Photo: Silvia Corbelle
The Congress of the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC) ended a few days ago. At its closing ceremony, a man uttered the final words. But this wasn’t the only, nor the last, mistake of an antiquated organization marked by ideology.
After listening to the sessions in the Palace of Conventions, I affirm my decision not to be “federated.” Why?
Here are my reasons:
I reject the creation of an “eternal president” in the figure of Vilma Espín, Raúl Castro’s deceased wife, because this whole display of perpetuity in a position seems to me, at the very least, ridiculous.
I don’t want to be part of an organization whose flag shows a uniformed individual. I am not a soldier, I don’t see myself represented in a gun-carrying militia member.
I don’t believe that a woman’s organization should have as its principles fidelity to an ideology, a party and a man.
I suspect that a part of the four million women who make up the FMC have entered its rank purely automatically, as a mandatory process that takes place when you turn fourteen.
I distrust a federation that benefits from the lack of freedom of association which prevents Cuban from creating other organizations.
I’m aware of the double standards of the FMC, which says it rejects violence against women but which has never condemned the acts of repudiation against the Ladies in White.
I consider inefficient the work of an organization that, in its 50 years of existence, hasn’t managed to place women in the positions of power where the decisions that affect the country are really made.
I’m tired of women being reduced, in these female congresses, to beings concerned with pots and pans, soldiers who are willing to offer up their children as cannon fodder or production parts… selfless, beautiful and obedient.
I am a woman of the 21st century, I carry my ovaries not with victimhood but with pride, and I can’t be a member of an organization that transmits the directives of power to women.
Of course, when it is legal to associate according to one’s beliefs, affinities, genders and many other points of similitude, I will be there with my progesterone and my demands for a true female federation.
A few weeks ago I was “driven” to Calixto García General Hospital by a doctor friend who, like the Orisha deity Elegguá, opened doors for me. The purpose of my visit was to receive medical attention. I have no complaints about the professionalism of the medical staff who, in spite of the difficulties and shortages with which they must deal, work hard to provide a good service to their patients, whom they treat with kindness and concern. This experience allowed me to see first-hand the current state of the above-mentioned hospital, which for some years now has been subjected to a prolonged series of unending repairs after decades of neglect.
Construction activity is evident everywhere: dilapidated medical wings, demolitions in-progress, building materials stored outdoors and inside the hospital, mechanical equipment being moved, construction workers going back and forth without doing anything, people shouting and other signs of activity. In the few areas that have been completed, one can see details such as sloppy plaster work on the walls and crooked tiles on the floors, signs that the repairs will not last long.
I do not know who came up with the brilliant idea of putting the various medical departments’ outpatient clinics in the basements of their respective wards, both the ruined and the repaired. Access to these clinics is either along broken sidewalks and pathways, or through steep, narrow exterior stairs. There are no ramps provided for the physically handicapped so wheelchairs cannot be used, forcing families of the patients to cart them up and down in a dangerous and embarrassing display.
The clinics’ waiting rooms, which are without air-conditioning or good ventilation, are veritable saunas, making them unbearable for the patients seeking treatment. It would be better to not even mention the older buildings, which suffer from roof leaks, flooded floors, peeling walls and broken doors. Dirt and decay abound and seem be be everywhere in the health service’s facilities. It is hard to imagine how services can continue to be offered in such wretched and unsanitary conditions.
Physicians lack even the most basic clinical tools such as light panels to view X-rays and computers to read test results. They often have no more than a table, two chairs and, at best, a stretcher, all in a state of deterioration.
One can observe a shortage of specialists to treat patients, which causes significant backlogs and wasted time for the clinics’ medical and nursing staffs, who carry on long conversations about problems in their personal lives, often using inappropriate language, while patients wait to be treated.
Those who manage to get into the waiting rooms quickly become bored reading the extensive propaganda slogans lining the walls, which remind them of the fallacy that “medical care is provided free at the expense of the State.” (In reality it is provided at the expense of its citizens.) They seem like commands, ordering everyone to accept it all with resignation. Meanwhile, others mill around outside, sitting on the sidewalks, fences and even the grass while awaiting their turns.
If there is an operation planned, then the process stretches out interminably. First there are various tests and analyses to be performed. Waiting for test results drags it out further. Then there is the wait to be admitted to the hospital, which can take months and often ends in bitter disappointment if tests have to be repeated because they are out of date.
Operating rooms show signs of an advanced state of decay. In recently renovated wings where post-operative patients are held, there is an obvious absence of a responsible administration as evidenced by a shortage of sanitary fixtures. Only one out three sinks is operable and showers lack their necessary hardware.
The situation is no better when it comes to janitorial services, which are performed by unqualified staff, who simply spread the dirt around by trying to clean an entire wing with one bucket of water. Even then, everything is done reluctantly, accompanied by constant complaining.
It should also be noted that those working in food service, which in general is badly prepared, do so in their street clothes, without using gowns, masks, hair coverings or gloves. During the day food vendors proliferate throughout the hallways, selling sandwiches, peanuts, coffee, chocolates, cookies and other items in clear violation of the regulations that should govern a health facility.
It seems that, in spite of all the construction activity and resources invested, there are still some blemishes in Calixto. Despite good medical care, in the end its hospital services leave that patients with bad memories. They are forced to put up with them because, unlike foreigners and VIP patients, they do not to have access to the specialized centers which are featured in news reports and shown to visitors who still believe in the myth of “Cuban medical prowess.”
I recently attended an academic event at the Felix Varela Chair. Lay Space magazine opened the doors of the old San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary for the public to freely participate in an exchange of ideas about the reforms undertaken by the Cuban government. I would have had a lot to say about the high scientific level with which they were addressing the problems discussed there, but for now I prefer to focus on a detail brought to light by a question posed by my colleague Iván García.
How is the “Loyal Opposition” defined? Loyal to whom, inquired the independent journalist. According to the panelist Arturo López-Levy, this concept finds its antonym in apostasy.
Although I collect them, I hate to fall into the facile habit of quoting dictionaries, but I have no choice but to refer to the first meaning of the term “apostasy” which is “the repudiation of Christ by those who have been baptized.” In a wider sense it’s appropriate to use it for a very wide range of meanings from resignation to treason. The trouble with synonyms is that the equivalence of meaning between the two depends on the context.
When the academic López-Levy attributes the adjective “loyal” to a certain kind of opposition and uses “apostasy” to refer to those who place themselves at the polar opposite of the opposition milieu, he is crossing a frontier in which those belonging to one or the other group end up identifying the loyal as traitors and the apostates as loyal… and vice versa.
The blame for this confusion lies not with semantics, but with history.
When opponents from exile or from the island support the blockade-embargo, including the Helms-Burton Act; when they receive financing from the “black beast” which is the Cuban American Foundation, or talk with that arch demon Carlos Alberto Montaner, they automatically fall into the list of on apostates from the loyal opposition.
The same can happen to anyone using the microphones of Radio Martí, visits the United States Interests Section in Cuba (SINA), or meets with some representative of the U.S. government, the only one in the world that has a legally structured program to overthrow the government of Cuba. They are betraying the Fatherland! And are denounced by the loyal opposition.
What Fatherland? The other side responds. The one that finds Socialist Revolution synonymous with the Communist Party and with the person of Fidel Castro himself? Will it perhaps be this fatherland that those on the other list claim to be loyal to? Does being a member of the loyal opposition mean belonging to a group of people who are not insulted or beaten by “the outraged people,” people who have never experienced a repudiation rally, who have always been able to enter and leave the country, and even give speeches at foreign universities?
People who have probably never been fired from their jobs, nor expelled from their classrooms, nor even been visited by the “friendly compañeros from State Security’s Section 21″? The ones who can count on an untouchable space and aspire to one day be designated as legitimate interlocutors from the powers-that-be?
Admission to this fiesta bears a high price, especially having the prudence that, once accepted, to never bother the landlord by warning him that out there are others dissatisfied, others with many issues to bring, claims, demands. Political correctness is to ignore this populace that fails to shed the nauseating odor of the dungeons and, better yet, from the prestige conferred by the condition of academic blamelessness, to accuse them of apostasy.
A socialist revolution is not a religious faith, “Revolution and Religion don’t rhyme,” the poet Herberto Padilla warned us. The first is the work of men, the second — I’ve been given to understand — has a divine origin. Those who deny their faith don’t fear going to hell, because they no longer believe in its existence. Those who disagree with ideological convictions that once embraces are simply exercising a civil and intellectual right that in my well-thumbed dictionaries is defined as to rectify. What can we say about those who never believed and from the start chose a different path.
I’m very familiar with another opposition that exercises a loyalty that has nothing to do with the submission of pets. Loyalty to the most pressing desires of their people, loyalty to justice and freedom.
Convicts say that when they get a pass for almost 72 hours every 10 days, their worries increase. They experience a major agony in the sense of feeling useless before the economic situation of their families. The little money they earn as slaves of the Regime that keeps them captive barely lets them satisfy the shortages that exist at home. They find their families without food, the children without shoes to go to school, and the electrical appliances broken, among other calamities.
In the first hours at home, already they have exhausted their savings, seeing themselves obligated to loan or offend, with the goal that at the end of their days on pass, their families remain with the minimum of needs guaranteed.
Once back in their beds in prison, they recognize that it’s preferable to be a prisoner, since they suffer less when they don’t have to confront the everyday reality and the constant pain of not knowing how to find a solution, how to stay on top of the poverty, without the familiar temptation of breaking the law.
“At least while we’re in prison we’re not suffering. We don’t see how poor our kids are,” they assert. “And we avoid crime, because we also know that it’s the only possible way to solve things,” says a convict, with whom the rest agree, and he affirms that “it’s preferable to be a prisoner, eat the acid, dirty rice with picadillo, to be beaten and put in a cell each time you feel like venting, than to see your loved ones looking at you like sparrows with open beaks, waiting for us to do a magic act and get some food to fall into them,” he says, and he keeps silent for a bit.
“Outside things have gotten worse. We feel fear when we leave because surely we’ll commit some misdeed,” someone affirms from the door, “and the hard part is to start another more severe sentence,” adds another. “We will never have the chance to be those ’citizens’ they want us to be, because society and the laws forget that we don’t have the least possible chance of surviving without stealing, and if we don’t, we would die of hunger.”
HAVANA, Cuba.-The crucial dispute in which the geopolitical, economic, and military interests of major world powers are played is the most relevant one in escalating individual conflicts that have been taking place in other regions–the Syrian and Venezuelan crises are two examples–perhaps of lesser effects globally, but where hegemonic interests also have some influence. Thus, in numerous media, alarms have gone off heralding the Cold War, an old ghost which many believed had been banished.
Review Notes
The term “Cold War ” was coined during the late 1940s to define tensions of multiple natures (economic, political and ideological, military, scientific, technological, etc.), that characterized the relations between the communist bloc, under the aegis of the dominant USSR, and the capitalist, led by the U.S., after the end of World War II.
The ongoing power struggle between the two axes to achieve global hegemony constituted a permanent threat to world stability and peace, branding many of the major events of the second half of the twentieth century up to the time of the elimination of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the disappearance of the Soviet Union (1991).
The US bloc and its allies had won the game; however, tensions between East and West have never really been overcome. Currently, competing interests go beyond the ideological aspect that defined that almost 50-year span, but the global threat of conflicts between the powers remains intact.
[WELCOME TO CUBA HONORED RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, VLADIMIR PUTIN] Havana street sign, 2000Meanwhile, those countries under the influence of the super powers continue as test sites in the show of force of world power centers, and also as blackmail scenarios of the worst of dangers, just as the 1962 Russian nuclear threat against the U.S. from the Cuban mainland. No wonder, then, that the mere mention of the Cold War can be a source of apprehension to many Cubans, especially now, when there are surges of the unmistakable signs of intentions of using our region, and in particular, our country, as platform for Russian imperialist expansion in this hemisphere, in full defiance of the U.S.
Good and Evil Empires?
At first glance, it might seem that the Russian intervention in the Crimea, the Russian arms sales to Venezuela, and the presence of a Russian spy ship in Havana, are unconnected events. However, declarations by the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, about their intentions to open military bases in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba (in the latter case these would “reopen”), information which was not published by the Cuban official media, show that Mr. Putin, seasoned in intrigue and sordid affairs since his days in the KGB, is ready to step up the tone, moving his historical adversary’s line of dispute in Latin America which, despite everything, remains an American sphere of influence.
Meanwhile, “leftist” governments in this region are sounding the alarm against “Yankee Imperialism”, but at the same time they meld alliances with the Russian Empire, whose importance might not be wise to underestimate, despite its post-Soviet era of decline, while others remain indifferent to these events.
Thus, Russia, with its culture and history completely unrelated to ours, and with a lack of traces in our national emotional memory, today has the enthusiastic connivance of the same old Cuban conspirators and their regional disciples, and the acquiescent silence of our Latin American brothers/step-brothers.
Obama and Putin, Mexico 2012
For Cubans, such a plot could not be taking place at a worse time, when the military power cast holds the monopoly of the economy, and the gerontocracy has been consolidating its international political legitimacy–though not its prestige–thanks to the collusion of governments that met in late January at that aberration called CELAC, and of other international organizations that decided to give the Havana regime a boost, thereby increasing the defenselessness of Cubans against the power’s game for political gains.
For now, some Russian entrepreneurs have begun to invest in sectors of economic interest on the Island, such as tourism, and reportedly also in the Special Development Zone in Mariel, indicating that Cuba remains a point of strategic interest for “the Northern Bear”, the only empire that, at a time when it was Cuba’s “ally”, at the goriest time of the Cold War, placed us in the epicenter of what had the potential to become a global conflagration which, in a matter of minutes, could have wiped us from the face of the earth.
It is terrifying to remember that there were Cubans back then, to whom the government denied the existence of those dangerous Russian artifacts on Cuban soil, who, immediately and massively, got up “in arms against the US imperialist threat”. Such a sad paradox, the enemy was, and continues to be, at home.
More than 50 years later, the scenario is different but some facts are repeated, creating–due to lack of information–the most diverse speculations. The same irresponsible government retakes up the affair with its former allies, perhaps with the collateral intention of indirectly pressuring for the repeal of the U.S. embargo, among other possible plans. Concerns abound, because, if the first part of that forced marriage was bad, we can bet that a second part could even be worse.
According to a spokesman for ETECSA, the only telecoms company in Cuba, they are going to start marketing internet in peoples’ homes, with ADSL included, from the first half of September.
We don’t yet know what the price of the installation will be. What has come to light in a document which we have seen are the different tariffs for national and international internet surfing.
The document, put out by Ibis Díaz Silva, commercial executive of ETECSA’s Oficina de Pequeños y Medianos Usuarios (Office of Small and Medium Users ), indicates that the 20 hour internet package will cost 10 convertible pesos a month, 50 hours 15 cuc (Cuban convertible currency), 100 hours 30 cuc, 180 hours 50 cuc, and 220 hours 60 cuc. There will be a 90 hour package, usable between 8 pm and 7 am which will be offered at 20 cuc. They will sell additional hours at 30 convertible pesos.
Additionally, starting from September, they will market the local intranet network at a lower price, where you can find official media. The connection speed will be between 2 and 4 megabytes.
Gradually, Raúl Castro’s government has taken some steps forward to provide internet access for Cubans. On 4th June 2013, ETECSA opened 116 navigation rooms in 15 provinces of the country.
Up to this month, according the ETECSA spokesman, about 600,000 customers have connected to the network. Last February 25th, the Gaceta Oficial de la República (Official Gazette of the Republic) announced new cellphone internet tariffs. And from 2013, ETECSA workmen have been busy putting in place wireless networks in different parts of Havana.
The prices of these new services have generated a lot of controversy. The point is that the Cuban man in the street, with an average salary of $20 a month, can’t afford the luxury of connecting to the internet while he has no chicken, fish or meat in his pantry.
One way or another, nearly everybody is complaining. Whether they are unknown citizens, like the private shoemaker Alfonso Ayala, who has never surfed the net, or official journalists like Elaine Díaz or Alejandro Rodríguez, who have criticised the excessive prices in their blogs.
“One hour at 4.50 cuc (Cuban convertible currency) is equivalent to 112 Cuban pesos. Repairing shoes, I make between 80 and 100 Cuban pesos a day. All my income is for buying food and supporting my wife and kids. As far as I can see the internet continues to be out of my reach,” says Ayala.
As far as the regime is concerned, the internet is an invention of the US special services with the aim of colonising information and culture. Only the inescapable necessity of not continually putting the brakes on Cuban professional development has forced the government to authorise access to the internet.
It all started in 1998, when the island was connected up, via satellite, more slowly and with a narrower band than a public university in New York. The official press blamed the technological backwardness on the trade embargo imposed by Washington, which forbids connection to the underwater cables owned by US companies, which surround the green Cayman Islands. And we know that Cuba and the USA are continuing with the Cold War. And truth is the first casualty of any war.
According to the ETECSA spokesman, in 2010, some gringo companies located in Florida were authorised by the Obama government to negotiate with Cuba to recommission an old unused underwater cable.
“The project was viable. It cost $18m with a bandwidth right for our requirements. But the government preferred to bet on the so-called digital self-government and designed a project jointly with Venezuela called ALBA1, stated the source.
At a cost of $70m, the submerged cable connected the twin cities of La Guiara and Siboney in the east, in Santiago de Cuba. There is a spur off it which goes off to Kingston, Jamaica.
There is a structure of corruption around the cable in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Communications and Information, which led to the desertion of a high-up manager of ETECSA in Panama in 2012.
There was no news about ALBA1 until 4 June 2013, following the government decision to open new navigation rooms. There is no doubt that the famous cable clearly improved the connection speed.
Before that, in a five-star hotel like the Saratoga, where Beyoncé stayed last year with her husband JayZ, the connection speed was slow and expensive. At best it didn’t get past 100Kb. And 2 hours of internet cost a bit over $15.
From September 2014 on, things are going to change, according to specialists I have spoken to. It could be that not many Cubans will be enthusiastic about the new provision, on account of its irrational pricing. But the ETECSA functionary referred to is optimistic and considers that the opening up of cyberspace will bring more positives than negatives.
Iván García
Photo: A Cuban surfs the net in one of the cyber cafes opened by ETECSA all over the island in June 2013. Taken by El Universal.
Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, secretary general of the workers. Photo from http://www.trabajadores.cu
HAVANA, Cuba. The 20th Congress of the ruling Cuba Workers Central (CTC) has just concluded its sessions. Even though authorities proclaimed that this had been a democratic meeting, what is true of every workplace discussion of the main documents is that very few workers expected anything good from the event. I could verify the foregoing a day after the conclusion in conversations held with several people.
Alina is a worker in a dressmaking shop of the Ministry of Industries. She told me that she did not bother to read newspapers or watch television news during the days that the Congress was in session. Overall, it was not going to answer her demand and that of the rest of her companions: a salary increase.
Alina told me that in her workshop three systems of payment have been applied, and none of them has served any purpose. They have not been able to pay the wage stimulus because the company to which the workshop is subordinate has breached the indicators that they call macroeconomics, and no worker understands where they come from.
The day that they gave the pre-Congress meeting in her workshop, her companions suggested that, since they never paid the stimulus, at least they could increase the base salary. But the municipal CTC official said that was impossible until the country’s labor production and productivity increased. “And of course I wasn’t about to listen to the same story now in the 20th Congress,” concluded Alina.
Miguel Angel is a Bachelor in Economics. He does not much like that kind of slogan that the government brandishes in the context of modernizing the economic model, in the sense that planning prevails over the market. What he likes least is that the CTC is not original and merely repeats what the country’s rulers say.
Like many, he was not aware of what happened in the chief worker meeting. He did not need to be. Some days before, Mr. Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, who presided over the Organizing Commission for the 20th Congress, confirmed that the unions supported the economic strategy that planning put in the foreground. “Well,” says Miguel Angel, “I oppose planning in Cuba. The government planners here, besides being inefficient in their work, want to stick their noses into everything, even in what must be produced and sold in a simple farmer’s market.”
And on passing near one area where some months before everything was business due to the clothes that private workers were marketing and that today languishes in loneliness, I stumbled on Yoandri, a young man who had to turn in his license as a self-employed worker. He was one of the first to agree to belong to the unions sponsored by the CTC. Today, however, he assesses that decision as useless. “Bottom line, it was all for nothing. When they closed my clothing business, the union did nothing to defend me,” he confessed.
He also said that his case could serve as a lesson to many other self-employed workers who find themselves pressured by authorities to join the unions. “The government wants to unionize them in order to control them better, because here the union and the government are the same thing. The rest is baloney,” he concluded.
Ah, and the three knew beforehand that the fatso by the name of Brazilian — as they call Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento — was going to be elected secretary general of the CTC. That was decided previously.
Cuba has always been the last in line in terms of positive results compared to the rest of Latin America. By a wide margin we were the last ones to abolish slavery, and also the last to achieve decolonization from Spain.
After a half century of trying out a prosperous and honest republic, we had a “revolution” that immediately stopped being such in order to turn into the iron dictatorship that we currently suffer, exceeding half a century of totalitarianism.
After Fidel Castro’s arrival to power in 1959 began the tumultuous period for Latin American countries in that failed effort to export the revolutionary model. After the communist threat covered the rest of the continent like an ominous shadow, the answer, also negative, as a solution for moving away from Castro’s Carribean Stalinism was the establishment of more dictatorships that captured, tortured and assassinated anyone who opposed them.
After years of governing, those dictatorships were surrendering power because of social and international pressures.
We, as good Cubans, also will be the last to free ourselves of the “monarchical” regime of the Castro brothers.
Angel Santiesteban-Prats
Lawton prison settlement. March 2014.
For Amnesty International to declare Cuban dissident Angel Santiesteban a prisoner of conscience, please sign the petition here.
For many, the designation .cu is a way to identify the country on the internet. But for the most accomplished netizens it remains a place very little in demand.
The .cu indicates mistrust, ease of hacking, promotion of the reading of personal sites by third parties—little privacy. Anyway, there are no encrypted sites [https] to protect visitors.
Why does .cu even exist? For those who want to share with the DSE (Department of State Security). For that reason it has ceased to be a domain visited by Cuban dissidents. Except for rookies with only a few hours in front of a computer.
To summarize, I would use .cu, but only when accompanied by a good HTTPPSSSSSSSSSSSS …
“The newspaper was talking about you…” sings the voice of Joaquín Sabina, while I read the newspaper Granma. On the cover, as usual, there’s some event. A tribute to a figure from the past, a reminder, a phrase someone said forty or fifty years ago. All the pages have this rancid stink of journalism that doesn’t dare to address the present, that avoids the here and now.
The Cuban official press can’t reform itself because to do so would be committing suicide. To report on the national reality it would have to renounce its role as ideological propaganda. It’s not enough to change the design of its digital sites, add new signatures to its articles, or keep the readers’ letters complaining about bureaucrats and corruption. It must go further and shed its political commitments and take on the truth as its only obligation. But this… this we know it cannot do.
I expect more from the press that will emerge, or consolidate, than a “new official journalism.” But I am also aware that the work of reporting from civil society, precarious and illegal, has to improve. Information is not trench warfare and it is not a weapon. Events should not be reported from the point of view of what we want to have happened, but from what did happen.
For its part, thematic variety is not contrary to the defense of freedom and human rights. There are many ways of speaking, and of speaking beautifully. We must search, then, for ways of reporting that bring us closer to ordinary readers. Creativity, daring and diverse points of view help us to be better professionals of the press. Going down that path is worth it.
For my part, I’m taking the first steps. The countdown to the digital media I’ve been working on for four years has begun. A new professional challenge approaches, but I will not be alone; rather I will be accompanied by a team of talented people who want to do journalism with a capital J.
In the coming weeks this personal blog will be transformed—right in front of your eyes—into a media of the PRESS. Words of encouragement are welcome!
HAVANA, Cuba – I heard the story late, it happened a year ago. But the residents of Santa Fe, a coastal community to the west of Havana where about 50,000 people live, are afraid to say anything about Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, a “historic commander,” who is credited with numerous shootings at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.
At the entrance to Santa Fe, on 1st Street, is the residence of this member of the Politburo of the only legally existing party in Cuba. It is hidden there behind high walls that span more than two blocks, so that nothing can be seen from outside. It’s a Nazi-style bunker, but with access to the sea.
Between gritted teeth, very carefully, in case it might reach the ears of the Artemisa Spy as many call him, or one of this many bodyguards, I was told this story.
On a sunny afternoon in April 2013, several workers from the Communal, an organization that is responsible for cleaning and slashing of weeds in sidewalks and green areas of the city, was performing these tasks near Ramiro’s bunker when one of them inadvertently slashed a wire in the undergrowth with his machete.
The area of Ramiro Valdes’s bunker from Google Earth
They continued their work, but on seeing the soldiers pour out of the bunker like wasps, looking for the counterrevolutionary terrorist who had cut Ramiro’s cable, they stopped in surprise. They didn’t know what to say.
Within minutes they were all under arrest and at the trail three of those working outside the bunker were sentenced to five years in prison, because as the action had been accidental, it was impossible to know who had cut Ramiro’s cable.
Three humble men who live in poverty, in houses they made themselves with materials found in the streets.
I know one of them, Carlos Merino Martinez, who has been my gardener for six years, someone who rarely speaks, honest and of good character, who still wonders why he has to serve a sentence if he is innocent.
He says that on occasion he’s wanted to speak with Ramiro who, after all, although he is vice president of the Councils of State and Ministers, was a poor man like him, a shopkeeper according to what he’s heard, back in Artemisa near his bunker, and to tell him of the injustice committed against him and his two companions, but he fears he would just be stopped approaching such a mysterious house. He tells me he feels humiliated, although the prison sentence was converted into “prison without internment,” he has to sign in at the Police Station every month, as if he were a criminal.
Groundskeeper Carlos Merino Martinez. Photo by Tania Diaz
As a man who lives a quiet life, along with his wife, he doesn’t care that he’s forbidden to attend parties or to leave Santa Fe. In short, he has always gone home from work. He never made money for parties. But it saddens him that his companions, younger than he is, are facing this situation.
Time has passed but the story of the wire cut by the three unfortunate gardeners is still talked about. As we’ve lived half a century and backwardness and very little of internet cables, many of us wonder if the so-important cable Ramiro has hidden in the weeds along the sidewalk from his bunker was for electricity, telegraphy, or an underground or underwater telephone. Some even think it might be that very “fiber optic cable coming from Venezuela,” through which Ramiro instructs his Cuban agents there.
Cells, some for 15 inmates, others for three. Photo: EFE
It happened in 2005. The prisoners were killed while guards remained impassive. A witness recounts the events.
HAVANA, Cuba – A riot that caused several deaths and dozens of injuries occurred on April 5, 2005, at the the maximum security Havana prison, Combinado del Este. Yoslan Diaz Quinones, recently released from prison after serving more than ten years in the prison, witnessed these events and agreed to describe them for Cubanet’s readers.
“The riot began because the inmate José Antonio Pavón Bonilla, one of the leading members of the cult called ’Just as I Am’ was notified that he would be transferred to a prison in Villa Clara. He claimed he could not go to that place because he had several enemies there. Furthermore, also in that prison, years ago, José had organized a riot.
“His reasons were useless. They told him the decision was made and there would be no reversing it.Then, at the first opportunity, he called the jailer who had keys to several of the cell blocks. He managed to tie him up, get the keys off him, and started to let everyone out.
“There were about 200 prisoners in each block. The only cell that Bonilla didn’t open was that of Abnoli, the Bakun Kere. He is a dangerous murderer. Abnoli screamed obscenity and said if he didn’t open the bars he would kill him. Meanwhile, others who were with him asked him not to release the Devil. But one of them called Chiqui, grabbed the keys and let him out.
“From there everything changes. They said everyone went to the dining room with their mats and protested José’s transfer, but they also immediately started to protest against Lt. Col. Carlos Alberto Quintana, then head of the prison, and yelling things against Fidel and Raul Castro. continue reading
“There were a few that did not agree with the riot. They were told that if they did not cooperate they’d burn them up. And so it happened. They set fire to the mattresses and closed the doors of the dining room.
“José Antonio Pavón Bonilla did not want to push things to such extremes, and told Abnoli he had to open the doors because there were people burning and choking, but Abnoli said that he didn’t care because they weren’t his family. Then someone, I don’t know who, gave the order to collect all the knives,the shivs, and every kind of weapon they had.
“After this they decided to open the doors. But there was another order: those who were leading the riot had to put themselves at the front and mercilessly stab everyone who came out. Neither the authorities nor anyone tried to control that frenzy.
“After three hours the riot squad appeared, they said it was Raul Castro’s Command One, and using rubber bullets and other weapons they were able to stop it.”
According to the testimony of Yoslan Díaz Quiñones, there were five dead in the revolt and some 80 wounded, 29 of them seriously.
josefornaris@gmail.com
Editorial Note:
These images of prisoners in the Combinado del Este prison were taken by the EFE and AFP agencies during a visit allowed by the government in April 2013. The photo report, published ihere, said there is no overcrowding and fighting among inmates is rare.
The head of prison health, Kervin Morales, said that knife crime among prisoners is rare (“we almost never have emergencies”) and there are no HIV infections in prisons. However, he admitted that from time to time there are hunger strikes.
It is also said in the report that prisoners work in an area outside the double fence, where there is a workshop for crashed cars, whose parts are sold . In this work, EFE said, outside mechanics and inmates work together, earning the ‘results.’ Some get between 2,000 pesos and 3,000 Cuban pesos per month (83 to 125 U.S. dollars), three to five times the national average salary.
They saw the face of Combinado del Este that the govenment wants to show, and some of the media bought it.
In digital format and DVD media, it is alarming part of the population that says it is unaware of the siege of the dissidents.
HAVANA, Cuba – The documentary “Gusano” (Worm), produced by Estado de Sats, is being shared hand-to-hand on DVD and digitally and has generated many reactions among people who are not dissidents – at least openly – in the capital.
The documentary is about the acts of repudiation in Cuba and mainly what happened last December 10-11 outside the Estado de Sats (State of Sats) site, where an event was being held: the First International Meeting on the United Nations Human Rights Covenants. The video has been shared with dissimilar people across the capital regardless of their political persuasion.
The audiovisual shows how the residence of Antonio Rodiles, director of the independent project, is besieged in an act of repudiation organized by the government, where the Ministry of Education (children and adolescents) participates, along with the Ministry of Culture, the Young Communist Union, the National Revolutionary Police and agents from the Department of State Security, all with the aim of neutralizing the event. In the film we see Rodiles being beaten and the arrests of other participants in the independent meeting held by the Cuban dissidence.
“The documentary has been taken to the streets to denounce the government, and show abuses and violations of international rules committed, like using children for repressive acts,” said Ailer Gonzales, Rodiles’s wife and one of the organizers. In the street, Cubanet collected some opinions:
“I didn’t know that this happened in this country, I still don’t understand it,” said Erick Chirino, 24.
“The repression used to block this activity is typical of a dictatorship,” said Yordanis Barceló Silva, 36.
State of Sats is an independent project where artists and dissident thinkers come together on the island, and has been repeatedly besieged by the State Security (the political police). The headquarters is located in the town of Playa in the Cuban capital.
Marino Murillo argues that the conditions are not conducive . Afraid of private talent? Of losing control?
HAVANA, Cuba . – ComTur, an alternative project for the development of tourism, tried to start up within the law, to generate local and community development. But it has been stopped.
A source close to the project reported, “One of the members sent a letter to Minister Marino Murillo on 30 October 2012, to get approval. The minister responded with the bad news: ComTur’s legalization was not approved. According to this source, Murillo, “Noted the project, but said he still cannot authorize the formation of a private cooperative for tourist workers, because the conditions are not conducive.”
ComTur calls itself a Consulting Partnership project. It’s objective would provide advice to rural and urban communities. It would also offer its services to groups of self-employed, relative to their lodging and food offerings relative to tourist potential. They would also advise, relative to tourism, on natural and social-cultural resources in these areas.
This project was developed on the basis of the so-called “Guidelines for the economic and social policy of the party and the Revolution,” the road map of the “updating of the Cuban economic model.”
In the Guideline 264, page 33, Chapter IX, Tourism Policy, states, “To design and develop as part of the municipal initiative for the territories, attractive tourist offerings as a source of hard currency income: accommodation, food services, social, cultural and historical activities, horseback riding, rural tourism, observation of flora and fauna, among others.” continue reading
ComTur is composed of professionals and academics who have treasured long experience and results in the management of community and tourist plans in Cuba and abroad. They are seeking to channel all their knowledge in ways that is beneficial for the country, and at that same time allows them to earn a fair return for their professional services.
The specialists began their consulting work in the city of Santa Isabel de las Lajas, in Cienfuegos province, for the purpose of enabling festivals in memory of Benny More there. Another place where the work of ComTur could be useful is in the capital community of Regla. “They should pay attention, it’s an iconographic place of traditional popular culture, the cradle of the Regla Guaracheros. This town is the strategic axis for the promotion of international tourism and is in the area of the future development program of Havana Bay.”
The response of the “Reform Czar,” is further evidence of the chronic ineptitude of those who pull the strings of the system, and its sick fear of creating legal spaces for private talent.
Cubanet, 13 March 2014, Polina Shvietsova Martinez
Two upsetting phenomena have occurred in the last few weeks: some products have disappeared from the market stalls, both those selling in Cuban pesos and those selling in hard currency, and prices overall have gone up. Cleaning products on sale for Cuban pesos don’t exist or are scarce, and personal hygiene products are even available in hard currency. In the farmers markets a pound of onions, lemons, or a small cabbage cost fifteen Cuban pesos or more.
It seems that the announced upcoming monetary unification and the new mechanisms of established trade, plus the reduced production, have been the principal causes.
In our commerce, supply and demand are unresolved issues: they seem to be locked in due to many years of absence. A product costs the same from the time it arrives at the market until it goes bad, and discounts don’t exist, while the ordinary citizen finds his pension or wages are less every day, able to stretch to less and less, without any real prospects of an increase. He finds himself between a rock and a hard spot, hoping some family member “out there” will help him out by sending some money or that there will be a miracle, at a time when these seem ever more rare.
The discomfort this creates is palpable in the street, and there are few who don’t express it: you just have to listen to what people say at the bus stops and on the buses, in the stores, and wherever two or more people get together. In these conversations the authorities don’t come out very well. For now, it is only this, but no one can be sure that this will always be the case and that tomorrow, those who today only talk, might not begin to act. Everything is possible: it just depends on how many holes are left for tightening our belts.
![[WELCOME TO CUBA HONORED RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, VLADIMIR PUTIN] Havana street sign, 2000](https://translatingcuba.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Bienvenida_a_Cuba_de_Vladimir_Putin-año-2000.jpg)
