-workers sent to Mexico for that contingency between 2020 and 2021: 1,479.

Despite the controversy over these health workers, the Mexican government won further criticism for the lack of transparency about the scholarships for medical residencies abroad, which began in 2020. The final destination would end up being only Cuba, for which Mexico paid the regime one million dollars, as revealed at the time by the Latinus portal.

Another milestone was the presence of Miguel Díaz-Canel on the presidential stand during the celebrations for the independence of Mexico, in September 2021, where he was even allowed to give a speech, something that had never happened in the country’s history with any foreign head of state.

Last May, López Obrador was reciprocated with the José Martí Order, on his official visit to the Island – one of the very few countries to which he has traveled as president. For those days, and during the Havana Book Fair, in which Mexico was the guest of honor, the opening of a branch of the legendary Mexican state publishing house, the Economic Culture Fund, had been announced,. It would end up happening in August, precariously, and again without information about the amount invested.

The list of solidarity of the current Mexican Administration with Cuba includes the sending of staff from Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Ministry of National Defense to help put out the gigantic fire, in August, of the Matanzas Supertanker Base, and members of the Federal Electricity Commission after the passage of Hurricane Ian, in September, as well as the purchase of anti-covid vaccines — not yet approved by the World Health Organization — and the import of Cuban gravel for the construction of one of López Obrador’s emblematic projects, the so-called Mayan Train, on the Yucatan peninsula.

The romance, of which neither Mexicans nor Cubans know the total cost, is far from over.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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A Hotel with an Unknown Owner and Rates of up to 100 Dollars per Night Opens in Centro Havana

The Tribe Caribe Cayo Hueso Hotel opened on Saturday in Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez / Olea Gallardo, Havana, 13 December 2022 — The neighbors of the hotel Cayo Hueso, in Centro Habana, watched with intrigue, for months, the remodeling of the building located at Aramburu 253, at the corner of Neptune. Little by little, the property — built in the 1930s and in decline, like all its surroundings — was becoming a luxurious establishment, judging by what could be glimpsed through the windows of the ground floor.

Nothing, however, reported its future use, and the only sign it displayed was the work license number written on a piece of cardboard and poorly hung on a window. The gossip began to flow without confirmation: a yuma had bought the property and was turning it into a hotel.

And not only that, but he had bought other houses and planned to relocate everyone who lived there.

If it was true that the project was for an American, in any case he had to be influential. In this regard, several residents of the place tell another anecdote. One day a cement truck was parked in front of the building, and a police patrol car arrived to ask the construction workers for identification. One of them phoned someone, and, after having a brief conversation, passed the device to the policeman: “Someone wants to talk to you.” “The policeman changed his expression, apologized, and they never bothered the workers again,” says a neighbor who asks for anonymity.

Thus, a name began to be repeated during the last few weeks by the neighbors. They dared to say that behind the project, headed by two American businessmen, was none other than Raúl Castro’s daughter. “There the meter is running, but it’s not for the Americans. That’s not theirs, but Mariela’s,” the residents said confidently, insisting they saw her on Friday inside the building.

True or not, no one saw Mariela Castro last Saturday, when the hotel was inaugurated and several unknown people were cleared. To begin with, its name: Tribe Caribbean Cayo Hueso (Key West). continue reading

The only sign that the establishment had was the construction license number written on a piece of cardboard and poorly hung in a window. (14ymedio)

On its webpage, where you can now book a room for 150 to 550 dollars a night — booking a full floor costs 1,000 — the “founders” appear: an American investor, Chris Cornell, and music producer Andrés Levín, born in Venezuela but with a US passport. In Cuba, Levin is known for participating in several cultural projects such as the Havana Biennale, in addition to his marriage to Cuban-American singer Cucú Diamantes.

Hence, he was the most recognizable figure on Saturday, at an unusual “neighborhood” inauguration party, which lasted six hours and included an exhibition by photographer Juan Carlos Alom, the sale of items by private businesses such as the Clandestina brand and musical performances. “Here in Cuba this is not allowed for just anyone,” commented a young man, who stopped humming what they were singing on the stage: El Necio [The Fool], by Silvio Rodríguez, to the rhythm of salsa.

Levín, with a cap and characteristic dark glasses, came and went, smiling, greeting with familiarity the neighbors gathered in front of the street stage, for whose installation the traffic on Aramburu Street between Neptune and San Miguel was closed off.

Nearby was a bus with the electronic sign “PROTOCOL” in capital letters, and the various Lada vehicles with drivers normally used by public officials, parked nearby, were obvious.

A group of young people dressed in T-shirts saying “Tribe Caribe” prevented people from entering the hotel and monitored the movements of the curious.

Tribe Caribe is a company registered on April 30, 2021, in Florida, with the address 1521 Alton Road 460, in Miami Beach. Levín and Cornell both appear as directors. The company, linked to the world of music, affirms that it “promotes and distributes exceptional original Caribbean content,” according to its website, and is “a proactive force, a voice and an educator in the continuous emergence of the rich cultural offerings of the Caribbean.”

On the hotel’s page, Chris Cornell points out that he is “a long-time professional entrepreneur and investor in arts, creative businesses and impact projects, who provides momentum and entrepreneurial spirit to the project,” and who “has directed all the important decisions of restoration, construction and design of the hotel, and is deeply aware of how these decisions affect the neighborhood, the local cultural identity and the preservation of the artistic heritage of Cayo Hueso.”

Andrés Levín iba y venía sonriente, saludando con familiaridad a los vecinos congregados delante del escenario callejero. (14ymedio) — Andrés Levín came and went smiling, familiarly greeting the neighbors gathered in front of the street stage. (14ymedio)

Of that mysterious investor, with unknown biography and background, there are no traces other than his alleged signature in the office in North Palm Beach, Florida, where the Tribe Caribe company was created. Of course, his name and surname coincide exactly with those of the famous singer of the Audioslave band, the first American rock group to play live in Cuba, in May 2005, at a venue none other than in the Anti-imperialist Bandstand, and for hundreds of thousands of fans on the Havana Malecón.

Levín emphasizes that he has been nominated for 26 Grammy awards — he won one in 2009 for the recording of the musical In the Heights — and that he has “propelled initiatives and produced numerous cultural events in Cuba, including TEDxHabana.”

Founder of the Afro-Cuban band Yerba Buena, the producer has collaborated, as mentioned on the official website, with artists such as Miguel Bosé, Aterciopelados, Orishas, David Byrne, Caetano Veloso, D’Angelo, Julieta Venegas and Tina Turner.

In addition, he is the producer of several film projects such as Amor crónico, directed in 2012 by the Cuban Jorge Perugorría, with whom he has a personal friendship, according to the photographs that show them together and messages.

An actor who prefers not to give his name and who was in business with Levin years ago, tells 14ymedio that both had agreed to collaborate on several projects, but that the producer cut off all communication after the artist’s participation in the demonstration on November 27, 2020 in front of the Ministry of Culture.

At that time, the actor attended two parties organized by Levín. One, in a house that he had rented in the municipality of Playa, near 5th Avenue, and another, in Siboney, where the mansions expropriated by the main architects of the Revolution are located, to celebrate the birthday of the producer’s father.

The source did not see, on any of these occasions, “anyone who was a heavyweight in politics,” but just “plain show business.”

Nearby was a bus with the electronic legend in capital letters “protocol”, and the various Lada vehicles with drivers were obvious. (14 and a half) — Nearby was a bus with the electronic legend in capital letters “protocol,” and the various Lada vehicles with drivers were obvious. (14ymedio)

But if he is associated with Mariela Castro, it is because Levín himself appears on social networks next to her, for example, in an “anti-homophobia” gala held in 2016. The Spanish singer Marta Sánchez, who performed on that occasion, also posted on Facebook about it: “Thank you Cuba for so much love and recognition! Thanks to Mariela Castro for that support to those who choose in this country to love as they want! Thanks to Andrés Levín for counting on me!”

In addition, the producer himself mentions Raúl Castro’s daughter in an interview granted in 2016 to Tablet, a magazine on issues of the Jewish community (the producers’s roots, whose parents, “very left-wing” according to their own description, were Argentines exiled in Caracas).

“It seems to me that I was at a dinner with you a few years ago and there were secret service people there and one of the Castros was with us or something like that. What happened?”, asks the interviewer, to which Levín replies that he does not remember well, but that it would surely have to do with the TEDxHabana event, in which he collaborated with “designers, programmers, artists and scientists” of the Cuban LGTBQ community.

The “neighborhood” opening party, last Saturday, lasted six hours and included an exhibition by photographer Juan Carlos Alom, sale of items by private parties such as the Clandestina brand, and musical performances. (14ymedio)

“One of the most advanced LGBTQ sex education programs in Latin America is led by Mariela Castro,” says the musician, who recognises having collaborated with her “on many projects related to culture and education.”

And then Levín unravels into praise for the Cuban people, whom he affirms “have a lot of potential and desire to prosper and are very different from what people think,” and who have “things that most of the world doesn’t have”: “Healthcare and education. Eleven million educated people. It is the most educated country in the world,” he says.

Tribe Caribe Cayo Hueso is offered precisely as a cultural project: “We continue a 25-year mission to preserve and pay tribute to Afro-Cuban culture and its musical legacy, we celebrate multi-generational artistic expression, and we come to share our exclusive access to a side of Cuba that visitors and guests could not experience on their own.” Not a word about the business purposes, nor the obvious opulence that the project exudes, nestled in the depleted heart of Centro Habana.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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The Saratoga Hotel’s Decline Began as Soon as the Military Took It Over

The Hotel Saratoga in all its splendor, in March 2014, after it had been restored. (CC/LukaszKatlewa)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodriguez / Olea Gallardo, Havana, 11 May 2022 — Though an explosion at the luxurious Saratoga Hotel last Friday led to the deaths of at least forty-three people and the destruction of an iconic Havana landmark, the seeds of its demise were planted within its walls much earlier.

Specifically, this was in 2016, when the Armed Forces Ministry seized the property from Habaguanex — a company had been operating under the auspices of the then all-powerful Office of the Historian of Havana, directed by Eusebio Leal — and handed over to the Gaviota group.

Leal’s agency had been successfully operating a number of tourist-related commercial properties when they were taken over by the Revolutionary Armed Forces Business Administration Group (Gaesa), led by Raul Castro’s former son-in-law, General Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Calleja.

“The Gaviota people were driving the Saratoga into the ground,” claims one former employee, a man in his forties who prefers to remain anonymous. He quit working there two years ago and swears he will never go back. “Everything became run down and they weren’t taking care of anything,” he reports. continue reading

This was a far cry from 2005, when the Saratoga — built in 1880 and operated as a hotel at the corner of Prado and Dragones since 1933 — reopened as modern five-star establishment after a long period of decline that began with the triumph of the Cuban revolution. The restoration was carried out the Office of the Historian and financed by foreign investors.

One of those investors, who prefers to remain anonymous, tells 14ymedio that the tab for refurbishing the Saratoga — part of an ambitious plan by Leal to restore Havana’s historic city center — was on the order of fifteen million dollars.

“An English developer sought out investors in several European countries, including Spain,” he explains. That developer was Coral Capital, a company founded by Amado Fakhre, an Anglo-Argentinian with roots in Lebanon. “We liked this project because we always believed, and still believe, in the future of Cuba,” says the investor. “And we never thought the current governent would last this long.”

According to this investor, however, everything changed once the property was transferred to Gaviota. “It all went downhill from there,” he says, though he acknowledges that investors also realized that the developers, led by Fakhre, did not have much experience in the hotel business. “They tried to make agreements with international [hotel] chains but were not successful. And, on the whole, the way they handled the negotiation with Gaviota was disastrous.”

The relationship of Fakhre and Stephen Purvis, his partner at Coral Capital, with the Cuban military brings to mind the popular fable about the frog who agrees to transport a snake across a river only to be stung by the scorpion in mid-stream, dooming them both. The two men were arrested — first in 2011 and again in 2012 — and accused of bribery. They remained in detention until their trial in 2013, when they were found guilty of “misdemeanor corruption” and released.

However, some media outlets report that Fakhre was forced to sign a confession stating that he had been detained for “having revealed state secrets” and spent twenty months being interrogated by the political police in a government safe house.

According to a 2016 article published in Vice, his business had invested a total of tweny-eight million dollars in the Saratoga.

Eusebio Leal’s star shone brightly even when Fidel was still in power and it did not dim until a long time thereafter. A flattering 2009 article in the official press noted that Habaguanex, which was created in 1994, operated no fewer than 300 tourist facilities. These included restaurants, shops, markets, cafes and lodgings with a total capacity of 546 rooms. These operations were touted as examples of “sustainable” development, whose profits went to “both the rescue of buildings that make up the Historic Center and to various social programs.”

“One morning, the elderly were invited to an extravagant breakfast at Casas Museos as part of a cultural event. And this was no run-of-the mill event,” reports a dancer who who worked with the Office of Humanitarian Affairs, which was also affiliated with the Office of the Historian

“Everything was carefully worked out,” she explains. “Partnership agreements and donations from from overseas as well as the income that Habaguanex generated as a company from all its hard-currency stores and hotels.”

“Not just anyone worked for them,” says the artist, who defends the management skills of Eusebio Leal, who died of cancer on July 31, 2021. “The Office of the Historian was a country within a country. They were powerful but they did things well. I worked there for many years and I know the efforts that were made.”

“In the end, they were audited and everything was taken away from them,” she says, alluding to the moment the Armed Forces took control of Habaguanex’s most attractive assets.

Once its foreign investors pulled out, the Hotel Saratogo languished under Gaviota’s management. Other former employees report deteriorating working conditions and the loss of financial incentives that the hotel’s foreign managers often provided on an informal basis to their workers in addition to their salaries.

“The first thing to go at the Saratoga was the art. But before that was the class,” says another former employee. “When it was part foreign-owned and part Habanguanex-owned, the Anacaona restaurant on the ground floor was packed on Christmas Eve. But under Gaviota, it wasn’t even a shadow of its former self.”

Gaviota — proprietor of the luxurious Grand Hotel Manzana and manager of the Kempinski — has close to sixty hotels and villas throughout the island with close to 30,000 bedrooms, most of which are administered by foreign companies.

It is the operations under foreign management that enjoy the best reputations while the hotels over which the military conglomerate has exclusive control have not managed to achieve the same level of customer satisfaction.

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‘They Want to Get Rich at the Expense of the Pain of Cubans’

There are still dozens of Cubans in Guyana, spending money that is beginning to be unsustainable for their families. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, 8 April 2022 — Juan and Ernestina (fictitious names) arrived in Georgetown, Guyana, on March 15 to process their family reunification visas. They had been ’claimed’ by their daughter, Miriela, based in the United States since 2011, who also prefers to remain anonymous because she insists that her parents are “in the hands of a mafia.”

The process — mandatory since the United States Embassy in Cuba suspended services in 2017 after the appearance of diplomats with strange symptoms known as “Havana syndrome” — should have been simple, but it has become a trial of anguish and expense.

Before arriving in Guyana, the couple, who are around 70 years old, had “12 days of anguish,” says their daughter, first because there was no ticket on any airline. “We spent hundreds of dollars calling Copa [Airlines] and they didn’t sell us a ticket because, according to them, they were full until July.” Thanks to a contact, they got a flight with a stopover in Panama, at no less than almost 5,000 dollars each.

A few days after buying that ticket, the Panamanian Embassy in Havana announced that Cubans would need a transit visa to set foot on its territory traveling a third country. Although the decision, which provoked demonstrations for days in the vicinity of the consular headquarters and continues to be a source of protest, mainly affected those who planned to emigrate to the United States irregularly via Nicaragua, it also hit those who, like Juan and Ernestina, had undertaken a legal route. continue reading

Both had the consular interview between March 16 and 30, just the dates for which the immigration authorities forced the rescheduling of tickets , since the transit visa had to be requested 15 days in advance. At the last moment, the option of flying to Guyana via Trinidad and Tobago on Caribbean Airlines came up and they took it. Paying, yes, says Miriela, “another ridiculous price.”

Once in Guyana, the problems were far from diminishing. To begin with, the accommodation was not what they had been promised in the advertisement. “In theory, the hostel is a small house with all the minimum conditions. At first they tell you that they charge 90 dollars a day, but when you arrive, it turns out that they charged 100 a day for an apartment,” says Miriela. Similarly, the price included breakfast, lunch and dinner.

However, the quality and quantity of that “full board” was slight, so her parents had no choice but to go to a market to buy what they needed. With the excuse that the accommodation “is not in a very good area,” Miriela denounces, “they charge them to take them to a market far from there, by taxi.”

However, the serious part came with the clinical exams required by the US Embassy as a requirement to grant the visas. “My parents had the tests exactly 15 days ago and supposedly the results are not there,” says Miriela, who insists that “if you give them 200, 300, 400 dollars, depending on how hard you press them, or if they suppose that you have it, the analyzes appear in a matter of seconds.”

That clinic, International Medical Center, was certainly the subject of a scandal in November 2021, when its owner, Dr. Colin Roach, was murdered, a crime for which two employees were arrested, without their identity being revealed.

Miriela calculates that currently the clinic’s workers are 80% Cuban and the other 20% Guyanese and Venezuelan. For this woman from Sancti Spiritus, it is obvious that the clinic and the hostel are involved in “corruption.”

As an example, she relates how one Saturday from the lodging they offered to go to the medical center to collect the tests. “If the clinic only works from Monday to Friday, does it make any sense that the owner of a hostel, who has no relationship with the patient, shows up at her business with the results of the tests?” Miriela wonders “There is obviously influence peddling and an unequivocal link.”

Cuban Berta García Reyes, who went through the same ordeal of obtaining a family reunification visa a few months earlier, in December, argues that “the flow of people is so great that many Cubans don’t have time to get checked before going to their consular interview, so they are forced to reschedule an additional appointment at the embassy to bring the results of the medical checkup, which can take 10 or 12 days, and after bringing those results to the embassy, you have to wait for them to give them to give you a date to finally pick up your visa.”

This, she explains, “has led people to turn to these corruption mechanisms in clinics to speed up their check-ups and results. And it is common for it to be in hostels where they are told who they should go to to resolve their case.”

García Reyes does not know the sum of money in all cases, but she does know “with certainty” that “there are those who have paid a thousand dollars for an accelerated and valid check-up.”

In her case, her problems began at the consular interview itself, when, to her surprise, she was told that she had to “complete and conclude the medical check-up,” even though she had already had those tests six days earlier. “At the hostel, I found out that they had called from the clinic to let them know that I had to go to the hospital,” says García Reyes.

At the clinic, the doctor told her that “a shadow” had been observed on the X-ray image and she diagnosed her with “cystic fibrosis,” and that she should therefore undergo a sputum test “for suspicion of tuberculosis.” There were also other Cubans there whose plates also turned out to be “suspicious,” the woman narrates, “and they had to undergo the same sputum analysis. In some cases they were asthmatic people, and there were also those with COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. They informed us that they had to follow the protocol, that is, the sputum test to rule out tuberculosis in all cases.”

All this was very alarming for García Reyes, because the results of the sputum test took between six and eight weeks, which, of course, delayed the time until she would be reunited with her daughter in the United States, but, above all, it made it made the whole process more expensive. “She had to continue to cover my lodging and food expenses – which until then was 45 dollars a day and, by having to extend the accommodation, they lowered it to 35 dollars a day – as well as other additional expenses, for transportation and telephone,” says Bertha.

Added to the anxiety produced by all this was one more concern: “Cubans always feel fear, especially when we are in the process of entering the United States and we believe that they can deport us for anything.”

So at first she went along with it, but it didn’t last long. “As the days went by, I felt I had to do something. We Cubans who were in that situation ended up connecting through the networks. I knew about cases that were in Guyana even before me, since the first week of December, and I also knew that the last sputum test for previous cases had been done on November 11, when the reagent ran out [to process the sputum sample].”

At that time, they concluded that “either the doctors at the clinic were incompetent, incapable of establishing an accurate diagnosis and proceeding accordingly, or else behind everything there was a business involving the clinic and the owners of the hostels, which benefited from the extension of the Cubans’ stay in Guyana.”

The rumor was that the clinic “accepted bribes in exchange for repeating X-rays or changing the results of medical examinations from those who were willing to pay for it.” Meanwhile, hostels were “keeping all their rooms occupied at full capacity.”

García Reyes alludes to the fact that the consular headquarters is fully aware of the situation. “We shared in the hostels with all the other Cubans, who arrived and left with their perfect medical results, those who, if we had tuberculosis, would have brought the disease to the United States. That clearly indicated to us that the medical personnel and even the embassy officials knew that we were not actually sick, so they were not even the least bit concerned or interested in resolving the situation.”

However, each time they pointed this out to officials, they were told that they were just “following protocol.”

“Many of us think that the rumors that began to spread in February (officially confirmed in March) about the restart of the consular services of the US Embassy in Havana were in some way influencing an increase in corruption among the medical centers in charge of doing exams for immigrants and the hostels where they stay, urging them to make the most of it while Cubans continue to be forced to do the paperwork in Guyana,” García Reyes details.

The wheel “began to unlock” for her after her statements to various US media, such as América TeVé and Telemundo, which publicized the problem. From there, congressmen like Marco Rubio also began to demand solutions for the Cubans stranded in Georgetown.

After Berta’s complaint to US television stations, and although without referring to the complaints, the Embassy authorized an additional doctor, Dr. Arya Devi Karyampudi, from St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, to perform medical examinations on visa applicants.

Until then, and since Colin Roach’s murder, only Dr. Yonnette Roach had been staffing the International Medical Center. She was the one who saw Juan and Ernestina.

In this regard, Miriela continues to express her doubts about the responsibility of the United States Embassy: “If they are rescheduling most of the appointments because they are showing up without the documents, isn’t it obvious that something is happening with the clinic? What are they going to do about it?”

On March 22, without referring to the complaints, the US consular section in Guyana added two other doctors: Zulfikar Bux, from St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, and Dev Persaud, from the Midway Specialty Care Center.

The delays, in any case, are not new, and for this reason last December the United States announced the increase in personnel at its diplomatic headquarters in Georgetown.

With not much success. Laments like those of Juan, Ernestina and Berta multiply in the Facebook group “Cubans united for family reunification,” many of them pointing directly to the consular headquarters as being responsible for the situation.

“You have to denounce these people, those from the embassy are in a plot with the hostels so that you have to spend more time here,” says Justo Toledo Luis. “When you go to the interview they ask you what hostel you are stayig in. Nobody leaves here in less than a month.”

Nierys Bermúdez refers to the owners of the hostels as “fraudsters,” charging guests $300 to “resolve” their medical check-up. “They want to get rich at the expense of Cubans’ pain, it’s too much,” she says, in the same vein as Zurileydis Domínguez Vichot: “What I think is that, as always, they make a lucrative deal off of our suffering.”

The criticism in the Facebook group has turned into praise, thanks and blessings since, this Wednesday, when the United States Embassy announced that it will resume processing in Havana the IR-5 category visas, which recognizes parents who are being claimed by US citizens.

In spite of everything, the diplomatic headquarters in Cuba insisted again that next month’s will be a “limited” resumption, which means that the Embassy in Georgetown “will continue to be the main place of processing for the majority of Cuban immigrant visa applicants.”

In addition, the embassy warned that applicants who have been notified before April 1, 2022 that their case is ready to be processed, will continue to be required to fly to Guyana. Those who have been notified after that date will have their interview scheduled in Havana.

“Given the limitations of their resources,” they added, they are not accepting “transfer requests from applicants.” They also do not have “an exact date” for when the diplomatic headquarters “will begin to process the full range of visa services for immigrants and non-immigrants,” but they assured that they will continue to provide “essential services to US citizens and a limited processing of emergency visas for nonimmigrants.”

For Berta García Reyes, the process was “without a doubt, the worst and most stressful experience” of her life, the cost of which “has been countless humiliations, mistreatment, indifference, contempt, helplessness, abandonment, anguish, to such an extent that some wanted to return to Cuba and wait for a new date.”

There are still dozens of Cubans in Guyana, spending money that is beginning to be unsustainable for their families. Miriela and her husband have spent 14,000 dollars, not counting the tickets from Guyana to the US. “And the old man’s interview is on April 22. Calculate how many dollars an average family needs for this process,” she laments with this newspaper. “Coming illegally to this country is cheaper than leaving through legal channels.”

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