Translator: Andrea Libre – Translating Cuba

Night Protests in the Midst of Blackouts in Pinar del Rio and Havana

Protest in El Curita park, in Centro Habana, early Friday morning. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Havana, 15 July 2022 — The state telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa, kept the internet cut off for at least half an hour in Cuba, coinciding with two protests that took place almost simultaneously, in the early morning this Friday, in the capital and in the west of the country.

In Los Palacios, Pinar del Río, the population showed it was fed up with the constant blackouts and power outages they have been suffering for months, aggravated by the summer heat. A group of people took to the streets in the middle of the night banging pots and pans and shouting “we are hungry” and “Díaz-Canel singao!” [motherfucker], as could be seen in videos broadcast on social networks.

In front of the Party headquarters, the people of Los Palacios left their fear in the drawer.
– The Engineer (@El_IngenieroCu) July 15, 2022

Shortly after, official accounts published images of the streets of the same area in complete calm to deny not the information, but that the protests had been significant.

The same operation occurred in Centro Habana, where a woman who was protesting in El Curita park, for being homeless, was joined by dozens of mothers who showed solidarity with her cause. “11:54 at night, a Cuban mother with 2 girls and one in a wheelchair claims that they have nowhere to live because their house is in poor condition,” said a Facebook user.

According to a social network account related to the regime, La Página de Mauro Torres, the protest was dissolved when the first secretary of the Party in the municipality attended the woman personally. continue reading

“You need to have kettledrums and be on the people’s side in order that, when there is a protest, a government official comes forward and looks for solutions. Good for her, she is a short woman, but with a tremendous heart. And also for those who, in their eagerness to solve problems, can find a light in the attention,” said the page owner.

Next, they posted several photographs of the place located between Galiano and Reina street, all calm.

Despite their apparent transience, the protests confirm the pressure cooker that the Island has become, whose citizens no longer hesitate, despite everything, to go out and complain to the rulers about their situation.

The internet outage was also brief, as was confirmed by the page Inventario, with data from Internet Outage Alerts, with a graph showing a sharp drop in connectivity, although the connection has been intermittent in the hours since, according to different people in various provinces of the Island. The service interruption, which was not announced for any technical reason and for which Etecsa has, so far, given no explanations, shows the regime’s commitment to control information, as it fears a new outbreak like the one of July 11th last year, commonly called “11J”.

Translated by Andrea Libre

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Every Day 2,000 Migrants, Including Cubans, Cross the Rio Grande in Piedras Negras

On Wednesday, a group of 250 migrants was gathered in an orchard in Eagle Pass (Texas) (Twitter/@BillFOXLA)

14ymedio, Havana, 13 July 2022 — Hundreds and hundreds of people in a line, from one side to the other of the Rio Grande, in an incessant flow like the waters that cross. The images, recorded on the river border of Piedras Negras (Mexico) with Eagle Pass (Texas) and shared this Monday by the American journalist Bill Melugin, illustrate the cold numbers.

According to the Fox News reporter, last week there were more than 13,000 illegal crossings in the same area: “That’s almost 2,000 a day.” A federal source told him that 2,258 illegal immigrants arrived on Wednesday. Matías, a source from the Mexican prosecutor’s office in Coahuila who prefers not to give his last name, told 14ymedio that between Sunday and Tuesday more than 8,000 people crossed the border strip of about 90 kilometers between Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras, among them, “several families”.

The official also says that the Northeast cartel has taken over the traffic of Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans in the place. “They have hawks – children, vendors, bartenders – who inform them about free points to cross migrants through the Rio Grande,” he details.

Two coyotes were seen in the images shared by Bill Melugin, revealing the way they operate: once the coyotes leave one group, they return to Mexican territory to guide another.

The arrival of Cubans in the US has reached unprecedented numbers during the Joe Biden Administration. Data offered by the Department of Customs and Border Protection show that in the last eight months a total of 140,602 Cubans have entered the United States by land, an number that already exceeds the Mariel Boatlift exodus of 1980, when 125,000 people reached the United States in seven months. continue reading

Matías knows that the undocumented immigrants who come in a caravan “reach their limits and some residents near Rio Grande support them free of charge so they can reach their American dream.”

Those who arrive by bus are “detected by the hawks, who notify the coyotes about the places where people are. Either under threat or extortion, but they end up agreeing to cross the river with these smugglers,” says Matías. “They charge them between 600 to 1,000 dollars to pass them and they leave them there.” This network also brings migrants from Tabasco and Yucatan.

The Northeast cartel – a split from the old Gulf cartel – is a bloodthirsty group that is not only dedicated to transporting drugs, but also to extortion, kidnapping, homicides, fuel theft, bank robbery and human trafficking.

The Cuban Francisco Torné Martínez is not part of the group filmed on Monday, but he could have been. He stepped on US territory this Wednesday. “They took names and divided the group of more than 200 people, the Peruvians and the Guatemalans were put on a bus to return them over the bridge,” he refers to this newspaper.

Torné was taken along with 22 other Cubans, 39 Venezuelans and 9 Nicaraguans to a church. “Texas is returning those from El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti and Guatemala, but this could change as a result of Texas Governor Greg Abbott intensifying his campaign,” says official Matías.

Translated by Andrea Libre

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They Challenge the Political Police and Demand Freedom for Their Children

The mothers of the 11J prisoners are not going to give up. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 12 July 2022 — “State Security visits us and harasses us, but we are going to continue asking for the freedom of our children.” The words of Migdalia Gutiérrez Padrón, mother of a 21-year-old young convicted because of the 11J protests [July 11, 2021] without even proof that he was there, explain why among more than 1,500 detainees in the anti-government demonstrations a year ago, there are barely only about twenty families who dare to raise their voices.

Warned and threatened, the mothers, wives, and sisters of the prisoners have become the weakest links for State Security, the easy target to ask for silence not to make things worse. But the political police did not count on the fact that links are also iron made. The political police lack the necessary expertise to understand that they would not be the first mothers in the world who fought for their children and managed, sooner or later, to bring genocides, traffickers and murderers to the dock.

Over several months, with the patience required to gain the trust of those who feel fear, the director of 14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, was able to interview the mothers of some of the 11J prisoners and the wife of one of them, who also suffers the consequences of having a son now fatherless. continue reading

These women agreed to tell where their loved ones were that Sunday, when the demonstrations began, how their arrests and grotesque trials took place, the painful days in prison, and the frustrated hope of a useless appeal. Some affirm that their children did not even participate, others claim that they marched peacefully asking for freedom, others cannot believe that even if they had thrown a stone, they have been sentenced more harshly than murderers and rapists.

They have all suffered having to bring food and clothing to their children and seeing them locked up in unworthy conditions. And although they all know that their fight is almost against a wall, they do not plan to abandon it. María Luisa Fleitas, one of our interviewees and the mother of a young man sentenced to 21 years in prison, wrote: “A son in prison is a dead mother.” But they are alive enough to keep fighting.

Barbara Farrat, Mother of 17-Year-Old Imprisoned for July Protests in Cuba, is Arrested and Released

Translated by Andrea Libre

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Cuban Opponent Ariel Ruiz Urquiola Hospitalized on the Eighth Day of His Hunger Strike

The biologist and Cuban activist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, this Monday in front of the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.

EFE (via 14ymedio), Geneva, 11 July 2022 — On Monday, the Cuban biologist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, an environmental and LGTBI activist, completed eight days on a hunger strike in front of the headquarters of the UN Office for Human Rights in Geneva, which he is demanding intervene to stop the harassment suffered by his family in Cuba.

“The only thing left for me is to ask the high commissioner (Michelle Bachelet) to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been violated against my sister [Omara Ruiz Urquiola] and me through medical torture and crimes against humanity,” the Cuban activist, resident in Switzerland since 2019, told EFE.

Ruiz Urquiola accuses the Cuban regime of having expelled him and his sister from the University of Havana for their political activism, of trying to confiscate the land they work, after not being able to dedicate themselves to teaching, and now of preventing his sister from returning to Cuba after traveling to the US to treat breast cancer.

In addition, the activist affirms that Cuban authorities inoculated him with the HIV virus in 2019, when he was on another hunger strike, and that they have given his sister placebo treatments on several occasions instead of the medicines she needs against her cancer. continue reading

“Now that my sister is prohibited from entering Cuba, my mother is left alone and they are going for her: they want to confiscate our farm,” said Ruiz Urquiola, who has been sleeping outdoors in a Geneva square since July 4, and assured that it will remain there “as long as the body lasts.”

“The Geneva medical services and the police have been very concerned about my health, but my choice is to continue,” he said, and blamed the UN Office for the medical consequences that the current strike, the fifth it has carried out in almost 20 years of activism.

The Cuban expert added that just one person in charge from the office headed by Bachelet has been interested in his health these days, for which he considered “disastrous” the response of an institution before which he had already done a shorter strike hunger in 2020.

Translated by Andrea Libre

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