Translator: Ricardo Recluso – Page 5

Internet and Mobile Signal Cut Off After a Mass Gathering at a Cuban Hotel

Reports are still coming in from the Cuban capital to the editorial desk of this newspaper, confirming that the mobile telephone service is still not operating. (Perioódico Cubano)

14ymedio, Havana, 16 February 2023 – An outage of internet and mobile data was reported in Cuba this Thursday afternoon at 6.45pm, according to reports to 14ymedio from various parts of the country, after a mass gathering at the Grand Packard Hotel in Old Havana, where the American rapper ’Tekashi 6ix9ine’ was staying.

“Only landlines were working, and, in some places Nauta Hogar (Cuban telecoms company), but there was no data or mobile signal”, a phone user from Sancti Spíritus told this newspaper at 7.40pm when the signal returned to his phone.

“We inform our customers that at the present moment there is a problem with mobile services. We are working as fast as we can to identify and fix the problem”, said the Cuban Telecommunication Company (Etecsa) after the service had been down for an hour.

Reports are still coming in from the Cuban capital to the editorial desk of this newspaper confirming that the mobile telephone service is still not operating. continue reading

Before the regime cut off the service, there were reports on social media of a mass gathering in front of the Grand Packard Hotel, mostly of young Cubans who had heard about Tekashi’s arrival there.

Several sources reported the moment when dollar bills were thrown from the hotel and this was video’d by a number of people.

Tekashi has gone viral on several occasions for throwing dollar bills to his fans or for giving large sums of money to poor families.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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A Review of Books by Cuban Authors Published this January

After consulting with a number of publishers and reviewers, 14ymedio offers here a selection of the new editions of 2023. (Collage)

14ymedio, Madrid, 1 February 2023 — Spanish and Latin American bookshops have already taken delivery of the latest titles by Cuban authors — writers such as Armando Lucas Correa, Abraham Jiménez Enoa and Joel Franz Rosell. Reissues of earlier editions and books by new young writers have also appeared this January. After consulting with a number of publishers and reviewers, 14ymedio offers here a selection of the new editions of 2023.

The Morro lighthouse that overlooks Havana’s port features on the cover of La viajera nocturna (The Night Traveller) (Ediciones B), Armando Lucas Correa’s most recent novel. The book is an emotive exploration of the connections between the individual and history, through the eyes of four women in constant displacement during the twentieth century.

From 1930s Nazi Germany to Batista’s Havana, Correa tells of human beings’ will to survive, and how family memories play a part in the decisions of his protagonists.

The journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa, who has just won the Michael Jacobs Scholarship for Travel Writing with a project about his first year in exile, publishes La isla oculta (The Hidden Island) (Libros del K.O) – a collection of articles with the subtitle Historias de Cuba (Cuban Stories). Jiménez Enoa follows the trail of some of the characters who remain part of Havana life, like the gigolo who’s main aspiration is to leave both his country and his profession, or the suicide who tries to recover a sense of meaning in a harsh city.

Speaking about The Hidden Island, in an interview with Jorge Ramos the author said “What I’m trying to show is the subterranean Cuba, that everyday Cuba which everyone knows, where scarcity happens for a reason, shortages, lack of medicine and lack of human rights — all happen for a reason. After having put together this ’compendium’, it’s obvious to me why people are leaving Cuba”.

Joel Franz Rosell, already known as an author of classic children’s literature in Cuba, won the French Ville de Cherbourg prize in 2000 with his novel Mi tesoro te espera en Cuba (My Treasure Awaits You in Cuba), re-published this month by Verbum. A little girl’s trip to Cuba has the secret motive of searching for a supposed treasure which her great grand uncle hid on the island before escaping from Castro in 1959. The publisher presents it as a story of “adventure, mystery, complicated romance and a variety of challenges to the bonds of friendship”.

This month the same publisher revived the historical and perceptive Memoria sobre la vagancia en la Isla de Cuba (A Report on Vagrancy on the Island of Cuba), by José Antonio Saco. This book, one of the most brutal nineteenth century analyses of Cuban society, discussed the vices, customs and interests of the Creole people, and proposed a way of better organising the country.

With the collection of poetry Los dias (The Days) (Homagno), the Camagüeyan writer Mario Ramírez continues the work he began in 2019 with his book Corolarios (Corollaries). “Romantic experience, all of the plans made over time that go on to trip us up, our resources of faith or of intelligence, this or that truth or doubt — all these, according to Rafael Almanza, are Ramírez’s themes, whose conclusions are that, in the middle of a dismal-seeming reality, there will still be, nevertheless, “a lyre” (musical instrument).

The novel Náufrago del tiempo (Time’s Castaway) (Verbum), by the writer and 14ymedio columnist Xavier Carbonell, is a meditation on the Island’s destiny, a “fable” — according to literary critic Roberto González Echevarría — whose protagonist encounters “a labyrinth of symbols, lost paradises, monasteries, pirate ships and ruined cities”.

Since the pandemic the Island has suffered a publishing crisis, and, although a recovery might be signalled by the 31st Havana International Book Fair (the Cuban Book Institute promised to market 4,000 titles), it’s unlikely that the work of Cuban publishers will be in the forefront of the event.

Dedicated to Colombia this year, as an invitee country, and to the theme of “inclusive reading”, the fair will be held during the period 9-19 February in its regular settings: in San Carlos de la Cabaña castle and its surroundings, and in Havana’s Historic Centre.

Among the hundred-year-old writers who will be celebrated at the event are Fina García Marruz – who died in 2022 aged 99 — and the geographer and explorer Antonio Núñez Jiménez. Homage will also be paid to Julio Travieso Serrano, recipient of the 2021 National Literature Prize, and the librarian Araceli García Carranza.

During the fair, the winners of the 2023 Alejo Carpentier Prize and the 2023 Nicolás Guillen Prize will be presented. The 2022 storytelling winners were Rogelio Riverón, for Cuarenta vasos de vodka (Forty Glasses of Vodka); Francisco López Sácha, for the novel Voy a escribir la eternidad (I’m Going to Write Eternity); and Joaquín Borges Triana, author of the essay Socorro, no soy subversivo (Help! I’m Not a Subversive). The winner of the Nicolás Guillén Prize was Carlos Esquivel, author of the poetry collection La guagua de Babel (The Babel Bus).

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Horoscopes, Divorces and Bikinis

Vogue’s iconic new year cover in 1974, photographed by David Bailey, featuring actress Anjelica Huston and the designer Manolo Blahnik. (Pinterest)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 29 January 2023 — It must be 15 or 16 years since I last flicked through the pages of a celebrity magazine. I remember the sparky covers with their 1990’s celebrities — Liv Tyler, Uma Thurman or Andy García — a bikini on the front page and the headlines were always about the mysterious reappearance of some actor, or a duchess’s secret, or a millionaires lover, or the second to last royal scandal.

These days, all serious and grown up now, I go down to the news kiosk in search of some bread or a literary supplement, and when I see the celeb mags I feel a wave of nostalgia. The covers no longer feature Angelina Jolie but Ana de Armas. Princess Diana has been replaced by Princess Leonor, Cher by Dua Lipa and Tom Cruise by Thimothée Chalamet, which, if we are even half awake, is almost an improvement.

I don’t know how all the mothers, grandmothers, aunties and their friends used to get all these mags through the customs and the censorship of the Island. To run their fingers over the dazzling pages, to admire Brad Pitt’s biceps or catch up with the latest diet to beat hypertension was their way of being transgressive, of staying young and of defying their parents, husbands or grandparents with this rather chaste print-based version of sexuality.

We too, still young boys, hoped that no one saw us cutting out a lingerie advert or a centrefold poster of Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer or some chick in Karl Lagerfeld’s service. All those exotic names, the perfect face make-up, the long suntanned legs, the supernatural cleavages and the feline eyes, they fixed themselves upon our retinas and, I can guarantee, they will never leave them.

But it didn’t stop there. The models, singers and actresses, the scandals and heartbreaks were only the mere surface of the wider universe that those fifty pages covered. Every celeb mag, as we discovered later — whilst in search of tricks (always useless) for seducing our first girlfriends — was a tiny encyclopaedia. continue reading

Following the contents page and adverts for Coca Cola, Victoria’s Secret and Rolex — yet more names of remote and unachievable things — came the news of celebrities’ love lives. The gossip columns were the perfect polar opposite to the political press, they explained the economic climate better and without numbers and put on record all the drunken women, divorces and rumours that would later be turned into novels, songs and plays.

Once the appetite for gossip had been satisfied then came the diet advice and only after that, the recipes. Cooking tips, new types of blender, the top ten brands of oven, how to decorate your patio to be a hostess for a ’brunch’ (but what was a ’brunch’?). As diligent as ants, the family set about an impossible project: trying to translate advice from a capitalist world to a ’sackcloth and ashes’ socialist one. A stuffed duck had to be adapted to a chicken as skinny as Cindy Crawford; the house wine passed for a Moët & Chandon; and the rusty wheel of the Singer sewing machine would spin tirelessly to try and achieve the style of a Valentino or a Versace.

When ill-fortune took hold there was no more pressing a remedy than the horoscope or the prophesies of that rather camp Walter Mercado, who appeared to be the product of a union between Elton John and Barbara Streisand. You only had to hear our mothers talking: “I read that this month some expected money would come our way”, “When it’s full moon, don’t get mixed up with other people’s business”, “You will feel vital and full of energy”, “Love will come knocking at your door on Friday, don’t hold back”.

Finally, on a hot Sunday afternoon it was time to open the magazine just before the classified ads, where there were the five, or ten, serialised chapters from the novel by Corín Tellado, the ubiquitous and harmless pornographer, as he was described by Cabrera Infante.

Taurus or Capricorn, alchemy or astrology, pig or rabbit, sunflower or olive oil, bikini or underwear, tracksuit or sarong; life was a constant dilemma of choice between things we had never even seen, and the magazines — the authorised opinion of Queen Elizabeth or of Keanu Reeves — helped us out in our theoretical predicament.

What we didn’t know [as kids] was that this whole microcosm was dependent upon a crude and secretive market. The magazines didn’t arrive home free of charge. They were rented by the day, they were traded for a bunch of bananas or a bottle of tomato pureé, certain titles became collector’s items and they were carefully looked after. Many female friends were ostracised for not returning a copy in time or for having ripped the cover. In an austere and monotonous country, that particular bastard genre of journalism was our only connection with the other world. Any infraction or theft would unleash a war.

Thanks to poor literature, our childhood got to become technicolour — as Nabokov used to say — and not black and white. Because of this, everytime I see the seductive and aggressive magazine covers, calling out like sirens, I wonder whether the termites have yet ground up the copies that I left back at my house.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Warnings of Cuba Transitioning into a ‘Mafia State’ Much Like Putin’s

The agreement between Cuba and Russia will facilitate the future hegemony of Moscow over the Cuban economy, Cuba Siglo 21 [21st Century Cuba] has warned. (Presidencia)14ymedio, Havana, 22 January 2023 — The creation of a Centre for Economic Transformation — the agreement reached last Friday between Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the chief of the Cuba-Russia Business Council, Boris Titov Yurievich — confirms the transition from a “model with a nationalised economy” to the blueprint for “a Russian mafioso market”, according to the think-tank Cuba Siglo 21 .

The independent Cuban civil society organisation with its HQ in Madrid emphasised that this agreement expresses the “clear decision by the elite” on the Island to make economic transformations under the direction of the Kremlin, that’s to say the “standardisation will facilitate the future hegemony of Moscow over the economy”.

The NGO said that when we talk of mafia states, we mean “countries in which a kleptocratic and autocratic elite exercises absolute power to promote its own interests over national interests”, which is detailed in the report, published on 14 January — Cuba: From Communism to Mafia State.

In this report it is shown that the “subjugation” of Havana by Moscow will result in “the new dominant class being a kleptocratic and autocratic oligarchy” that controls the greatest wealth in the country for its own benefit. Raúl Castro, it says, “expanded the oligopoly of the State entity Gaesa, thus strangling the incipient enterprise sector”.

The report warns that Cuba is initiating a transition towards a mafia state market, much like Putin’s. The NGO reminds us that as part of the agreement between Cuba and Russia it was announced that the aim is to prepare “economic transformations in Cuba based on the development of private business”, which would open the market to the Russians. continue reading

Cuba Siglo 21 explained that this model will “liberate market relations but put them under the hegemony of an oligarchy” and will be organised in such a way that it will “not be free and competitive”. The organisation said that although many will seemingly be able to participate, “it is nevertheless guaranteed that only the oligarchy’s chosen few from the political establishment will rise to the top”.

In the NGO’s opinion this accord is a “provocation” in that it came about in the same week that there were conversations in Havana between the Cuban and American governments.

“We have to keep in mind that the proposition of creating a major economic agreement between the two countries comes at the height of the Kremlin’s war of agression against Ukraine and the growing impact of western sanctions against Russia”, Cuba Siglo 21 pointed out.

To remove Cuba from the list of countries that do not collaborate in the fight against terrorism “will mean that after this renewed public alliance with Moscow, Cuban banks will be able to launder money” and that they will be able to provide effective support to Putin’s financial manoeuvres in avoiding western sanctions.

Boris Titov Yurievich, the independent organisation said, is a businessman and politician who “specialises in creating market economies compatible with regimes dominated by autocratic elites”.

This Wednesday, Titov, as part of this alliance, emphasised the start of a “strong exchange effort” at the level of intergovernmental commission, different ministries and other bodies, and the businessmen of his country, on the instructions of Putin, with the principal objective of “developing bilateral relations from all points of view”.

The Cuban government has shown interest in importing Russian fertiliser, gasoline and wheat, the Russian ministry of the economy reported at the end of the bilateral intergovernmental commission held in Moscow before the Cuban president’s visit.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Nobody Understands the ‘Algorithms’ of the Cuban Peso Stores

She slides her hand along until she finds her designated shopping date, but then looks further to find that all she can buy is two packets of picadillo [ground meat]. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 18 January 2023 – She traces along the notice board with her finger. “This one’s my store”, she whispers as her forefinger reaches the sales schedule of a shop in the outskirts, in Calle Galiano, Havana. She slides her hand along until she finds her shopping date and then looks further to find that she can only buy two packets of picadillo [ground meat]. After having figured out the complicated method being used, Nancy has ended up frustrated and without hope once again.

“You need to have a degree to be able to understand these Cuban peso stores*”, the woman complained on Wednesday morning after deciphering the convoluted process of getting basic supplies like frozen chicken, detergent or sausages. As the months have gone by, the mechanism for buying products and paying for them in the national currency has become more and more complex. “If a foreigner came up and read this he’d think we’d all gone mad, completely mad”, the lady moaned.

Five years ago it was convertible pesos that opened the doors to the best selection of goods, but today, as well as the money, you need also to pay with high levels of stress and time in order to get hold of whatever food ingredients you need. In the inexact science of the state market, very often there’s a lack of logic and too many corrupt employees, too many re-sellers, and too often the phrase “we don’t have any”. The rationing algorithm ends more often with hunger than with satisfaction.

With doctorates in absurd business practice and degrees in poverty, the Cuban people have studied an infinite number of courses at the university of misery. The qualification awarded brings them more shame than pride. There are days when, after hours of waiting and a hard mental effort to unscramble all the bureaucratic speak, one is limited to getting hold of maybe just a pack of sanitary napkins, or a litre of vegetable oil.

*Translator’s note: A “peso store” is a store that accepts payment in Cuban pesos — the currency in which Cubans are paid their wages. An “MLC” — also called a “dollar store” — is a store that accepts payment only in moneda libremente convertible (freely convertible currency) such as dollars or euros, which Cubans acquire be receiving remittances from family or friends abroad.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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In New Shop in Havana, ‘Thaba’, You Can Look at the Products but Not Buy Them for the Moment

Queue/line in front of Thaba’s shop in Havana on Wednesday. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 19 January 2023 — On the day following its opening, which was announced with great fanfare by the official press on Tuesday, the shop owned by the Thaba company in the Havana district of Cerro was already being subjected to an audit. This opening had brought with it much expectation as it was anticipated that there would be items such as gloves on sale, or masks, backpacks or caps — things that are very difficult to find on the Island — at low prices and in pesos.

“You can’t buy anything at the moment because they’re auditing the shop”, explained the man calling himself the administrator as he stood in the shop doorway on Wednesday and addressed the crowd that had gathered there since the early hours. And then he added, grumpily, in the manner of an official from the Ministry of the Interior, that: “You can come in and have a look but you mustn’t interrupt in any way what they’re doing in there”.

The majority of those who were waiting turned away, but others, curious, accepted the offer. Inside the tiny shop a number of them took out their phones to take photos of the products and their prices but they were sternly warned by an employee: “You can take photos but you mustn’t put them on social media”.

A modern electronic register stood out on the counter. Payments can’t be made in cash, the employees explained, but only by using the EnZona or TransferMovil apps.

The main attraction of the shop is, without a doubt, rubber gloves (at 70 pesos), unavailable in Cuba for a long time. Apart from that, the range is limited to several backpacks, a few caps — all with Cuban flags — and masks.

To the disappointment of those who entered, the facemasks weren’t the surgical type — despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of the nationally produced blue masks (azulitas) are piled up in state producer Gardis’s warehouse — but instead they are cloth ones, and priced at 30 pesos each.

In the shop, a leather apron reaches 1,400 pesos, whilst a belt, of the kind worn by dock workers and heavy goods handlers, costs 400, a bag 800 and a durable small suitcase, 2,000.

Everything comes from the state company Thaba, dedicated to the production, in different factories across the country, of “protective equipment of all kinds”, including gloves, aprons, wristbands, bags, sunshades and tents. The company has also been designated to produce baseball gloves.

“So many potbellies came here yesterday for this nonentity?” a woman commented as she left the shop, disillusioned, alluding to the high functionaries who inaugurated the shop on Tuesday, including the first secretary of Havana, Luis Antonio Torres Iríbar. “Soon they’ll even be inaugurating with big fanfares a state shopping trolly full of Slushie drinks”. continue reading

Located in Calle Suzarte, in the district of Palatino, the establishment’s objective is, according to Tribuna de La Habana, “to satisfy the population’s needs, looking for ways to make prices competitive”. The official statement emphasises this last point, reiterating that costs will be “overall lower than the informal market, those of the TCP (self employed workers) and the new types of non-state management”.

The opening of a new pesos shop in the middle of an economic crisis which is gripping the Island is an increasingly rare event. If we add the presence of the highest party leader in the city, the expectation created among potential customers was quite high, but it only took a few hours for any excitement to disappear.

The parade of officials didn’t end with Torres Iríbar: on Wednesday, the Minister for Communications, Mayra Arevich Marín, visited the shop “to test the use of electronic payments in Cuban pesos, facilitated via the platforms Transfermóvil and Enzona”, according to the Thaba company’s Facebook page.

On the same day that Arevich congratulated the employees on their skill with the payment technology, a dozen customers became frustrated outside the shop doorway because an audit was stopping the sale of goods inside. “What starts badly, ends badly”, concluded an elderly man who decided to retrace his steps and come back another day.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The Cuban Regime is Cruel to the Family of Luis Robles, ‘The Young Man With the Placard’

Yindra Elizastigui and her son Lester Fernández, brother of Luis Robles. (Collage)

14ymedio, Havana, 16 January 2023 — Yindra Elizastigui, mother of Luis Robles, “the young man with the placard”, reported on Monday that her younger son, Lester Fernández, has been detained since 19 December and is currently being held in the Valle Grande central penitentiary in Havana. Via a Facebook Live link the mother said that they were accusing the young man of “an illegal attempt to leave the country”, as he was arrested whilst building a boat.

“They didn’t arrest him at sea”, she stressed, after leaving the Provincial Tribunal in Havana. “The border guards gave him a 7,000 peso fine”, according to what they told Yindra. The seven others who were arrested with her son were fined 3,000 pesos and “they have all been free to go about their business since that day”, the woman said.

Yindra Elizastigui said that the way in which they brought the charges against her son is a clear “reprisal for being the brother of Luis Robles, who is suffering an unjust imprisonment”.

Lester Fernández was arrested and taken to the police station in Cojímar. His mother tells us that in this place the first question that the State Security officer asked him was whether he was the brother of Luis Robles, because the surname Elizastigui is very rare on the Island. continue reading

The young man’s mother doesn’t understand why they transferred Lester from Cojímar to Villa Marista, State Security’s centre of operations. “Why did they take him there? Why didn’t they release him like they did the others that they’d arrested that day?

She only hopes that they don’t accuse Lester of being the “leader, the instigator, the one who paid for everything: food, fuel and everything that they found” for the building of the boat.

“It seems it’s not enough for them to make me suffer for one son, and now they have the other one”.

“Enough now. I won’t give up until I see them set free”, she posted on the same social media page, along with two photos of the boys, after she had gone live. “Freedom for my sons Luis Robles Elizastigui and Lester Fernández Elizastigui and for all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience”, she demanded.

The mother of Robles has gained notoriety on social media since she started to denounce the unjust imprisonment of her son Luis Robles and the maltreatment he has suffered in prison. The woman reported on her first Facebook Live last June that Robles had received constant ill treatment, such as being photographed unclothed and against his will.

This denouncement by Yindra was made a few months after learning about the sentence of five years in prison for the youth, condemned for demonstrating peacefully on 4 December 2020, on the central boulevard of Calle San Rafael in Havana, with a banner in his hands asking for the end to repression and freedom for the Cuban rapper Denis Solís.

“Perhaps a lot of the people who are watching and listening to me will say that I took a long time to speak out because it’s a year and six months since my son Luis Robles was jailed, unjustly I believe, and I know many other believe that too”, she said. “I have dared to go live today because I am outraged and disturbed by what is happening to my son”.

Robles is currently serving his sentence in the maximum security prison Combinado del Este.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Havana, Without the Sunshine’s ‘Make-Up’

The man had to drain the pathway because the water “is very cold” and it’s already starting to rise higher and take away the two rubbish bins near his house. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 14 January 2023 — There was a warning of its arrival ever since the early hours of Saturday. From dawn onwards the gusts of wind and the cold drizzle marked the first day in 2023 in which Habaneros could be sure that a little bit of winter had indeed arrived. On the seafront avenue Malecón, the traffic continued to circulate towards the zone closest to Calle Paseo; however, in El Vedado the ingress of seawater forced the closure to traffic.

“The water’s rising fast”, a local resident complains. The man had to drain the pathway because the water “is very cold” and it’s already starting to rise higher and take away the two rubbish bins near his house. The flooding is bad news for someone who spends hours waiting in a nearby shop to buy the sausages and picadillo [ground meat]that had finally arrived after weeks of delay.

A grey Havana with winds and temperatures below 20C is much less frequently photographed and written about than when there are blue skies and the sea’s like a millpond — which is how it’s seen in the paintings sold to tourists and in all the travel agents’ publicity photos. Talking of cold fronts: sometimes you might see pictures of the waves which crash over the sea wall of the Malecón or of the sea’s assault against the Morro lighthouse, but much less often will you see pictures of the murkiness that sticks to the city — a city where these cold fronts have switched off the colours.

The cracks in the walls seem wider, the holes in the roads deeper, and the people smaller, dressed in overcoats several sizes too big or in threadbare jackets. When the mercury falls, the city takes on a certain sincerity, because without the sun’s “make-up”, all of its shadows begin to emerge.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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In Cuba, ‘There Isn’t Any’, Period.

“There isn’t any”, it read. And that was it. No explanation, and no telephone number to ring. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 13 January 2023 — In Havana it’s normal to find signs all over the place, offering articles or services. Written by hand, more often than not with spelling errors on an old scrap of cardboard with stains on it — from which one deduces it’s at the end of its useful life — these signs announce all those things which are difficult to find in the state-run shops. The most common one is for the sale of ice, but also many other things — as long as it doesn’t lead to problems with the authorities — from mouse poison to apartments, from plumbing services to fumigation.

One of these signs, attached to a balcony in the Havana district of Cayo Hueso, caught the attention. “There isn’t any”, it read. And that was it. No explanation, and no telephone number to ring. “There isn’t any”, as if that covered just about anything and everything, encapsulating in one brief phrase the entire state of the country. There isn’t any gas, there isn’t any bread, there isn’t any chicken, there isn’t any sugar, there isn’t any ham, there isn’t any transport, there isn’t any freedom. In Cuba, there isn’t any. Period.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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New Houses in a Ruined Neighbourhood for Victims of the Hotel Saratoga Explosion

The new houses for victims of the Hotel Saratoga explosion stand out among their surroundings. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 12 January 2023 – The residents who lived in the buildings at Zulueta 508 and 512 adjacent to the Hotel Saratoga have gone from having one of the best views in the capital to a view of the ruins which surround their new homes. After the tragedy on 6 May 2022, which caused them to lose their homes when the historical luxury building exploded due to a gas leak, those affected are now going to have a roof over their heads again, but the good news ends there.

On Avenida de España, better known as Calle Vives, between the streets of Carmen and Figuras, there are eight new houses which have been given to some of the victims of the Saratoga explosion, in which 47 people lost their lives. According to the official press, the buildings are “almost ready” and their new occupiers “may help in the finalisation of electrical details”.

Tribuna de La Habana published the news on Wednesday, detailing that in the houses they have used a system of ’formwork’ known as FORSA, for which they use precast concrete, and there’s a cistern for guaranteeing the water supply. “This Wednesday marks another day for demonstrating that with constancy, organisation and control, any target can be reached”, concludes the extremely short article, surrounded by close-up photos of the new buildings.

But you only need to zoom out a little bit to see the future occupants’ new reality. The surrounding houses are on the point of collapse, if they haven’t collapsed already, and there’s a stench which fills the streets of a district which, despite being in Old Havana, lacks any attractive features and hardly any tourists venture there. continue reading

Whereas before, they only needed to step outside of their homes to find themselves just a few metres from the restored Capitolio, the Brotherhood Park, the main taxi rank in the city, or the shops on Calle Monte and the restored areas around the hotels near to Central Park — now, their surroundings are much less pleasant.

As a street which takes you to Havana’s Central Railway Station, Calle Vives once had its fashionable heyday, due particularly to a constant flow of rail travellers and merchandise. However, with the passage of time this area suffered a deterioration of its building stock — via a decline in the Island’s rail system — and a disdain shown to it by plans for restoration of the Historic Centre, which have left this part of the city forgotten.

Now more of a neighbourhood with a bad reputation, Atarés lies among some of the the least valued districts of Old Havana, and not only because of its wrecked buildings and its potholed streets and its puddles of sewage water, but also because of its frequent problems in the water supply, which forces many residents to bring water in from other areas.

On one corner, a man selling chopos hesitates when a buyer asks him if they’re over-spicy. “Doesn’t matter — the customer concludes — I’ll have to eat them anyway, ’cause I don’t have anything else”. All the passers-by are residents of this forgotten corner of Havana, where the poverty feels even worse when compared to the more privileged area from where its new neighbours are about to arrive.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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From 23 January Cuba will Require all Tourists to Complete a Digital Registration

Check-in desks at José Martí International Airport in Havana (14ymedio)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Havana, 12 January 2023 — Cuba will require all travellers to fill out an online form from the end of January (which will include personal and health related information) up to 48 hours before travelling, authorities on the Island announced on Thursday.

The measure was published on Thursday in the Gaceta Oficial and it will come into force from one minute past midnight on 23 January. The announcement had been made in a press conference by Rita María García, director of Aerial Transport and International Relations at the Cuban Institute for Civil Aviation.

The registration will be made on the “D’Viajeros” platform, which has been working in a test phase and which has so far been used by 1.7 million travellers.

The previous option of filing in a paper form on arrival at the airport will no longer be available. continue reading

“The filling out of forms in advance will minimise physical contact and shorten a traveller’s time in the epidemiological surveillance queue/line, which will help to avoid bottlenecks”, said Carmelo Trujillo, head of Sanitary Control at the Ministry of Public Health.

Once the form has been completed, including information about possible contacts with Covid-19 infection, the platform will generate a QR code which will be required to be shown at check-in of the airport of departure, as well as in Cuba on arrival.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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In the Chaos of the Cuban Consumer Registry Offices, ‘The Dead Return to Pick up Their Bread’

The framed photo, dominating the Consumer Registry Office in Calle Juan Alonso, can be seen clearly by the crowd in the street. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 9 January 2023 — The Office for the Registry of Consumers (Oficoda) on Calle Juan Alonso, Luyanó, Havana, was in chaos on Monday morning. Scores of people crowded round the establishment trying to resolve the problems they were having with their ration books.

“This year you must not lose your ration book under any circumstances. If you lose it again it won’t be replaced until next year”, warned an official in a loud voice, without clarifying whether you’d lose your right to buy rationed food if you did lose the book. “So are they going to write it on a piece of cardboard or what?” complained a woman, who reluctantly let pass, in front of her, a mother and her tired little boy who wouldn’t stop crying. It was already eleven in the morning and only three people had been attended to, while it was obvious that there were four other employees inside the office doing nothing.

If that were not enough, the process of getting the new ration book can be delayed by up to 17 days, when you used to be able to get it on the spot.

The lack of paper, which once again has caused the delay in the issuing of the new books, has added to a general disorder so bad that some unbelievable errors are being made. Like the one that has affected Caty, also a resident of Luyanó.

Some months ago she was pressured by the authorities to de-register her mother who had recently passed away, with the threat of a fine if she failed to do so. When she picked up this year’s book she couldn’t believe her eyes: they had once again printed her mother’s name in the book. “They told me I had to go back to Oficoda and correct the mistake, but I’m not going to correct anything. I did what they asked me to do, which was to de-register my mother. If they’ve put her name back on it, that’s their problem”, she told this newspaper. “The way things are going, anything can happen — even the dead come back to pick up their bread”. continue reading

The Juan Alonso Oficoda has been the subject of residents’ complaints for days. “Unbelievably, I’ve been coming to this office over three separate days to verify the information in my ration book, which has been retained by them, so I can’t even get basic supplies”, Zonia Suárez, a customer, complains, clarifying that all her data is in fact correct and that everyone registered in her book is alive and resident in Cuba.

The woman explains that the queues/lines for this process start to form at four in the morning and that they shut the office at midday. The picture she paints is similar to the one that 14ymedio found at Juan Alonso: “There’s a whole lot of errors in hundreds of ration books and the people who are supposed to be sorting this out are elderly and rather slow and there’s only one desk there which blocks the entrance to the building so that everyone has to crowd outside, including pregnant women and older people, so that arguments break out”.

Suárez says she asked them who gives the instruction to hold back basic food supplies from clients when the errors are not their fault but the fault of the authorities — and they replied: “it comes from the top”.

“I imagine it must be from Jupiter or Mercury then”, the woman added, wryly, “because no one who lives in Cuba could give themselves the luxury of doing that unless they had the right conditions to take similar measures with those who have only that book to get sustenance.

On the other hand, even those who don’t have any errors in their books are equally annoyed, owing to the reduction in the rationed products that are on offer. “People are ignorant of the reduction in the number of products that will be sold for cash in Havana shops where people use the ration book that’s given to every family. The price difference is significant, though many goods fall somewhere in the middle”, complains one young man from Central Havana in a store which put the January allocation on sale this Monday and doesn’t even have the new ration books available. “Last month they gave out four packets of picadillo [ground meat] and now they don’t even give out two, and it’s the same with sausages and olive oil. In my mother’s shop they haven’t given out any white sugar, only three pounds of rice per person”.

These are bad times — the worst — for the rationing system that the Island has been suffering under since 1962. Because if this weren’t enough, the new system of “cycles”, established by the authorities in Havana on 1 December, which is dependent on “the availability of produce” in the state run chains Tiendas Caribe and Cimex, has caused a situation in which even the January allocation is not yet available for many families.

“In our store they haven’t been able to even start the distribution of the January allocation because there are still hundreds of families which haven’t bought their December one yet. They can’t start selling the current allocation until the last one has all been bought”, warns a resident from Revolution Square district.

In Luyanó, it wasn’t until yesterday that Caty was able to buy her December supply. “So I’ll get my January one in February”, she says, resignedly. From the crowd in the street one can clearly see the framed photo that dominates the Oficoda in Calle Juan Alonso: Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel, together with the slogan: “We are Cuba, we are continuity”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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No Dreams, No Entertainment, No Work, This is How the Young Live in Villa Clara, Cuba

They split the cost of a couple of bottles of rum, not too expensive, and look for an empty bench near to the bandstand in the park. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yankiel Gutiérrez Faife, Camajuaní, 8 January 2023 — Nearly all their friends have left, but Javier and Érica, two young people from Santa Clara, are still in Cuba. Leaving will be almost inevitable. With the Island’s economic situation, having children isn’t an option. Besides, at twenty-five years of age, where are they going to find a decent job, a house, or an environment less hostile?

A few weeks ago, after having scraped together enough money, they decided to celebrate the anniversary of their engagement at the Conuco Grill restaurant. The restaurant’s barbecue and its creole atmosphere have become legendary in Santa Clara. Javier and Érica reserved a table and ordered steaks, some salad and rice, and beers. Just as they had begun to eat, there was a power cut.

The owner, in order to ease the frustration of his customers a little bit, put lighted candles on each table. “The service was brilliant, and we were really happy with the food at the restaurant, but the power cut destroyed the magic of the evening”, Javier told this newspaper. “You try not to blame the waiters or the restaurant owner, because it’s not their fault, but the fault of those above“.

Nevertheless, says Javier, the power cut didn’t affect the bill at all: the couple ended up paying 1,360 pesos in total. After the meal Conuco Grill’s owner explained to them that intermittent power cuts are already a common occurrence and their impact on his business has been brutal. He has thought about buying a portable generator but the restaurant doesn’t yet make enough profit to be able to afford such an investment.

More than one year after he started Conuco Grill, his only option for solving the problem is to try and fit in with the timetable of scheduled power cuts that Unión Eléctrica publishes for the province. But, he tells us, even this data isn’t reliable.

Forty kilometres from Santa Clara , in Taguayabón, a group of young people the same age as Javier and Érica are trying to decide which village to go to for the evening. If they do manage to get a bus to Remedios or Caibarién they could grab a snack in its colonial streets or let off steam on the waterfront. However, more probable is that they’ll have to make do with going only as far as Camajuaní, and even then they’ll probably have to walk home. continue reading

Eventually they manage to get a lift from a truck and leave Taguayabón behind – barely illuminated, the village passes the night in a graveyard-like silence, as no one can afford to organise a house party, roast a pig or even share a bottle of rum. As far as the young people are concerned, the usual thing is to meet on a bench on the squalid main street above the bridge, or hang around waiting for someone to put some music on.

The truck drops them on Independence Street, opposite a cinema converted into a warehouse and the town dump. They decide to split the cost of a couple of bottles of rum, not too expensive, and look for an empty bench near to the bandstand in the park. You can hear them singing, between swigs of liquor, until dawn.

Michel, one of the group, arrived at the village’s discoteque on Saturday night and was met with a power cut. “It’s already lasted for two hours”, they told him. Someone suggested they go to the bandstand and said they’d bring a speaker to connect to their phone to entertain themselves for the evening. Michel himself collected 300 pesos from each member of the group and bought a bottle of Havana Club and an energy drink — Tigón — as a mixer.

Between sips from plastic cups, they began to share how angry they felt. One of them said that his grandmother, called Josefa, wanted to celebrate his nineteenth birthday with him when he came home on leave from military service, as he had done that Saturday. She went to buy some whiskey and some beers”, he said, “but the only shops that were open, on the main street, didn’t have any power. She waited a bit, it came back on and she bought the stuff… but when she got home she found there was another power cut”.

Another of the young men, David, told them that his dad had taken his little brother to the Rainbow park in Santa Clara, and when they arrived there was no electricity. The boy waited for the rides to come back to life, but in vain. “All they could do was walk around”, David complained.

It’s better to go back to Taguayabón before midnight. Otherwise, you have to walk via the road between Camajuaní and Remedios, in complete darkness.

Camajuaní ’s situation – which is replicated in all of Villa Clara’s municipalities – is deplorable. Years ago there were at least six restaurants, a discoteque, several bars and cafeterias, all state owned. These days they’ve become ramshackle buildings, practically abandoned and with little to offer, or they’re on the point of being remodelled to cater for the little tourism there is.

Once they’re refurbished they will be out of reach of the ordinary citizen, let alone the younger people, whose costs are doubled if they want to spend time with their partner and whose parents aren’t able to permit themselves any additional luxuries.

“The worst thing is that we’ve stopped thinking about our dreams, just in order to dedicate ourselves to survival”, Jaime explains — he’s a young waiter from Santa Clara. He feels stuck, bored with everything, ruled by routine and poorly paid, and he feels he’s going nowhere in life. “Nothing in sight, no destination”, he says, ironically.

One frustrating thing, claims Jaime, is that the older folks think that the current generation is “badly adjusted” because they criticise the government but then want to leave the country instead of “resisting” like they’ve been taught to do. It’s quite common to be “tormented” with stories about the Special Period and to hear the old worn-out saying: “What have you got to complain about? – you have it better than we did in those times”.

The lack of decent employment opportunities is obvious. “You can do anything to earn your living”, Jaime accepts, “but that’s not the same as fighting to achieve your dreams”. Many young people say that not only are they unable to plan to have children, but as things stand, nor do they want to. “If we bring children into the world with all this going on, their lives will certainly be worse than ours”.

What’s the solution?: “Leave Cuba”, Ariel replies without any doubt. He had been decided to leave since he was very young. “I thought the situation would carry on the same and that I would be able to put up with it for a few more years, but I couldn’t”, he tells us. Like thousands of other Cubans he crossed the Darién jungle in Panama towards the United States and today he lives there with his wife and her father. “It seems impossible that anything could get any worse but it still takes us by surprise”, he says in an exchange with his friends who stayed in Villa Clara.

“If you’re against the government it only brings you problems to remain here”, says Jorge, 23, resident of Camajuaní. His parents live in the USA and he remained with his grandmother and his uncle, but they also are now on the point of leaving. “Continuity is now no longer an option for the young”, he says, alluding to the regime’s slogan of keeping firm to their ideological position and of not changing anything.

“Well, I don’t get into politics”, explains David, who started to study medicine a few years ago. “I could lose a career which has cost me a lot of sacrifice. I haven’t gone hungry and gone without only to lose it all in the end”. And he adds, half jokingly: “When I graduate I’m off to Haiti. They live better there than in Cuba”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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State Security Fines and Blackmails Users of Social Media in Cuba

Decree 370, known as the “whip law,” monitors Cubans’ social media content. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 7 January 2023 — Yanara called her best friend and said to her in code: “My son’s unwell, could you bring me a thermometer?” This was just a strategy to get her old university friend to visit her so she could then tell her what was really on her mind. Two days earlier she had been called to a police station in El Vedado, Havana.

“At first, when they summoned me, I thought it had something to do with my business, because I’m self-employed and I sell various things from a street stall”, she told her friend. “But when they took me to a small room I realized it had something to do with State Security. There were three plain-clothes officers, all very young”.

Between those four walls, Yanara found out that that the secret police had been monitoring her Facebook account. “They had pages and pages of everything that I had shared or written on my time-line, at least over the last year”, she said. “They began by asking me why I was using this way of criticising the government when there were already existing mechanisms like the People’s Power and accountability meetings”.

After an hour of recriminations and threats over her postings, Yanara left the station with a fine of 3,000 pesos, which she says she’s going to pay. “I think it’s unjust but I’m really scared because I have a little boy, a business to run and a mother who has no one to look after her but me”, she told her friend.

The police justified the fine citing the law passed in July 2019 “concerning digitisation of Cuban society”, the Decree 370, known as the “whip law” — a ruling which claims to “elevate technological sovereignty for the benefit of society, the economy, security and national defence” and to “counter cyber-aggression”. continue reading

Amongst Yanara’s presumed ’crimes’ were those of “distributing, via public data networks, information contrary to social interests, morals, good behaviour and personal integrity”, which has been compared, as applied to the virtual world, with the crime of “pre-criminal dangerousness”, a legal term which has been used widely against opponents and dissidents.

The content of her posts, which cost her an interrogation and a fine of 3,000 pesos, included memes, some of which ridiculed Miguel Díaz-Canel, comments about the long queues/lines for food and criticism of the deterioration of Havana. “Nothing that you wouldn’t hear said on the street, but they said this type of thing shouldn’t be published on the internet”.

This Habanera, born in the middle of the eighties, likes to keep everything she does under the strictest secrecy. “If this happened to me, who only posts memes and other friendly stuff every now and then, then I imagine there must be lots of other people who’ve also had to pay this fine for saying next to nothing at all”. In the same police station where she was questioned “at least three other youths were waiting with a similar summons”.

There have been plenty of reports circulating since the start of Decree 370, about the imposition of fines for posting certain types of content on social media, but the majority of those reporting these reprisals have been activists, government opponents or independent journalists. It’s indeterminate the number of other people who have been punished in this way but prefer to keep silent.

“I set my Facebook to private and deleted some posts”, says Yanara. “I don’t want any problems and they made it clear that they were going to carry on monitoring everything I write, who I give ’likes’ to, or what I share on my time-line. It shouldn’t be like this on social media, it’s like walking down the street and having a police patrol following you”.

Cristian, a young man from Camagüey who is preparing for university entrance this year, went further. “I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts after I got a verbal summons, supposedly from the director of my pre-university course, but when I arrived at his office there were two State Security officers waiting for me.

The adolescent was questioned about the show of support he’d given on the internet for the 11 July 2021 demonstrators and for “sharing mercenary content”. The secret police threatened him with the whip law and warned him that university entrance was an honour that was only granted to revolutionaries! His Facebook account lasted until that day. Only his family knew about that encounter.

I don’t know whether any of my fellow students have had the same experience, and now when I’m walking down the street I ask myself if other people have also gone through anything similar and said nothing”, Cristian wonders. “I’ve seen friends suddenly disappear off social media and I thought that maybe they were wrapped up in some project or other but after that interrogation I’ve come to believe that they also must have got a summons for what they were posting”.

Decree 370 isn’t the only law to try and put the brakes on citizens’ criticisms on the internet. In August 2021 Decree 35 came into force which penalised anyone who gave voice to ’fake news’ in Cuba, or promoted it, or published offensive or defamatory messages that prejudiced the “prestige of the country”, or “social and ethical damage, or incidents of aggression”.

The law includes a long list of cybersecurity areas, from digital attacks or physical damage to telecommunications systems up to access to, and dissemination of child pornography content, all of which only merit a level of danger which is ’medium or high’. On the other hand, the category “social subversion”, described as actions which attempt to affect public order, is considered ’very high’ risk.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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D Frente Fears that This Year Could be Worse than Last Year for Cubans

La Calzada de Diez de Octubre [10th of October*] Avenue in Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 5 January 2023 – The platform D Frente, made up of activists, intellectuals and opposition groups, sent a message to the Cuban government on Thursday denouncing its responsibility for the visible impoverishment of the Island at the start of 2023.

The message challenged the regime to respond to the “hard reality of the Cubans”, for which they assume that “nothing can be done” to improve the country’s situation. “The next twelve months could be worse than those that have just ended”, says the text.

D Frente explains that the government could take many “political, economical, judicial and social actions” that would improve the conditions of Cuban families in a number of different spheres.

For example, they point to “the liberation of hundreds of men and women prisoners of conscience” and that this involves “human beings, entire families, who are only being punished because of the government’s need for hanging onto power and as a bargaining chip before political negotiations take place with other players”.

This is the first of four fundamental demands that D Frente makes of the government. As well as the “immediate unconditional release of prisoners”, they demand also that they “cease their repression against activists and journalists” and anyone who doesn’t share the Communist Party ideology.

Again, they demand the “end to exile and to measures of political punishment”, a situation framed by the huge exodus of Cuban people which the Island is currently experiencing. Finally, they demand the “recognition of opposition organisations and individuals as having full rights to participate in Cuban society”.

D Frente’s four proposals are, they insist, essential for any future “national reconciliation”. In addition, they assure that they are open to the support of any “democratic governments of the world who might be able to facilitate a process towards a Republic that does not criminalise dissent, recognises political pluralism and advances towards a national reconciliation”. continue reading

The collective stands behind its continued aim of making proposals for resolving the crisis on the Island in all its injunctions, and, as they have confirmed on previous occasions, “to re-establish the Republic”.

In December, using the occasion of the Cuban Catholic Bishops’ Conference proposal of a petition, calling for the release of political prisoners, D Frente sent an open letter to Pope Francis asking him to mediate in favour of this cause.

They asked the Pope to exercise his “good office” to appeal to the Island’s authorities, and reminded him how much the prisoners had suffered from the “criminalisation by the Cuban government of the exercising of universally recognised human rights, such as the liberty of expression, of free association and of peaceful protest”.

The organisation held internal elections between 14 and 19 December and Elena Larrinaga and Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada were chosen as presidents of the Assembly by individual members.

The Coordinating Committee remained the same, with Ileana de la Guardia, Frisia Batista, Manuel Cuesta Morúa, Jorge Masetti and Michel Fernández.

*Translator’s note: Cuba’s War of Independence against Spain began on the 10th of October 1868. It is very common in Cuba, and other Latin American countries, to name streets and (for example) other things after dates.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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