‘Our Patience and That of the International Community Is Running Out,’ the United States Warns Maduro

The Cuban Foreign Ministry demands, in a strident tone, that the “majority support of the people” for Maduro be recognized

Three young people walk with their hands up to avoid being arrested by the members of the Bolivarian National Police in a protest in Caracas / EFE/ Ronald Peña R.

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 1 August 2024 –On the third day, the United States changed its tone on Venezuela. The caution which the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, expressed after the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed the victory of Nicolás Maduro in the elections of Sunday, July 28, ended this Wednesday, when the White House woke up warning about being fed up waiting for the tally sheets of the vote after going to bed with the request to recognize the opposition’s victory.

“Our patience and that of the international community is running out. We are tired of waiting for the Venezuelan electoral authorities to be honest and publish the complete and detailed data of this election so that everyone can see the results,” said White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby at a morning press conference.

It was the preamble to the expression of some harsher words by Brian Nichols, in charge of the Department of State for Latin America, before the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS).

“With the irrefutable evidence based on the voting records, which everyone can see, it is clear [that the opposition] defeated Nicolás Maduro by millions of votes,” said the diplomat. The senior official referred to the electoral tally sheets published by the opposition in which it is observed that, with 81% of the documents provided, between Edmundo González Urrutia and Nicolás Maduro there are almost four million votes in favor of the first. continue reading

“With the irrefutable evidence based on the tally sheets, which everyone can see, it is clear [that the opposition] defeated Nicolás Maduro by millions of votes

“This is not a projection, even if Maduro wins 100% of the votes in the less than 20% of the votes that remain to be published, he could not surpass González,” stressed Nichols, who urged both the Chavista candidate and the other countries “of the world” to recognize the opponent’s victory. “Those who do not do it are allowing Maduro and his representatives to carry out an attempt at massive fraud and disregard for the order of the law,” he added.

However, the OAS, despite everything, did not reach an optimistic conclusion. The member countries did not have the necessary consensus to approve a resolution that asked the Venezuelan authorities to publish “immediately” the tally sheets of the elections. Although there was no vote against, the absence of Mexico and several Caribbean countries, added to the abstention of 11 countries, including Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia, led to the fact that the votes necessary to approve the document in an extraordinary session of the Permanent Council were not obtained.

The representatives of the member countries negotiated the document for more than five hours, but it was impossible to agree on a wording that everyone could accept. The resolution requested only that a “comprehensive verification” of the results be carried out “in the presence of independent observer organizations to guarantee the transparency, credibility and legitimacy of the results,” which had already been requested by “the relevant Venezuelan political actors.”

According to diplomatic sources, several countries that abstained asked to delete this last part, and others – such as Panama and Peru – opposed the deletion. Faced with that situation, unanimity was impossible.

Colombia’s abstention generated a wave of internal criticism from former Colombian presidents and politicians, who accused the Government of Gustavo Petro of being “an accomplice” of the “fraud,” which forced explanations from its foreign minister. Luis Ernesto Vargas pointed out that Venezuela has no representation in the OAS, so it would only be a “salute to the flag.” Bogotá, in addition, considers that the statements of the Secretary General, Luis Almagro, prevents the OAS from being an “impartial” organization.

This position is the same as that offered by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for not attending the meeting. Both countries are, along with Brazil, in dialogue with Chavismo “to create the necessary conditions and seek an agreement for coexistence and political peace,” according to the Foreign Minister. Other diplomatic sources say that the United States is working with these countries to find a negotiated way out for the regime. “This is the most important and difficult political operation of this century in America,” a participant in the talks told El País.

Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, along with the United States, are looking for a negotiated exit for the regime. “This is the most important and difficult political operation of this century in America,” say sources close to El País

This Wednesday, Argentina, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, the United States, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Suriname and Uruguay voted in favor of the resolution. Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Granada, Honduras, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia abstained. Dominica, Mexico, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago did not participate in the session.

Cuba, which also does not belong to the OAS, made a public statement through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which it accuses the OAS of a lack of “moral or legal authority to resolve matters that only concern Venezuelans.” The text denounces the “long history of the OAS in the service of American imperialism,” its interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states and its support for “coups d’état, military dictatorships, repression and torture.”

The Cuban Foreign Ministry emphasizes that the “dignified attitude of a group of countries prevented the interference document from being approved,” but when mentioning that “the Venezuelan people decided to maintain their majority support for the option founded by Commander Hugo Chávez Frías” it ignores that it is left alone in closing ranks with a Chavismo that it desperately needs, if only for the oil.

The isolation is so great that Argentina also adhered to the almost universal position among the international left. The Union for the Argentine Homeland issued a statement in which it considered “the publication of the election tally sheets essential” and pointed to Maduro as responsible “for ensuring that the scrutiny is transparent with the corresponding counting of votes and display of the tally sheets before national and international observers.”

Also in Spain there was a movement of position by the left closest to Maduro, especially from the political parties Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU), which went from demanding immediate recognition of the official results on Monday to adhering to the Colombian position and demanding “transparency in the results.”

“Let everything be done with transparency,” said the general secretary of Podemos who demanded the publication of “all the tally sheets,” but at the same time denounced the “Venezuelan right” for making an “openly pro-coup” speech. The federal coordinator of IU, Antonio Maíllo, valued the position of the president of Colombia as a “sensible” proposal. “It’s a good way without a doubt. From the standpoint of friendship of the peoples and looking at the common good.”

“It’s a good way without a doubt. From the standpoint of friendship of the peoples and looking at the common good,” said the coordinator of Izquierda Unida

The members of the G7 (four European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan) also urged Maduro yesterday to “publish the detailed electoral results with total transparency,” and expressed gratitude to González Urrutia, for “his solidarity with the people of Venezuela and his call for the publication of the detailed electoral results.”

“From all corners of the world, they support the legitimate demand of Venezuelans to respect their decision to change in peace,” added the Democratic United Platform (PUD), as well as calling for the protection of María Corina Machado, whom Maduro wants imprisoned.

“If you ask me my opinion as a citizen, I tell you that those people should be arrested, behind bars, and there has to be justice in Venezuela,” said the head of state at a press conference.

“They should, instead of hiding, appear before the Prosecutor’s Office and show their faces, instead of fleeing like cowards and continuing to incite their criminal groups to insurrection,” Maduro added, despite the fact that neither of the two opponents is in hiding anywhere, since this Tuesday they led massive demonstrations in Caracas.

The president also asked, before a gathering of supporters, that citizens denounce those who participate in the protests for “altering public order.” “We are going to open a special window of the VenApp page, which we use for the 1×10 of the Good Government, at page 58. It will be opened for the entire Venezuelan population so that they can confidentially put in the data of all the criminals who have threatened the people, who have attacked the people, to go for them, so that there is prompt justice.” Although a multitude of opponents claim to have managed to get Google and Apple to suspend the service, there is still no evidence that the option was enabled yesterday, despite the unverified videos circulating.

The president also asked, before a gathering of his supporters, for citizens to denounce those who participate in the protests for “altering public order”

The Government describes the demonstrators as “terrorists” and has already arrested more than 1,200 people, according to official figures. The Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) affirmed, without providing evidence, that those people were “trained for some time” in Peru and Chile, and also in “Texas” and “Colombia,”with the aim of going to Venezuela to “attack and burn, which is terrorism.”

In an effort to delegitimize those who denounce the fraud, Chavismo has been forced to open the political arc of the “fascist right,” in which it now includes the Argentine president, Javier Milei – who is accused of saying “stupidities” – and his Chilean counterpart, Gabriel Boric, who is considered left-leaning.

“We don’t care what you say,” said Diosdado Cabello, number two of Chavismo, in his TV program Con el mazo dando. On the program he spoke out mainly against Boric, whom he called “idiot,” “dummy,” “crooked” and”sellout,” as well as “very sad puppy of imperialism.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

A Proposal To Join Forces Against the Dictatorships of Cuba and Its Allies

Luis Zúñiga, former Cuban political prisoner, during the conference on torture and dictatorships in Latin America held in Madrid. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Madrid, Rosa Pascual, 18 March 2024 — More than 4,000 miles away from Santiago de Cuba, in Madrid, there was talk this Monday night of the protests that took place in the eastern capital and other cities of the Island. “Let’s keep present in our thoughts the people who are in the streets right now,” said Javier Larrondo, founder of Prisoners Defenders, at the beginning of the part dedicated to Cuba in Faces of Torture, autocracies in Latin America.

Leopoldo López, general secretary of the World Liberty Congress, which organized the event with the support of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), had inaugurated a conference for victims of the tyrannies of Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, asking for the unity of the citizens of all countries living under an autocratic regime. “Human rights have no borders; human rights cannot be defended on islands, without understanding that every human being has the same rights, regardless of where he lives,” said the Venezuelan opponent, exiled in Spain since October 2020.

Both he and former Bolivian senator Zvonko Matkovic, who spent ten years in pretrial detention without trial, insisted on the union of the activists of the four countries in response to the authoritarian regimes, all members of the Puebla Group. “The rulers help each other, and we also have to help each other.”

“They have the whole society on its knees. They need to establish terror in society. That’s why they torture those who have the audacity and courage to face them”

Along with Larrondo, the voice of Cubans was represented by Luis Zúñiga, a former political prisoner described by the regime as an “anti-Cuban terrorist,” who began by exposing how Castroism has used the Armed Forces from the beginning to torture and repress the Cuban people. “They continue reading

have the whole society on its knees. They need to establish terror in society. That’s why they torture those who have the audacity and courage to face them,” he said.

Zúñiga, who silenced the already sensitized audience by telling how he and other prisoners covered their ears with threads pulled out of their underwear so as not to hear the screams of the tortured, detailed the process of accelerated establishment on the Island of a terror based on that of the Stalinist regime. To illustrate, he gave a figure.

Before 1959, there was a prison for each province in Cuba, which then numbered 6, and now number 15. After, 240. “On an island of 11 million inhabitants. So that you understand the level of repression that has been experienced in Cuba for 65 years.” In the 1960s, he said, there were 120,000 political prisoners, “recognized by Fidel Castro and commented on at the United Nations.” He showed a photograph of a walled cell, like the one in which he himself spent nine of the 19 years he was in prison. “There is no window in the cell, and that’s where you live. You live perpetually in that twilight,” he added.

Zúñiga also spoke of the Cuban presence in Angola and showed photographs from the ’11J’ demonstrations of the wounded and beaten. By criticizing the regime, Cubans can lose their jobs and, even worse, their freedom. In addition, he stressed, Cuba is the model to follow for the rest of the autocratic countries in the region. “They have two strategies: one for friendly countries, which are Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil and Honduras; and another for other countries, such as Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay.” In the former, he specified, intelligence and the Armed Forces are trained, while in the second they act “through non-governmental organizations, civil society and far-left organizations.”

Venezuelan Leopoldo López, general secretary of the World Liberty Congress, inaugurated the event in Madrid. (14ymedio)

Javier Larrondo asked everyone to have a symbolic and specific thought for the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, José Daniel Ferrer, among the many individual cases he cited. The alarm has increased over this prisoner in the last 24 hours, after his relatives – later supported by American and European political leaders – asked for proof of life. They haven’t heard from him since November 2023. “There is a victim who is being tortured, and they are killing him slowly, systematically. And his name is José Daniel Ferrer. They want to release him in a wheelchair, that’s a reality,” Larrondo shouted.

In his speech there was no lack of reproach toward the leaders of the European Union, for sitting down and shaking hands with the leaders of the regimes who torture those who are willing to stand up to them.

The figures provided at the beginning of the event by Javier El-Hage, legal director of HRF, did not leave anyone indifferent. “In the world, there are a total of 97 authoritarian or hybrid states; that is, with a democratic facade but authoritarian methods.” Among those he considers “hybrids” are India and Serbia, he said, warning of the considerable ground that authoritarian governments are gaining in the face of democracies.

“There is a victim who is being tortured, and they are killing him slowly, systematically. And his name is José Daniel Ferrer”

His introduction was followed by Jhanisse Vaca Daza, of the Jucumari Foundation, and Alejandra Serrate, both Bolivians, who demanded that the situation of their country be taken into account, overshadowed by the apparently most brutal cases of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Vaca Daza told the story of the indigenous opponent, César Bazán, a cocoa grower, who is in a private prison for medical assistance after suffering three embolisms that paralyzed him after being tortured. According to her report, the jailers pressured him to sign – with a finger, since he lacks mobility – a paper admitting his guilt. “They told him that he could be free and have the necessary care, that he is there because it is his decision to be suffering that type of torture, that he does not know because he is very stubborn and does not want to accept it,” she said.

Both agreed that the Government of Luis Arce is even “stronger in terms of repression, political persecution, torture and authoritarianism, even armed attacks on the press, because it wants to win the vote of the people who support Evo Morales.”

Another of the most emotional moments occurred during the testimony of the Nicaraguan student leader Lesther Alemán, who received a standing ovation from the auditorium by reclaiming his nationality, lost “only on paper.” “I am and will continue to be Nicaraguan, however painful that is.” Alemán, 26, spoke together with the activist Alexa Zamora, also stripped of her passport, and told of the case of the children who are collateral victims of the violence of these dictatorships, exemplified in the case of the son of one of the stateless opponents who – like him – was forcibly expatriated on a flight to the United States.

Alemán did not want to reveal the name of the affected person, but he did explain that the child could not leave the country because his father, lacking a passport, “did not exist.” The solution that was offered to the family in Migration – “sent from above” – was to deprive the minor of his paternal surname and formally take away parental authority. “The minor has had to lose his father’s last name to be able to hug him,” he said, showing the way family members are pressured.

“Not only is it worrying that there are more and more dictatorships, but that their economic and commercial power is increasing”

Venezuela was very present at the event, especially thanks to the video with virtual reality prepared by Víctor Navarro, from Voices of Memory, to place attendees of the exhibition – which will be open until Wednesday in the Serrería Belga cultural space in Madrid – inside the Helicoide prison itself, headquarters of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service in which all kinds of tortures have been reported.

Both he and Molly de la Sotta put the focus on the many detainees of the Maduro regime that “liberates political prisoners on one hand and imprisons as many on the other.” Both were critical of the processes of dialogue that have been carried out with the Government of Nicolás Maduro and, even more, of the many dealings that the different countries have with Venezuela. “Many democratic countries continued to do business with Venezuela. Not only is it worrying that there are more and more dictatorships, but that their economic and commercial power is increasing. According to a report, 48% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product is produced by autocracies,” said Navarro. “An economy that is maintained thanks to the blood of the tortured.”

De la Sotta shook up the public detailing some of the methods of torture of Chavismo that have been documented, including asphyxiation by immersion, hanging with ropes, cuts in the soles of the feet, rapes with a rifle, simulation of executions, deprivation of food and sleep for more than 48 hours, obligation to eat their own excrement and vomiting, and all kinds of ideas, imaginable or not.

“This is a key year for the permanence of this autocracy. A key year for a transition process. Yes, we need the European Union. We need you to say that there is torture in Venezuela. We need you to demand the release of political prisoners. In Venezuela there is torture; in Venezuela there is murder. But there are also Venezuelans who are not going to shut up and who are going to continue fighting,” Navarro concluded.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

The Albanians Ended Communism and Were Left Hungry

Ypi believes that communism and liberalism have a coincidence: “Both fail to understand the complexity with which ideas and history are mixed.” (@lea_ypi))

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 1 January 2024 — Lea Ypi has not written a book to make friends. Free [Libre], memoirs of the childhood and adolescence of an author who enters adulthood at the same time that her country, Albania, makes the leap to democracy, is a diptych as harsh with the lack of freedoms of the communism of her childhood as with the broken promises of a liberalism that tasted like disappointment. “In 1990 we had nothing but hope. In 1997 we lost that too.”

“I never asked myself what freedom meant until the day I hugged Stalin.” With that powerful phrase, which was in all the drafts of the first (and, for now, only) novel by this Albanian born in 1979, the first part of the book unfolds with the subtitle The challenge of growing up at the end of history. The author, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, says that she sat down to write a philosophical essay about the overlap of the concept of the word freedom in communist and liberal societies, but “ideas ended up becoming people.”

Thanks to this turn, Ypi has created a novel that — better than any history book — relates the process of transition of her country from the dictatorship of Enver Hoxa to the rebellion that was about to lead to civil war. The lives – absolutely normal – of her characters, Lea’s family, friends and neighbors, paint a fresco of the daily life of communist society like no essay will.

The first ten chapters of the book are dedicated to this, with scenes in which readers who lived under the same system will soon recognize themselves.

The first ten chapters of the book are dedicated to this, with scenes in which readers who lived under the same system will soon recognize themselves. The lines to do the shopping, the start of classes shouting “pioneers of Enver,” the valuta stores for foreigners – where dreams come true – with their nylon stockings and Bic pens; the empty Coca-Cola can – a memorable chapter to which the book cover makes a nod – as a status continue reading

symbol…

But, above all, the codes. Little Lea grows up hearing talk at home about how the biographies of her acquaintances had determined their studies, identified with an initial. Although, luckily, most ended up graduating, some ended up expelled. “I’m so sorry, it’s terrible,” is said in those cases. Starting in 1990, she discovered that the letter designated a prison, to be discharged was to be released and expulsion meant death.

Lea grows up in an apparently normal family, with civil servant parents moderately critical of the regime and an intriguing grandmother – the most interesting character in the novel and to whom it is dedicated – who, without being French, speaks French. The propaganda has taken strong root in her and she is, of all those who live in the house, the one who most fervently expresses her faith in the system, to the point of insisting, as her parents told her, that there were no photos of ‘Uncle Enver’ in their house because they were looking for a nice frame.

But at age eleven her life changes completely. “It was like the moment when they tell you that Santa Claus does not exist. We had built, for the children, a myth to explain the world. Now it was necessary to know the truth,” she has said in interviews.

Lea reaches adolescence and her world suddenly falls apart – “I was one person and then I became another.” Everyone she trusted had lied to her, everything she believed in was a lie. Her family history, her biography, had also determined her seemingly unremarkable existence, dating back to her great-grandfather (former Prime Minister Xhafer Ypi), whose last name was not, as she was led to believe, a coincidence; to her religion, Muslim, to the fact that she embraced it, along with her books, to find refuge in a dark adolescence.

That is the second part of the book, the one that will disappoint those who expected an ode to the benefits of liberalism and capitalism.

That is the second part of the book, which will disappoint those who were expecting an ode to the benefits of liberalism and capitalism and which rhymes with the author’s own disappointment.

“I had always thought that there was nothing better than communism. Every morning of my life I woke up wanting to do something to make it come more quickly. But in December 1990 the same people who had participated in the marches celebrating socialism and its advance towards communism took to the streets to demand its end,” she recalls in the novel.

Lea entered 1991 trying to join the democratic enthusiasm of her parents and trembled with the first free elections. She travels for the first time outside of Albania, to Greece where her grandmother Nini was born, and on the plane she sees something hitherto unheard of: “a colored plastic bag.” And she remembers perfectly the day when her mother brought home the first issue of the first opposition newspaper, whose motto was: The freedom of the individual guarantees the freedom of all.

But she soon discovers that when the words that the regime imposed on them disappeared – dictatorship, proletariat, bourgeoisie – only another omnipresent word remains: freedom. “It appeared in all the speeches on television, in all the slogans shouted angrily in the streets. When freedom finally arrived it was as if you were served frozen food: we chewed a little, swallowed quickly and were left hungry. Some asked if they had given us leftovers, others said they were just cold starters,” she writes.

Things happen before her eyes that she did not expect. Among them is the mass exodus of Albanians to Italy, repressed by the governments of both countries. “What value does the right to leave one country have if there is no right to enter another?” she asks, which in the case of many young women her age only served to cause them to be sexually exploited. Also the new business culture, which forces her father to order massive layoffs – “structural reforms” according to the new foreign businesspeople – or the great pyramid scheme that led the country to ruin and almost ended up unleashing a civil war.

But for teenage Lea, what hurts the most is the intimate thing, the conflict with parents who deny her the right to complain. “They had the feeling that they had always wanted this new world, but now they could no longer live it. It was my responsibility, they told me, to do everything that they could not do,” the author, explains, describing that stage of confusion, violence, insecurity, conflict and trauma that her parents previously disdained. “You’re not in prison, you’re not working in a mine, nor are they persecuting you. What are you complaining about?” they told her.

Ypi left Albania in the summer of 1997. She crossed the Adriatic and entered the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the Sapienza University in Rome. She had broken the promise she made to her father to distance herself from Marx – she is an expert in Marxism, among other things – and her CV is brilliant, but she lives with boredom having to explain in Western Europe the lack of freedoms of communism, and in Albania and other countries in the Soviet orbit the defects of a capitalism she believes “only emancipate a few.”

At university she made new friends who “declared themselves socialists” and spoke of Trotsky or Guevara “as if they were secular saints”

At university she made new friends who “declared themselves socialists” and spoke of Trotsky or Guevara “as if they were secular saints.” She was bothered when sharing her childhood stories with them and they, paternalistically, told her that this was not “true socialism (…)” without being able to hide their irritation. “The socialism of my university classmates was clear, bright and with a future. Mine was confusing, bloody and from the past.”

But she makes no concessions to his new reality. “Liberalism was synonymous with unfulfilled promises, with the destruction of solidarity, with the right to inherit privileges, with turning a blind eye to injustice,” she says.

Ypi believes that communism and liberalism have an overlap: “Both fail to understand the complexity with which ideas and history are mixed.” Her book has the potential to anger everyone, and yet, in such a polarized time, it has united critics and audiences in praise of it. And that is already good news.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

‘If I Go Back to Cuba, It Will Be on My Own Two Feet’

Passport control at aiport in Marbella, Spain area divided into two areas: one  for passengers with EU passports and another for everyone else. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, November 1, 2021 — Hopes are fading fast for the Cubans who have been stranded at the airport in Zakynthos, Greece since last Thursday. At least that is what Yanelis believes based on recent media coverage on their plight. The Cuban migrant told her story to 14ymedio on Friday. She is counting down the clock until the deadline Greek authorities have given her to leave the country.

“The altercation at the airport put the whole country on alert and now they won’t let any Cubans fly unless they have a visa,” laments the Yanelis, who has little energy left to continue her journey to Spain.

“I’m thinking of going home,” she says, making no effort to hide her disappointment at the prospect that the final leg of her journey, which began months ago in Russia, may not end as she wanted. She was detained on three occasions by police in North Macedonia and spent three weeks in a refugee camp.

The Cuban Foreign Ministry announced on Saturday that it was in discussions with Greek authorities over the eighty-four Cuban migrants at the Zakynthos airport.

The ministry claimed on Twitter that its intention is to “provide consular assistance and guarantees of a safe, voluntary continue reading

return” as well as “to receive all Cuban migrants who left the country legally and who now find themselves without travel documents in third countries, in accordance with Cuban law.”

Yanelis finds the ministry’s message hypocritical but believes it could be useful to some people who might be forced to go back for lack of funds. “Perhaps there are some Cubans who want to go back. There are a lot who don’t have family to help them financially,” she says. But she herself rules out returning under those conditions. “In my case, if I go back to Cuba, it will be on my own two feet.”

Most of the Cubans stranded in Greece have no desire to return to a country from which they fled for political and economic reasons. Therefore, only those who find themselves in precarious circumstances would be willing to accept the offer by Cuban authorities.

The migrants were counting on the employees at the European airports being absent-minded. This made their journey problematic because it relied on inspectors being distracted at all points along the way. Passengers were required to present their travel documents, including visas, to airport personnel both at the check-in desk and at the boarding gate.

Upon arrival at a European airport, passengers on international flights are divided into two groups: one for domestic travellers and those with EU passports, and another for everyone else. Each group must present the requisite travel documents. For the Cubans it was the last stop before their final destination.

While some of the more fortunate, like Yanelis, wait for a window of opportunity to open to catch a flight to Spain or Italy, thirteen Cubans remain in detention for undisclosed reasons at a center for migrants in Corinth, Greece. The group is apparently awaiting political asylum, although some of them say they have not applied for it.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Fidel Castro’s Cooks: In Squalor or Opulence, Both Adore Him

Erasmo Hernandez, former cook to Fidel Castro and owner of a private restaurant, Mama Ines. (Tripadvisor)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, September 18, 2021 — “I love the comandante as though he were my father, as though he were my brother. If he showed up here today and told me, ’Flores, I need your hand,’ I would cut off my hand and give it to him. If he told me, ’Flores, I need your heart,’ I would give him my heart …”

Fidel Castro’s cook has lost his mind. He no longer knows how to count to ten and lives in a dilapidated house in Havana that has almost no furniture. He has little to put in his mouth but tobacco. He is sure of only two things: he adores his comandante and he is afraid. Of what, we do not know.

Flores is one of the late president’s two former cooks who were tracked down by journalist Witold Szablowski for his book How to Feed a Dictator, published by Oberon. The other is Erasmo Hernandez, owner of a Havana restaurant, Vieja Mama Ines, and resident of a world a thousand light years away. This is the world of Cuba’s nouveau riche, where lobster is on the menu (and served) every night. The thread that connects Flores with Erasmo is not exactly Fidel Castro himself but the devotion they both feel for him.

It is not unlike the thread (spaghetti, if you like) that connects the world’s evildoers. Szablowski has tracked down the people who fed five of the last century’s most cruel dictators. He approaches the task like an explorer, relying mainly continue reading

on the pick-and-shovel work of persuading his subjects to talk to him. To a greater or lesser degree, almost all the cooks profess a certain enthusiasm for those whose stomachs they filled. Not surprisingly, in certain ways they took on the roles of the dictators’ mothers.

This was literally the case with Enver Hoxha, a five-foot-eleven diabetic and leader of Albania for forty-one years whom Mr. K — the only cook who did not want to give his name — had the difficult task of feeding. K lived in terror during the years he was forced to cook for a man who ordered the executions of 6,000 people. He got the job after two of his predecessors died. To keep Hoxha and his stomach happy, the modest chef had the brilliant idea of asking the dictator’s sister to teach him how to cook dishes just like their mother had. The effort had the desired effect on Hoxha’s mood. “Who knows how many people’s lives I saved that way?” K wonders.

The lives of these men all depended on keeping the supreme leader and his family in good health. Perhaps the clearest example in the book is provided by Otonde Odera, who cooked for the fearsome Idi Amin. One night Odera had prepared a rich, sweet dish that Moses Amin, the dictator’s 13-year-old, ate until he vomited. Alarmed by the boy’s intense stomach pain and terrified by the crazed father screaming that Odera had poisoned the boy, the chef ran to the hospital. Medical staff explained that it was nothing more than indigestion, which he promptly reported to his boss. “Later I would find out that he was holding the phone with one hand and pointing [a gun] at the head of one of the cooks with the other,” Odera recalls.

Sadam Hussein, who used to make his cooks pay for dishes he did not like, became obsessed with security after the Gulf War. At a time when economic sanctions limited food shipments into the country, he had multiple luxurious palaces built in which food was being constantly prepared.

The idea was that no one should know for sure where the dictator was at any given moment, so his presence was feigned at different residences. Tons of food ended up being thrown away. Why wasn’t it given away? “It was the president’s food, prepared only for him. No one else was allowed to touch it.”

His cook, Abu Ali, knew how much food the Iraqi dictator wasted but still admires him. He is grateful to Sadam for everything he was given. (He escaped the stresses of the palace when he was allowed to take a job as a cook in a luxury hotel.) Moreover, he considers Sadam to be, by far, the best member of his family: “Of the entire Al-Tikriti clan, Sadam was the only good person. I really don’t know how he could have grown up with them,” Ali says.

But let’s move on to dinner. The book is divided into five parts, each corresponding to one the five meals of the day. This chapter, one of the most important, is dedicated to Fidel Castro. The comandante was, as is well known, crazy about dairy products, particularly yogurt, cheese and ice cream. Of the latter, he could eat anywhere from a relatively sensible six scoops to as many as twenty, according to hyperbolic accounts by the senile Flores.

What did Castro eat? His favored vegetable dishes. (He was crazy about Erasmus’ vegetable soup, telephoning the chef even in his retirement years to order it.) Though he did not much like meat, he would eat it under certain conditions. Lamb with honey or coconut milk and roast suckling pig marinated in mojo criollo were his favorites. He did not mind fish either: a ceviche, some eels and fish in mango sauce. There was lobster, of course. “Fidel eats a W-H-O-L-E lobster by himself. Everything else is for sharing. He’s like that. He always shares everything,” says Flores.

Both cooks report that Castro was not very demanding when it came to food. He was satisfied with simple dishes and cooked his own spaghetti, which he learned to make in prison and which he would not allow anyone else to prepare for him. This is because — and it will come as a surprise to no one — Fidel was a know-it-all. So much so that the ever-faithful Erasmus acknowledges it was “the only defect” he had.

“Once he went to visit a former teacher. He went straight into the kitchen and instructed the cook on how to fry plantains,” recounts Erasmo. “As president he often ate at the Havana Libre, the best hotel in Havana. He told the cooks how to prepare red snapper, lobster, duck confit…”

Castro does not fare badly compared to others in the book. Szablowski looks beyond the personal stories of these individual cooks. All are extremely complex characters, whom he portrays in full chiaroscuro. They saw and experienced the horrors up close and kept their mouths shut. For the sake of their own lives. And their own pockets. In the course of his research, the author, (he himself briefly worked as a cook as a young man) found his subjects’ fates reflected in those of the common people and the reprisals they suffered.

The stories are truly horrifying, although in the Cuban version the subjects were not confronted with the execution of a family member but rather with the pain of exile. Julia Jimenez, a Florida-based physician, left the island as a teenager. Her aunt now runs a private guest house in Matanzas which Szablowski visited to experience the local cuisine. There, the Polish author feeds on authentic dishes prepared by Juanita. “My aunt is from the Nitza [Villapol]* school,” Jimenez explains.

Here the thread leads to the Special Period and the hunger that drove her family from the island. “I lost twelve kilos, seven of those in the first year after the fall of the Soviet Union,” says Jimenez. “It was then that my father decided he couldn’t wait for Fidel to come up with a solution.”

But Erasmo sees the past differently. “Fidel can be criticized for a lot of things but he was very upfront about the things he did,” he says. “People often ask, ’Didn’t he expropriate land?’ He expropriated his family’s land too. ’Didn’t he force people to leave the country?’ He didn’t force them. He said if anyone wanted to leave, they could because he was building a country where you couldn’t dine on lobster every day. What are you saying, Witold? That I serve lobster in my restaurant every night. Look, you’d better not say that. Come, let’s go to the kitchen and make something else.”

The book ends with dessert, which is none other than Pol Pot, the only brutal dictator in the book who employed a cook so loyal to the party that she held diplomatic posts. Yung Moeun’s anecdotes about the genocidal Cambodian ruler are sprinkled throughout the book like appetizers until her experiences become the focus of the last chapter. Her final statement is chilling: “You ask if I loved him. After listening to everything I’ve told you, I will answer you this way: How could you not love him?”

*Translator’s note: a Cuban cookbook author and TV personality often referred to as the Cuban Julia Child. Villapol hosted a cooking show on Cuban television from 1948 to 1997 in which she showed viewers how to prepare traditional Cuban dishes using the limited supplies available on the island.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Havana’s Obsession With the Nobel Peace Prize in Response to Allegations of Slavery

The sale of medical services provides more than $6,000,000,000 annually to Cuba, triple that of tourism. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 2 February 2021 — The perseverance with which the Cuban government seeks the Nobel Peace Prize for the Henry Reeve Brigade in the context of the pandemic is now beginning a new phase. After the nomination period closed on Monday, the official press reported the addition of singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez to the international committee that is promoting the campaign for awarding the prize to the medical contingent.

The Cuban state media reports promptly on the trickle of support from associations, political parties, legislators and international leaders, on which they count to achieve two main goals. One is the pocketing of the prize awarded annually by the Norwegian Committee, which currently comes to 9,000,000 crowns, almost $1,000,000. Second is the legitimizing and recognition of health work that isn’t exactly without profit, since it produces more than $6,000,000,000 a year for the Cuban state, three times as much as is earned from tourism.

Profits from the sale of professional services abroad wouldn’t be in the eye of the hurricane if it weren’t for the fact that they’re based on the exploitation of the workers who maintain the system, the doctors and nurses from all kinds of specialties who enlist in these missions, encouraged by a salary higher than the one they receive in Cuba, although the Government keeps 70% or, in some cases, 90% of the pay they each receive. continue reading

In addition, during their time abroad, the health workers are tightly controlled to prevent them from interacting with the local population and, above all, from fleeing the country. This is practically impossible to avoid for the vast majority of the brigades, despite the fact that such audacity is punished with the prohibition on returning to Cuba for eight years.

Despite the number of organizations that have been alerted about the situation of slavery that Cuban health workers experience in these international missions, the Cuban candidacy hasn’t lacked for promoters.

On February 1, Didier Lalande, the French president of the Cuba Linda Friendship Association, received the commemorative stamp of the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) from the hands of its leader the former Cuban spy Fernando González Llort.

Lalande founded Cuba Linda in 1998 and since then has worked to promote exchanges with Cuba, facilitating the travel of many of his compatriots to the Island. He was also the first to promote, last April, the nomination of the Henry Reeve Brigade through a letter that has been signed by more than 2,400 people.

The start of the competition for the award was determined by his alliance with Michel Lambert, a French-Cuban deputy who has been active in parties with different ideologies (from environmentalists to liberals), and who presented the necessary documentation to formalize the candidacy last September, when registration was opened.

The presentation of proposals to the Nobel Committee is restricted to very few. You must be a member of the legislative or executive branch of a state, a member of an international court, a university rector and professor of various subjects, a director of an institute linked to peace and foreign policy, a previous winner or someone close to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

The candidacy presented by Lambert was joined by the World Peace Council, a body founded in Helsinki in 1949 in the context of the Cold War and aligned with the Former Soviet Union. Today its headquarters are in Athens, and it advocates “for universal disarmament, sovereignty, independence, peaceful coexistence; and campaigns against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction and all forms of discrimination.”

“There are 14 such brigades working with more than 500 specialized doctors and other health professionals, brave men and women who have been bringing much needed help to peoples in various countries and on all continents, saving countless lives and showing empathy and human kindness for which they continue to be remembered wherever they have been,” reads the letter that this organization addressed to Berit Reiss-Andersen, President of the Norwegian Committee.

The World Peace Council’s letter has been disclosed by Granma despite the strict confidentiality rules imposed by the Norwegian Committee, which prevent the nominees from knowing who nominated them for a period of fifty years. Leaks are constant, and this year it’s already known that Alexei Navalny, Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump and his son-in-law have been selected for nomination. There are also movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Boy Scouts, the Belarusian opposition, the Polish Association of Independent Judges and fact-checkers, journalists and activists from conflict zones among the nominations.

Similar to Cuba, in a year marked by Covid-19, the Coalition for Innovations in Preparedness for Epidemics (CEPI) and the World Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) are also eligible for the award.

The Norwegian Committee, however, has also encountered those who press in the opposite direction. Among the most energetic detractors of the Cuban candidacy is the organization Archivo Cuba, the Cuban Archives Project, which last October sent a letter to those responsible for the choice (whose names are unknown except that they’re five people designated by the Norwegian Parliament) in order to explain the working conditions of the Henry Reeves Brigade, and what it would mean to grant Cuba the moral recognition intended by such a prestigious award.

“It is our duty to inform you of the abundant and overwhelming evidence that makes this medical body an intrinsic part of a scheme of human trafficking by the Cuban Government, which is a violation of international law,” reads the letter, signed by María Werlau.

The award has sought to avoid controversy and arouse a spirit of harmony for many years, but it recently has had several stumbles in this task. Some experts attribute the controversies to the intention of the Norwegian Committee to “sponsor” peace processes that have often been controversial or haven’t turned out well, as has been the case with Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres and Itzak Rabin for the Oslo Peace Accords, Juan Manuel Santos for the peace process in Colombia and Abiy Ahmed for facilitating a peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea that didn’t last.

Another of the most criticized prize winners was Barack Obama, whose award was considered more aspirational than deserved, as the bottom line of his presidency demonstrated.

Last year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to the U.N. World Food Program for “its efforts in the fight against hunger, preventing its use as a weapon of war and helping to improve conditions for harmony in areas of conflict.”

We will have to wait until October 10 to meet the next Nobel Peace Prize winner, but the Cuban ruling party’s campaign promises to be long and intense over the next seven months.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Medical Missions Are "The Great Capitalist Slave Business" of the Cuban Government

Doctors and nurses of the “Henry Reeve” Doctors Contingent in a ceremony in Havana before traveling to Italy to help in the COVID-19 epidemic. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual / Yaiza Santos, Madrid, September 22, 2020 — Cuban Prisoners Defenders (CPD) made public this Tuesday its complaint in front of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which it presented on August 24 in the names of 622 doctors from the Island who have been on missions abroad.

In May of 2019, CPD, headquartered in Madrid, announced the presentation of the first complaint, against six Cuban politicians including President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his predecessor, Raúl Castro. The document contained the testimonies of 110 doctors who denounced the conditions in which they were forced to work on international missions.

“We are denouncing situations of authentic slavery for hundreds of thousands of people. We believe that the prosecutor of the ICC could perfectly investigate those acts as crimes against humanity,” affirmed CPD member Spanish lawyer Blas Jesús Imbroda, at that time. continue reading

This Tuesday, in an online press conference, the president of CPD Javier Larrondo gave a hard recounting of the figures and data from the testimony of several hundred professionals included in the complaint, which he says has been very well received in international bodies.

According to the organization’s data, the missions usually last three years and between 50,000 and 100,000 professionals participate in them annually, 70% of them doctors, but also engineers, teachers, and athletes. Larrondo noted that the work of these professionals entails a profit for Cuba of $8.5 billion net ($6.4 billion in 2018, according to the most recent available official data). This is three times the profit that tourism reports, he detailed, while calling the missions “the great capitalist slave business of that country.”

The reports agree that the professionals are forced to participate in “conditions of slavery” with long workdays and restrictions on their freedom, such as, for example, being forbidden to drive a car or having to ask a supervisor’s permission to marry. The law, moreover, penalizes with from three to eight years in prison those who leave the missions, as written in article 135 of the Penal Code.

In most cases, the Cuban Governments takes away the professionals’ passports to retain them and pays them between 10% and 25% of the salary that it charges the receiving countries, under the argument that Havana needs money to finance the Health System.

Larrondo emphasized that these professionals are subject to Cuban law, and specifically Decree 306 of 2012, “On the treatment of the professionals and athletes who require authorization to travel abroad,” and Resolution 168 which, among other restrictions, includes returning to Cuba when the mission ends, informing the immediate superior “of romantic relationships with nationals or foreigners,” asking permission to travel to distant provinces or places, observing curfew from six in the evening, and asking permission to “arrange invitations to family members.”

“They have a special passport and it doesn’t work for customs. They can’t travel without authorization and never without the entire family.”

Nor are they allowed to take a copy of their university degree. “Without passport or degree, you aren’t a person,” said the president of CPD. “What does this sound like if not human trafficking and prostitution?” he stated.

Among the conditions that the healthcare workers suffer in these missions, the NGO included political work and obligatory proselytizing by the bosses, under the threat of being repudiated by their own colleagues.

Two of the doctors who are part of the complaint joined Larrondo. One of them, Manoreys Rojas, who now lives in the US and hasn’t seen his children in six years, told how when he left for the mission to Ecuador in July of 2014, he did it “to fulfill a program that he was not prepared for.”

He did it “because it was a way out economically, the only way to escape the country.” Rojas claims that the Cuban Government places its doctors in the worst parts of the cities, where they frequently suffer robberies, and that it forces them to do proselytizing work and to produce falsely inflated statistics. As for the objective of the missions, he is forceful: “pocketing money [by the government] at any cost and by any means possible.”

For example, medicines were sold by Cuba to Ecuador for $13.8 million, “medicines that they weren’t even able to use.”

Another doctor, Leonel Rodríguez Álvarez, had a similar experience. An internal medicine specialist, he was first in Guatemala and then in Ecuador, where he is now a university professor. Rodríguez related that Cuba sent Island nurses to Guatamala with a course of barely a few months in anesthesia and that they passed them off as specialized anesthetists, which caused conflicts with local doctors, who refused to work with them.

Also, he confirmed that State Security agents were sent to the missions passed off as healthcare workers. “Those of us who already had some experience, we realize when we are having an exchange with people who aren’t of our profession.” These people, specified Rodríguez, are also easily identified because they have a vigilant attitude, denouncing, for example, conflicting opinions. That the Cuba’s G2 security services intervenes in the missions, he asserts, “is an open secret.”

On that subject Larrondo gives as proof the case of Bolivia, where it was demonstrated that of the 702 members of the mission, only 205 were doctors.

The plaintiff organization argues that the ICC can hold accountable the 58 nations that have signed conventions against slavery.

This June, CPD directly accused Norway and Luxembourg of contributing to the financing of the system of slavery of Cuban doctors in Haiti and Cape Verde, and asked them to revise their triangular collaboration agreements to continue being an example in human rights for the entire world and to avoid facing a complaint before the Human Rights Court of the European Union.

The brigade in Haiti was established in 1999 and remains today, with almost 350 healthcare workers of whom the total number of qualified doctors is unknown. Norway, a country that doesn’t belong to the European Union (EU), although it does to the European Economic Area, has contributed a total of $2.5 million via three agreements of this triangular type since 2012 in the support of that mission.

The money provided by Oslo was mostly destined for the construction of permanent medical infrastructure, but a consignment of around $800,000 was planned for the Cubans who, in that country earn $250 per month, an amount lower than the already very poor salary of local doctors, who pocket some $400.

In the case of Luxembourg, which is a member of the EU, the cooperation dates back to this March, when it signed an agreement equipped for almost half a million Euros for the establishment of a contingent of Cuban doctors in Cape Verde.

According to CPD, the group established in that African archipelago is made up of 79 workers who provide support in different areas of health, as well as 33 members of the Henry Reeve brigade to combat COVID-19 financed by a tripartite accord with the European country.

In the specific case of the workers in Cape Verde, CPD cited an example of the vigilance to which they are subjected. According to a report, on August 7, 2017 a communication was sent between the office of then-Minister of Public Health, Roberto Morales, to the embassy in Madrid with a copy to the ambassador in Cape Verde in which was requested, by order of Colonel Jesús López-Gavilán, head of the Health department of the Ministry of the Interior, that an official from the diplomatic headquarters in Spain come to Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport to supervise the layover that five doctors would have to make from Cape Verde.

The instruction was for them “to be investigated and check their communication with family members abroad” since, according to the sender, one of them had demonstrated “strong indications and intentions to ’desert.’”

Taking part in the press conference this Tuesday was Gilles Campedel, from the organization Prodie Santé, which has launched what it has called the International Brigade of Free Doctors. It is a project which, he said, is already present in 17 countries, and under whose protection Cuban doctors can work with just compensation – not less than 2,500 Euros per month, according to Campedel – and without intermediaries. “We have fantastic doctors and countries with the desire to receive them,” emphasized Campedel, who stressed that the pandemic is a good opportunity to get it off the ground.

The judge Edel González, ex-president of the Provincial Judicial Power of Villa Clara, seemed to agree that the brigades must “provide a service, but of quality, with transparency.” The objective of any analysis of the missions, he asserts, “is not to eliminate them but to humanize them.” After legally analyzing the complaint, he concludes that the punishments of the doctors who violate the law, like prohibiting them from reuniting with their families, is unconstitutional.

José Daniel Ferrer, president of the human rights organization Unpacu, expressed gratitude for the work of Prisoners Defenders in his case – the organization asked for his release on numerous occasions – and praised the creation of the brigade set up by Prodie Santé.

Ferrer, who noted that he has suffered a police cordon around his home for 74 days, addressed the politicians of other countries who participated in the press conference, including the Spaniard Javier Nart and the Argentinian representative Lucila Lehman, to ask them: “To what extent are the politicians and public opinion of your respective countries aware of the situation? What more can be done to show that the regime is neither in solidarity nor progressive?”

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

University Autonomy is Not Compatible with a Police Officer’s Pistol

Police facing student demonstrators during the Franco dictatorship in Spain in 1968. (Courtesy)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 13 April 2019 — Unlike in Cuba, the images of police officers beating unarmed students in Spain are gray. And called by the color of the uniform, the “Grays” were the members of the body responsible for order in Franco’s Spain. And the photographs from that era, the last years of the 1960s, are also gray, with their caption, “Running from the Grays,” imprinted in the vocabulary of generations of Spaniards in the present and the future.

The anti-Franco student movement swelled in those years in the Spanish universities and the Grays came, usually on horseback, to break up with blows of their truncheons those crowds of wayward young who rose against the regime. For this reason, one of the main achievements of democracy in Spain was the recovery of university autonomy, enshrined as a fundamental right in Article 27 of the 1978 Constitution.

University autonomy is at the very origin of the institution. In the eleventh century, the Emperor Federico Barbarroja granted shelter and protection to the University of Bologna (the first in history) against the Government. Since then, it has been considered one of the most powerful mechanisms with which to protect Higher Education from political fluctuations and external interference, endowing the institution with its own governing and administrative bodies that protect its independence and freedom. continue reading

The context in which this concept must be placed is that of an institution that is constituted from its beginnings as a center of ideas, where intellectual restlessness, critical thinking and the exchange of opinions are part of its nature and favor an environment more prone to the questioning of authority as a given.

It is, therefore, natural that university autonomy is intrinsic to democracy. Or, in other words, incompatible with the dictatorship.

One of the most controversial aspects of university autonomy, even in consolidated democracies, is the inviolability of the campus. This implies the assumption that the Police Forces and State Security Forces can not enter the campus unless expressly authorized by the highest authority, the rector.

During the Transition to Democracy in Spain, the pitched battles between Franco’s police and the student movements were very recent. It counted for something that some of the politicians who sat in the first Courts of democracy had been colleagues or teachers of Enrique Ruano, an iconic student leftist who died in strange circumstances (they claimed he fell out of a window) during an arrest for distributing labor union leaflets.

The newly born Spanish democracy struggled for decades to keep the police as remote as possible from the universities. The protests inside the campuses, which in the worst case involved some graffiti or vandalism, were allowed to wind down or resolved or by negotiation between the student bodies and the rector. The security guards seldom dealt with demonstrations or disorder and, in no case, did they carry firearms.

On a few occasions the police have intervened  on a Spanish campus in democracy. A judgment of the Supreme Court of 2003 guarantees that the entry of agents into the premises does not in itself violate the right to university autonomy and affirms that the institution lacks independence with regards to citizen security or the right to assembly or demonstration.

However, rarely has there been a political, academic or police authority that wants to be the one who allows the riot police to dissolve a protest with blows, which would involve to their name in the slightest shadow of the memory of the Franco regime’s police. This presence not only implies the inability to resolve conflicts in a dialogued manner, but it also violates some of the fundamental pillars of democracy and the fundamental rights of citizens.

The image of an agent of the National Revolutionary Police pointing a gun at an unarmed Congolese student, no matter how enraged the protest, should be intolerable in a country that, although we know it is not a democracy, does claim to defend the rights human beings in every international forum.

With a new democratic Constitution, which will not be the same as yesterdays, the photos of police hitting students in Cuba will continue to be in color, but very likely they will go down in history.

________________

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

‘Matryoshkas’ of Exile / 14ymedio, Rosa Pascual

Arbat Street in Moscow. (Flickr)
Arbat Street in Moscow. (Flickr)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 10 March 2016 — Moscow 1989. Mario, a Cuban journalist working in the press department of the secretariat of the Organization for International Economic Cooperation (OCEI) representing the island in the Soviet capital, attends, with his family, the premiere of the play The Master and Margarita, whose main female part is being played by Dolores, his lover. He has spent months rehearsing the part with her, playing at confusing reality and fiction in its portrayal of the main roles of the novel. Bulgakov’s Russian literature satire, censored in the USSR since 1973, borrows shamelessly from Goethe’s Faust to talk about good and evil and the decadence of Russian Society. In the same way, Arbat Alleys, a novel by the Cuban-Swede Antonio Alvarez Gil featuring the character of Mario, exploits The Master and Margarita to recall the strategies of the dictators over artists and their works.

Arbat Alleys (Verbum, 2016) works like Russian matryoshka dolls. Hidden stories of totalitarianism, of lack of freedom and censorship, of love, of literature and exile, one within the other. Mario’s story contains that of Santiago, Dolores’s father, a child of the Spanish civil war who left his country fleeing fascism to live in another; and Santiago’s in turn, contains that of the Stalinist purges of the artists of Russia’s Silver Age. continue reading

Mario is a moderately correct son of the Cuban Revolution in 1989, the year in which Arbat Alleys is set. He studied at Moscow University, he married a Russian, he already has two sons in Cuba and works as a journalist again in Moscow on the day he had to cover a press conference where Nazarov announces a renovation of the organism by the “transformation processes that are being tested in member countries” of the Eastern bloc.

One night in the OCEI building he meets Dolores, with whom he initiates a friendship that leads to passion. It is the young woman who introduces Santiago to Mario, weaving the small and large story of Arbat Alleys, although at times we don’t know which is the greater and which is the lesser.

Santiago Gomez had fled Spain as a child, leaving the side of the vanquished and heading to Moscow, where he grows up and comes into contact with Ariadna – daughter of the retaliated-against Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva – who appears in the novel as a ghost. Through his literary collaboration – the Spaniard translates Russian literature – is born a deep friendship that lets the young exile know first hand the pain of the vanquished, the repression, and the censorship suffered by artists such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Nabokov. Someday Santiago’s annotations should serve to construct a novel about the drama of silenced Russian authors, so that Stalin’s crimes are not forgotten and the injury to the Soviet Union’s national literature is remembered.

Santiago entrusts his notes to Mario who, from them, writes the novel of the purges of Russian literature. Fascinated by the harshness of history, with his own works censored by Stalin and by Dolores, the journalist embarks on the narration of a story that ends up consuming him.

Mario is not an enthusiastic revolutionary. He is suspicious of the behavior of senior officials, is aware of the shortages that consume the island, and knows that his criticisms of the Cuban government cannot be made in front of anyone. But the regime’s hypervigilance weighs on him, as it does on all Cubans. However, his criticism is lukewarm because he still believes in the many benefits of the Revolution.

But throughout the year – and the novel – the fall of the Soviet bloc passes before his eyes and with it, the principals in which he has been educated crumble. In the historical background of Arbat Alleys is perestroika, the Prague Spring, Solidarity’s victory in Poland, the execution of Ceausescu and the Tiananmen massacre. But the news of drug trafficking in Cuba and, especially, the execution of General Ochoa, cause the final blindfold to fall from his eyes and he begins asking questions.

“Examples like the one I just cited in the cases of Pasternak and Mandelstam are an example of how the arrogant dictator is allowed to humiliate the rebel writer. The laudatory poems, letters of contrition and public acknowledgments of guilt are only the most visible edges of lives and talents that are consumed and disappear in the trough of totalitarian power. Disgracefully, the cultural life of our country has not been exempt from issues of this kind. Although I do not believe it is necessary, I could cite here several cases of humiliating and despotic treatment toward Cuban writers.”

Mario writes this paragraph thinking of Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas and Virgilio Pinera, without being fully aware that as soon as the manuscript falls into the hands of the machinery of power he is immediately classified as a counterrevolutionary.

His friendship with Santiago – whose past as a child of war isn’t enough to relieve him from being suspected by State Security for having visited Spain during the dictatorship – his affair with Dolores, the friendships of his children and even the discussion at customs at Jose Marti Airport in Havana appear in Mario’s seemingly spotless file, making him into a subversive element.

“I am a Cuban who is dying defending that same Revolution that you’re questioning in this book,” charges the State Security official from the Cuban delegation in Moscow. And Mario understands finally that not even his first idea of suppressing the “most problematic” paragraphs will save him. That the only lifeline has been the loyalty of an official who decides to put friendship ahead of the Revolution and the Party. That the only redemption possible is in his family and in the preservation of the original manuscript, which should be published somewhere in the world to denounce the terror to which dictators subject their artists, surely out of fear of the force and power of intellectual creation and its capacity to make others think.

Alvarez Gil has squeezed the maximum from The Master and Margarita as an explicit reference throughout the novel to make his own denunciation almost 75 years since Bulgakov began his master work and his fight for freedom of expression. In 1930 the Russian writer sent a letter to the government of the USSR where he said, “The fight against censorship, of any kind and under any government, is my duty as a writer, much as it is an appeal for freedom of the press. I believe firmly in freedom and even would say that if a writer only suggested that freedom is not necessary, it would be the same as if a fish declared that it did not need water.”

The Cuban-Swedish writer Antonio Alvarez Gil. (Wikicommons)
The Cuban-Swedish writer Antonio Alvarez Gil. (Wikicommons)

But Arbat Alleys also contains a lot of the life experience of its author. Antonio Alvarez Gil (born Melena del Sur, Havana, 1947) worked in the secretariat of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in Moscow for several years, where he experienced the era of perestroika, he married a Russian, translated the country’s writers – Pushkin among others – and ended up in exile, in 1994 in Sweden, although he has recently lived in Spain. His life and career path have served, without a doubt, for the construction of the character of Mario and to make this novel indispensible for recalling the collapse of the Socialist Bloc and the horror stories of those who cemented its construction. An adroit story that leaves a strangely bitter taste, because Mario flees knowing himself persecuted by a regime 30 years later still controls its citizens and intellectuals, but he does it thinking of a future filled with hope.

  • Arbat Alleys was first published in Puerto Rico by Terranova Publishing (2012). It has just been reissued in Spain by the publisher Verbum.
  • Antonio Alvarez Gil published in Cuba before going into exile. In 1986 he won the Cuban Writers and Artists Union David Award for A Girl on the Platform. With The Long Hours of the Night he was a finalist for the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1993. Outside Cuba he won the International Award for Short Narrative Generation of ’27 in 2005 or XIV Vargas Llosa Prize for Literature in 2005, among others.