Category: Regina Coyula

There are medications that do not require a prescription, among which are the “artisanal” and “green” medications for a cough or such like, but they are not always there when you need them. Others are dispensed by prescription and controlled by the “Tarjetón” – your ration card for medications.

The Tarjetón is a piece of cardboard that each patient receives, where medications and other health supplements whose monthly sales are regulated are recorded. The doctor gives you a certificate valid for one year, stamped with her seal with her name and both surnames and her practice registration number. Despite these unique data for each physician, there is still one unavoidable step missing, the seal of the healthcare institution. After standing in line (there is almost always a line), the “stamp issuer,” who is not a doctors nor has a list, nor writes on a computer, nor makes notes on paper, stamps the seal and continues to the next. With this paper, in the pharmacy nearest to your home among the 2,141 in the country, you get in line, deliver the certificate, show your identity card, register, and receive the Tarjetón.

Despite such rigor, it may be at the time of purchase, that the medications have run out, have arrived incomplete, or are “missing.” For insulin-dependent diabetics the Tarjetón controls disposable syringes. It says right on the packaging “sterile insulin syringe for single use,” but the patient only receives between two and five syringes a month. If you complain, the clerk peevishly tells you that this disposable “isn’t really” and you can reuse it and even boil it and nothing will happen.

When the medication on your Tarjetón is “missing,” which is not uncommon (data in the press from last year shows that this is the case, on average, for 40 medications a week), you have to see a doctor for a substitute. If the medication only needs a prescription it is simpler; if it needs the Tarjetón the process starts again, even if it’s a temporary certificate.

But there are items that have no substitute, such as colostomy bags. In that case, the pharmacy employee shakes his head sorrowfully, and advises you to solve the problem immediately by talking with the doctor at your hospital, but to look for a safe way, while accompanying the counsel with a wave of the hand in the air which alludes to very far distances, because the supply of the bags is usually very unstable.

Regardless if the difficulties are their own or others, if they have it or not, the purchase cannot be made retroactively and experience dictates that one should not leave it to the last days of the month because things run out. This largely explains the existence of an active black market.

To locate a drug that is not in your pharmacy assures hatred of the line. The employee is obliged to locate it, and the phone used for this is delayed because it is busy on the other end, or they don’t answer, or they don’t have it either. If the search is crowned with success, they will give you a paper (yes, it’s the Tarjetón), which reserves the medication for you, but not for 8 hours, nor for 16 or 24 hours, but only up to midnight of the same day.

If a lifelong treatment combines medications on the Tarjetón with other prescriptions, the patient is required to regularly go to their neighborhood doctor to wait for the prescription that completes their treatment. The staff shrug their shoulders and raise their eyebrows when asked why these drugs are not included on the Tarjetón.

I have left for dessert the issue of the sanitary pads received by women between ages 14 and 55. Outside this range women must document early menarche or late menopause. Fertile women must bring, in addition to their ID card, the ration book for food where their receipt of these items is marked; the book will show an item called a “torpedo,” a form that registers the monthly packet of ten sanitary pads, responsible for one of the most painful events that must be coped with.

Do not despair. There is always the appeal in extremis to spending Cuban convertible pesos [known as CUCs, each one worth about a dollar or one-twentieth of the average monthly wage] in clean, bright and air-conditioned hard currency-pharmacies, where there is no queuing or prescription required.

The irony is that while “.nu” generates enormous profits, the inhabitants of Niue who want to connect from home and not from the only internet café are obliged to pay for installation and service.

So I find another curiosity: the second most used internet extension after “.com” corresponds to another little place in the corner of the Pacific, also unnoticed, a group of islets of roughly four square miles. Tokelau is the name of this place whose domain “.tk” hatched in 2009 and was free, and today it is the virtual home of hundreds of thousands of sites of dubious probity.

The way in which the territorial domains of each country (ccTLD, which stands for: country-code-top-level-domain) are managed is very different. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has left the who and how to the discretion of each country. Many countries have privatized it either in the hands of institutions or companies created for that purpose, while in others it is done by an entity attached to a stage agency.

The two ways of operating ccTLDs have advantages and disadvantaged. Deregulating the extensions tips the balance toward the more profitable companies to the detriment of the agencies, NGOs and social and cultural institutions. Decreasing the influence of governments, can weigh heavily on the sovereignty of countries with fragile economies or small and young countries.

As a counterpart, state-regulation administration tends to protect social and cultural interests, a successful management style that can lead to gains that positively impact national life. It can also happen that the process for buying a ccTLD are restrictive or discriminatory, sheltering under deliberately vague rules to be applied at their discretion, as is the case with Cuba’s “.cu”.

In Latin America, Argentina is the only country that offers a site for free; hence the millions of sites with the extension “.ar”. This gratuity is about to change because a way to collect payments is being studied. In Chile and Nicaragua domains are administered through public universities. In Guatemala it is also done through a university but in that case a private one.

State regulation occurs in Venezuela through the National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel), and in Cuba through the Information Technologies and Advanced Telematic Services Company (CITMATEL).

Colombia, and without going into details about its antecedents, is a reflection of a similar debate ongoing in many countries. A private company owns its ccTLD and they believe that the fact that 89% of the owners of a “.co” site are foreigners living outside the country, far from violating national identity, internationalizes Colombia and brings its brand to the entire world. What underlies these debates is that the market is imposed on cultural values and little can be done in the defense of an intangible patrimony.

But ultimately, who governs the Internet? Any observant newcomer claims that the United States governs it. On its territory are the institutions and the majority of the servers intended to organize what would otherwise be chaos.

The now well-known ICANN assigns domain names (DNS) to IP addresses, has a contract with the government and is located in California. Very influential internet companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are also American. By September there will be news of a change; simply that ICANN will be independent of the United States Department of Commerce.

In this asymmetric influence are counterpoised the interest of other parties involved and also of the internet. International organizations such as those dealing with trade (the ITO), intellectual property and the International Communications Union have been involved in conjunction with ICANN. Virtual space modifies the notion of sovereignty, with added risks to equality and diversity; so the term governance has gained importance in the design of policies, where governments, civil society, business, academic and technical innovators come together.

In the same way that innovative technicians have placed in our hands the protocol that ensures open access to the internet from any type of device, it behooves governance to establish policies, even if they are not binding, to guarantee freedom of expression and information, full access and limits on control.

There are generalities that are inherent in the concept itself. In the case of the concept of revolution, it involves a drastic change within a historic concept to break with a state of things that is generally unjust. Although it is a collective project, revolutions don’t always enjoy massive support; it is not until it is resolved that the great majority of citizens are included.

That said, from the official positions of the Cuban government they are still talking about the Revolution that overthrew the Batista tyranny and initiated profound changes in Cuba as a continuing event. This group believes itself still within the revolutionary morass, but can a country live permanently in a revolution?

One immediate consequence of a social revolution is chaos; everything is changing, and after a nation experiences a revolutionary process it needs stability to return to the path of progress, a natural aspiration of society and of the individual.

The 1959 Revolution became a government many years ago and its young leaders are, today, old men who in their long time in power ensured mechanisms for the control of the country. It could be nostalgia for not having been there or it could be comfort with the idea of having made mistakes and implemented bad policies, all justified as an appropriate effect of the revolutionary moment.

It is here that democracy intervenes. Whatever kind it is, it must characterize itself because popular decisions are effective; directly or through the leaders elected through voting. And also through debate. One can’t insist on continuing to wear children’s clothes when one is an adult. Norberto Bobbio’s concept is always widely accepted: without recognized and protected human rights there cannot be a real democracy, and when we are citizens of the world, and not of one state, we are closer to peace.

We do not live in a democratic country, however much they want to minimize the lack of freedoms and blame it on the “blockade,” the “imperialist threat” and novelties such as “opinion surveys” or “media wars.” Because democracy is an umbrella that should also protect minorities of every kind.

We can see vestiges of Marxism-Leninism in this stumbling march toward capitalism without democracy, we see in the free state version of the idea enclosed in this disturbing paragraph of a letter from Engels to August Bebel, regarding power and those who oppose it: “So long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.”

Where are the rights of minorities? How do we know if they are real minorities? So far, certainly, the public support for the government has been a matter of trust, but the suspicion showed by the government when asked for transparency is striking.

From the polemics that are shared among websites and from closed-door meetings to emails and the chorus of the interested, and from there to the classic rumor on the street, it is clear that there is an imperative to widen the debate. Patriotism is not a state monopoly nor is it reflected only in talking about history and honoring symbols, much less in the cult of personality, which by the way, this year promises North Korean dimensions.

One of the ideas that is addressed in this debate is the danger posed by “non-revolutionary transitions in the name of democracy,” but we know that this is a concern of the hardline defenders of that model that they stubbornly insist on calling socialist; ‘they’ being those who consider themselves anti-imperialists, those who “won’t budge an inch,” and who sleep peacefully without looking for other culprits for the collapse that surrounds them on all sides.

My concern as a citizen is not having democracy in the name of the Revolution.

The building remained dark for several days and the residents organized to complain. The Electric Company blamed the Havana Water Company, which was able to prove its innocence, so the Electric Company was obliged to replace—“when there is availability”—the burned out appliances and to extend new wiring to the meters.

From the meters onward, that is to every apartment, is being litigated, so the majority of the residents, watching the days tick by without power, decided to resolve it themselves and to pay the Electric Company workers under the counter to connect their homes. With the wiring outside, almost all the residents have had makeshift electrical service for months now. But there are stubborn residents, or those who don’t have the 100 CUC (roughly $100 US) that it would cost to pay the electrical workers, and with faith in the power of justice, they have decided to take their case through institutional channels.

Those who have now lacked electricity for six months are finding the institutions unresponsive. The delegate to the People’s Power showed up on the day of the accident, but is surely engaged in the many other problems of her constituency. There was silence in response to letters to the Municipal and Provincial People’s Power. Silence in response to the section for complaint letters at the newspapers Juventud Rebel and Granma. Silence in response to a letter to the similar section at the Havana Channel. And silence in response to letters to the Electric Company. All this correspondence has been the victim of these residents’ “darkness syndrome,” and they haven’t received even an acknowledgement of receipt.

Only the Prosecutor took the time to rule that the residents are right and that the Electric Company is responsible, but this has not resulted in any change for those affected.

And in an event that is not without irony, the electric bills, which should show a “zero” for electrical usage, have arrived with an “approximate use” calculation, which after the accident caused by the Company last November is applied to the residents who have connected themselves to the electricity. Sparking new trips to the Basic Electricity Office in Old Havana to explain to them what they should obviously be very aware of.

One of the residents rests his hopes on managing to get an interview with the Minister of Basic Industry, which controls the Electric Company. His effort began through a friend who has a friend who is a friend of the minister, but after waiting three months for this improbable event, he went to the ministry in person and asked for an interview. He was assured that even though it is delayed, the minister deals with cases like his, so he feels optimistic that the blackout he is suffering will be resolved.

After learning about this event, we can make some inferences that go beyond who is responsible and what the deadlines for resolution are:

• Most of the neighbors have no confidence in the institutions and decide to resolve the problem on their own
• The pathetic complaint mechanisms available to citizens do not work
• The capacity of some to resign themselves to such things is worthy of a study that could explain certain social behaviors, well beyond those related to a simple outage

of a worldwide holocaust in October of 1962.”

I will focus on the analysis of the overblown letter of 26 October 1962 that Fidel Castro delivered to the Soviet embassy to get it to the hands of Nikita Khrushchev; but not on what everyone usually comments on, that the USSR should never allow the United States to take the lead and set off the first nuclear strike.

What interests me is what it says a little later: …if the United States should “manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba — a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law — then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”

If anything defines these high-level messages it is the use of very precise terms to leave no doubt about the idea to be expressed. Without any errors in translation, it speaks of an invasion and not of an attack on Cuba, it being understood that this would be a conventional invasion with the landing of troops and air support. In the face of such action, it asks the Soviet leadership that its response “eliminate such danger forever.”

It does not mention eliminating the Pentagon; it does not mention eliminating the Capitol, the White House, the intercontinental ballistic missile silos closest to Cuba, it does not even mention another target previously agreed to by the parties, no.

Those words must have produced stupor in the Soviet hierarchy. While the Russians were already negotiating with the US government, the leadership of the Cuban Revolution was willing to immolate its own people if, with that, Yankee imperialism would disappear from the face of the earth.

In Fidel Castro’s words, the consideration does not appear that a military invasion by the United States would have received immediate condemnation from the international community, given that it is a small island whose Revolution enjoyed enormous sympathy among the global intelligentsia and opinion leaders. The Cold War and the pro-American blockade were not enough to observe such a scenario impassively. Nor should the diplomatic route be contemplated as a solution to the crisis, as is laid out at the end of the paragraph: “However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”

Probably, Khrushchev had a profound effect on the psychology of the Cuban leader when he made the offer to place the R-12s and other strategic weapons on our territory. While Fidel Castro was looking for an open and defiant installation, the Soviets, excellent chess players and with more political experience, were aware that the United States would not allow with impunity that installation so close to its shores; the Soviets were looking not to the Caribbean, but to the Mediterranean, specifically to the missiles aimed at the USSR from stations in Italy and Turkey.

With Operation Anadyr the Soviet leadership put on Cuban soil the war material necessary to then negotiate the withdrawal of the Titan and Minuteman missiles from Turkey, which, according to the political divisions of the time, had borders with Armenia and Azerbaijan, territories of the USSR, and to achieve a moratorium on US aggressions against Cuba for a period of 15 years.

The end of the crisis was a setback for the Cuban leadership in general and for Fidel Castro’s pride in particular. Despite the so-called Five Points, the truth is that he was not taken into account in the negotiation; he was not even consulted, and most likely the Soviet side made that decision knowing that the Cuban leadership would be against the removal of the weapons and rationality indicates not opening several fronts of conflict if they could not be managed.

I bring up again the Soviets and chess, because Khrushchev took advantage of the impulsiveness and inexperience of the Cuban leader to move the pieces according to his own interests and to achieve – collaterally – guarantees for his new Caribbean ally.

A revolutionary movement recently installed in power, in a small and underdeveloped country, needed international sympathy to pave the diplomatic path. Matthews created the conditions to organize a trip for Fidel Castro to the United States. The Cuban leader visited the country in April 1959, at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, thanks also to the mediation of the journalist Jules Dubois.

The revolutionary government had been recognized by the United States, but by the date of the trip the executions were figuring prominently; in fact, a reading of Fidel Castro’s speeches at Princeton, Central Park in New York, and the Hilton Hotel in Washington, suggest the effort to leave the hearer (and public opinion) the impression of a humanist, familiar with bourgeois values, and one who would accommodate a political correction acceptable to American citizens.

Eisenhower rejected a personal meeting with Castro, to establish distance and because Fidel Castro was a political conundrum. Allen Dulles’s intelligence agencies could not help but observe that in the security bodies recently created by the rebels, members of the Communist Party were invited to participate; the same Party that followed directions from Moscow not to join the anti-Batista guerrillas.

But as historian Ramirez Cañedo has confirmed, what was happening in Cuba was calculated, and affinities increasingly outlined with the Soviet Union did not arouse optimism in Washington. In terms of bipolarity and the Cold War, of course, the turn of events in Cuba must have been of great concern to the anti-communist Eisenhower and his government. Anti-communism was the natural state of the immense majority of the politicians on Capitol Hill, who had accepted with relief a nationalist government in Cuba, but one as far from Moscow as they themselves were.

“…the nationalization of U.S. properties in 1959 and 1960 was not a deliberate provocation by Cuba to seek a break in relations with the United States, but a necessity of the Revolution, planned by Fidel since 1953, in his famous plea of self-defense before the courts of the Batista tyranny, “History Will Absolve Me,” and foreseen in the 1940 Constitution.” [Source]

This is an interpretation. While giving land to the peasants was an aspiration of the 1940 Constitution and was contained in the well-known plea “History Will Absolve Me,” the measure had a scope much greater than an act of justice for tenants and sharecroppers. The lands given to individual farmers and to the cooperatives created by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) were expropriated; but on expropriating every extension exceeding 400 hectares, most of the land remained in the hands of the state through INRA.

A considerable number of farmers benefited, receiving land that was of good quality and, in many cases, idle. The large landholdings that were productive remained in state hands under the name of People ‘s Farms, a name, by the way, that disappeared from the official vocabulary many years ago.

With respect to compensation, the environment did not favor a difficult collaboration with those affected, who could not understand how the leader of the Revolution spoke of slander when he was accused of being a communist, while meanwhile he was dynamiting the pillar of private property and enjoying vodka and caviar, according to the correspondent from the Soviet news agency Tass, the future ambassador of the USSR in Cuba.

Investments of the other countries affected by nationalizations did not reach a third of that of the United States, so it was relatively easy to reach agreements on compensation. The Revolutionary government offered to pay with 20-year bonds with 4.5% annual interest. However, the U.S. companies were demanding cash, which the Cuban government didn’t have, and as their bank reserve was depleted and they were not willing to divert money “to pay the landowners.”

The popular phrase “everything is in the eye of the beholder” serves well with regards to this long dispute. Combing through this skein of secrets, tangles, polarized testimonies and all the elements needed to approach the truth seems a task more suited to the historians of the future, although approximations are always welcome.

Despite emphasizing this quote, I do not intend to focus on the perceived cultural war, and much less on Cuban socialism. I will try to put aside my emotional and historic proximity to the events, to disagree with the author’s arguments.

Before engaging in an analysis of demystification, I cannot ignore a statement that is not true: “The United States blocked any possibility of the existence of a national bourgeoisie in Cuba.” Geographical proximity favors, with a growing presence from the colonial era and above all taking advantage of the economic crisis in the second decade of the last century, American capital’s engagement with a good part of the Cuban economy, which until that moment had been essentially Spanish. But the United States not only failed in its effort to block the existence of a native bourgeoisie, but, by 1959, this same bourgeoisie possessed the majority of the national wealth, including banking.

Moreover, the introductory text states, “The US government did everything possible to prevent a bourgeois nationalist government led by the orthodox party from taking the reins of the country.” In reality, it did not have to do anything to prevent it, because what did away with the future of this party and so with the constitutional future of the country, was not a maneuver by the CIA – nor even a maneuver by Batista – but a badly calculated shot by Eduardo Chibas, who very likely could have been elected president of the Republic in 1952.

Myth 1: “The root of the conflict was in the alliance of the Revolution with the Soviet Union, because the Eisenhower administration was willing to reach an understanding with the democratic nationalist project in Cuba.”

To claim the analysis of the conflict derived from the Revolutionary triumph of 1959 as a consequence of the unconfessed desire or manifesto of the United States to seize Cuba, starting in the late eighteenth century, responds to a vision that passes its entire optics through the sieve of a very punctilious anti-imperialism. With the difficulty of accessing texts of philosophical, historical and political thinkers with a more ecumenical approach, the Cuban reader has a Manichean perspective of bilateral relations with the United States, born of American dissatisfaction at not being able to decide the destiny of Cuba.

National sovereignty is a pillar of this approach, putting forward examples from the time of proconsuls and invasions. But this pillar is undermined in the last 60 years, and not specifically because of the interference of our neighbor to the north. No analysts among those who surgically tease apart the intentions and reach of American influence have interested themselves in doing the same with the Soviet influence, it seems, a task for future historiography, especially given that we are now living in a kind of second season with Russia and Putinism.

In the context of the Cold War, the US government would have been very naïve if it had not observed with growing concern how things were developing, barely 90 miles to the south. From the conciliatory and humanist discourse of 1959, the language of the leader and voice of the Revolution was changing his tone. But not only the speeches became more aggressive and anti-Yankee.

To the agrarian nationalizations without compensation of 1959, was added the fact that in the autumn of the same year the Soviet ambassador in Mexico came to Havana with two main principals: the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and the visit of Anastas Mikoyan, First Vice President of the USSR and Khrushchev’s right hand man; a trip that took place in February of 1960 and, in an unprecedented event, lasted nine days.

From this trip stemmed agreements for more than 100 million dollars. America’s concern was not free, the terms of the agreement by which Cuba would sell the USSR 300,000 metric tons of sugar were remarkably advantageous – more so than the sugar agreement with the United States before 1959.

It would be interesting to see – if the Soviet documents were declassified – how Operation Mongoose, under the direction of the CIA and the Department of State, found its counterpart in the KGB and Gremlin. And how plans were developed to increase our country’s influence through collaborative programs, technical assistance, trade and cultural exchanges as the first step to then arming and training a regular army and intelligence organs – the spearhead against its enemy – which conferred on Cuba the highest priority in the foreign policy of the USSR. Every power according to its interests.

These new best friends could not be looked on with indifference. In fact, the relationship is considered a precursor of the Soviet influence in the so-called Western Hemisphere. However, the analysis of Cuban historians should also focus on how the opportunity was lost to achieve a true independence and sovereignty as a nation and a republic for the first time; there are no records of the revolutionary government seeking alternatives in the Latin American context, for instance, to establish political, commercial and financial relations that would have allowed it to step outside the epicenter of the bipolar conflict.