Category: Orlando Palma

Last October Cuban television’s Primetime News published a report from Jose Marti International Airport in which the techniques used by customs to detect the entry of drugs were demonstrated and in which it reported the discovery of at least 40 cases of intent to traffic drugs through the border through mid-October.

The report came out days after the independent press echoed a study published by Customs of the Republic that showed the case of a passenger who transferred to the Island “a certain quantity of drug in an ingested form which was destined for the domestic consumption market.” That brief phrase focused attention on the existence of two problems within Cuba: domestic consumption and the use of “mules” for transport of the substances.

The Customs report, prepared by Moraima Rodriguez Nuviola, chief of the Department of Analysis for that agency, adds other figures. Between January and November 2014, the system for confronting drugs on the border discovered through air, sea and postal channels 38,843 kilograms of drugs, among them 36,587 of cocaine, 2,224 of marijuana and 32 of cannabinoids.
Customs now has 110 dog units trained to find not only explosives but also drugs.

Modern X-ray equipment for the Mariel port, together with other technical means of control have been installed or will be installed soon in all of the country’s international airports. Among them the internal body scan, which is used to find out if a person has ingested drugs and the external body scan to see if there is contraband attached to the body.

Official recognition of the existence of a domestic market for the consumption of drugs has been reflected on official television through signals such as the appearance of a message announcing a telephone help line for addicts and the introduction into scripts of cases brought against networks that distribute crack cocaine or any other substance. Counseling programs have begun to include advice for family members who live with addicts.

Increased tourism and the new economic capacity of some population sectors would be the main causes for the presumed increase in consumption of drugs. Meanwhile, the new official discourse suggests that, to the extent that the country now is looking like the rest of the world, these phenomena are inevitable.

After the announcement of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana, the fight to stop drug trafficking could become another area of cooperation between the two countries, since the Island, in contrast with the majority of its neighbors, is not an important point in the circulation of narcotics.

“I do not believe that the Cuban government wants to be a drug trafficking center,” Barry McCaffrey, a White House anti-drug official during the Clinton administration, has said in statements to The Washington Post. McCaffrey has said that there has already been “all kinds of communication between the US and the Island” in this area, although it was not “perfect cooperation.”

Translated by MLK

Just inside the homes, out of the control of the cultural supervisors and far from the censorship scissors, the packet has life. The numbers of audience members lost by official television is never made public, but, in view of the worry that its officials demonstrate, the phenomenon of the packet-ization of Cuban society must be reaching significant levels.

They Call Me Cuba emphasized that the country “is enjoying a moment of transformation not only economically but also socially. The establishments that belong to the non-state sector have taken their own initiative when it comes to animating their environment.” According to the report, there then arises “the question of how these entities are welcomed or not into the country’s cultural policy.”

It has not only to do with the time – ever greater – that people invest in consuming material of their choosing to the detriment of what’s shown on state television, but the social impact that the private spaces have on the formation of taste and musical and audio-visual distribution. In order to decrease that influence theater critic and researcher Jaime Gomez Triana urged that “the Government’s cultural policy be not only a policy for the Ministry of Culture’s institutions but that it be a cultural policy that regulates the way in which these offering are produced in other spaces.”

In interviews conducted on the street, several people referred to their experiences as consumers of the packet. The favorable opinions mentioned that an advantage of this kind of cultural consumption is that it gives better information about what is happening “in the international arena.” Reported among the factors leading to the increased alternative distribution of audio-visual content was the deterioration of the movie houses that domestically offer a poor substitute for public spaces.

The view that this compendium of audio-visual content is only “soap operas and reality shows” was challenged by several survey respondents who mentioned the didactic and instructive character of some materials like documentaries made by The Discovery Channel, as well as courses in make-up, gastronomy and handicrafts that are also included in the so-called combo.

Fernando Rojas, Vice Minister of Culture, in an interview, criticized those who concoct and distribute the packet as being “people who act strictly on their own and have a network that distributes that material that is updated periodically and that is made at the margins of the institutions and regulations for self-employed work.” In the judgment of Rojas, “the packet is made to feed the illusion that people are choosing (…) in reality, in a certain sense, and I stress in a certain sense, that idea about choosing is an illusion.”

In spite of the dread that the cultural institutions demonstrate before the advance of these forms of self-directed consumption, Rojas thinks that “people who talk so much about the topic of the packet, the famous packet, the aforementioned packet, give it greater importance than I believe it really has.” For the Vice Minister, “to the extent to which we move forward to a greater penetration of the Internet, and we are going to move forward, we are certainly going to move forward ever more, people are going to choose directly on the web and not have to depend on an intermediary. The packet is going to have a limited life in my judgment.”

Fabio Fernandez, content and programming director for the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT), explained that among the great attractions of the packet is that “people can watch and listen to what they deem appropriate at the moment when they deem it appropriate.” The fact that “there is no direct relationship between the broadcast schedule times and the time a person decides to watch something” makes many choose this option that does not tie them to the screen on a determined broadcast schedule. To recover the viewers that national television has lost, the official bets on “offering ever more high quality products.”

Nevertheless, the formula for improving the official programming bill faces the difficulty of few resources for legally acquiring foreign content or advancing national production. Cuban television has underperformed in terms of quality, dynamism and thematic updates. An industry that was a pioneer in Latin America and the world has been suffering the fact that series and soap operas produced in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil captivate the public. The problem is rooted in issues that range from undercutting wages of actors and technical personnel to censorship that for decades caused bland, complacent scripts closer to sketches for a school morning assembly than to material to captivate and entertain.

Roberto Smith, president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) said that it should be “based on the legitimacy of personal taste (…) some like one thing and others like another and that is their personal right, to prefer something and reject the other.” But later he remarked “that taste is educated, and that education is a process that must begin from earliest infancy. Right now we are developing (…) the possibility of offering different alternatives of audio-visual education from infancy for youth and for adults.”

Faced with the evidence that the demonization of the packet has only increased its attraction, Rojas confessed that “the path before any phenomenon (…) that is not desirable, in the sense that it is not a carrier of solid human values, of convictions and humanist, supportive, socialist feelings; the reaction before something that does not seem to us to fit in that formative educational effort, the reaction cannot be to prohibit it. The reaction has to be to compete.”

But the packet has come first to that competition with the advantage of being customizable, free from censorship, adjustable to all tastes and considered by the majority of Cubans as something outside of state control.

Translated by MLK

The branch of the Ministry of Education charged with exporting academic services includes a team of 26 specialists occupied with carrying out the process for selecting the teachers who will offer services abroad.

There are many educators who aspire to carry out one of these missions, now lacking the epic and caring character of other times and marked today by the economic needs of the country and the hardships that these professionals experience. In spite of receiving a fraction of what the State raises in payment for their services, many of them consider the missions in other countries an opportunity to improve economically and acquire consumer goods.

Public Health personnel have been doing something similar and, according to unofficial figures, close to 50,000 people from that sector currently lend service abroad. They are mainly in Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, also in Argentina, Ecuador, Haiti, Guatemala, Panama and many other countries.

Translated by MLK