Translating Cuba – Page 228 – English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island

‘The Cuban State No Longer Has Money To Pay Waste Collectors, so I Sell to the Private Companies’

Cooking pots like pressure cookers are made from the processing of cans. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Miguel García, Holguín, 7 January 2023 — Search, collect and crush. Ramón’s day, at age 57, contains those three actions. He makes his rounds through the city center of Holguín, where cans of soft drinks or beer can be more common in the trash. Then, after several days of accumulating, he sells his loot to an intermediary who will take it to a workshop where it is turned into slotted spoons, frying pans, pots and buckets.

“It’s been more than three years since the Raw Materials Recovery Company here had almost no money to pay the collectors, so now I only sell to private companies,” Ramón tells 14ymedio. “Many people have left this job because they earn less and less, and it depends on many things, so everything is very insecure.”

Ramón needs a lot of tourists to arrive in Holguín because they empty thousands of cans a week, and he can “fish” them out from the city’s broken garbage containers. “Now fewer foreigners come, and the soft drinks that are sold almost all come in small bottles, which is not what I pick up. My thing is aluminum.”

On the outskirts of the rustic workshop, the cans that have previously been collected and crushed accumulate. (14ymedio)

Born in 1968, the same year of the Revolutionary Offensive that erased the private sector in Cuba with a stroke of a pen, this holguinero once dreamed of being an engineer, but a traffic accident caused him a head injury that left him with the inability to remember numbers, concentrate and even find his way home in the busy streets of the city. continue reading

“I made a living with whatever appeared, but since 2014 I have been doing this,” he explains. Although the Raw Materials Recovery Company has existed since 1961 on the Island, for decades its operation was nourished by the waste collected by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the State centers in their days of voluntary work, or with the by-products of the State industry.

After the opening to tourism during the crisis of the 90s, not only did travelers arrive but also their waste. Canned beer was no longer a novelty to be sold in hotels, shops and cafes. National soft drinks were no longer distributed in the traditional glass bottles but in the lightest and easiest to handle aluminum containers. It was at that moment that the “can crushers” emerged everywhere.

“I made my neighbors crazy,” acknowledges Luisa, another 81-year-old from Holguin, who was one of the first in the city to take up collecting raw materials on her own. “I would come home with a sack or two and spend the whole afternoon crushing cans, I didn’t let any can get away,” she says. Now she has left the business “because it got very bad.”

For the collectors of 30 years ago, the problems were different. “We didn’t have a license; we had to hide every time a policeman passed by, and people treated us badly because they thought we were all crazy,” Luisa recalls. “Now you can ask for a permit and sell the cans legally in one of the State raw material houses, but there’s hardly any business.”

By 2013 the country already had more than 5,700 people who were registered as self-employed in that occupation

It was the economic easing promoted by Raúl Castro from 2008 that boosted the activity, and by 2013 the country already had more than 5,700 people who were registered as self-employed in that occupation, according to Jorge Tamayo, then director of the state Raw Materials Recovery Company.

“With four or five bags of cans that I sold a month, I earned more than my doctor brother,” Luisa recalls. “We made the slab for this house out of crushed cans, because before it was made of tiles, and it was always wet. I had agreements with the private tourist homes, who gave them to me before throwing them away, and I also made some contacts in hotels to pick them up twice a week.”

Over the years, there were delays in payments. “You took the raw material to the State premises, and they told you that you had to wait for the money.” The State began to decline in the organization of its points of purchase, and the private sector occupied the place left by the increasingly ailing State companies with insufficient resources.

The clandestine factories now absorb most of the cans recovered from the garbage. Many of the owners of these small industries do not even have a license to operate, or, if they have a permit, it only covers a small number of employees under their direction.

Image of a finished lid for a pressure cooker. (14ymedio)

In the People’s Council of San Rafael, Víctor, (his name was changed for this report), says that in his private workshop he has “six permanent workers, although, if the volume of work grows,” he hires new employees. “One manages the oven, three are turners and the other two finish the pieces, throwing away the garbage generated by the whole process and collecting the cans upon arrival,” he explains to this newspaper.

“The State pays 30 pesos per kilogram of aluminum, and you have to empty the cans of any liquid and put them in a well-tied bag. They can be whole or broken, but now they’re buying only two or three times a month because they don’t have a budget,” Víctor explains. “We can pay a little more, at 100 pesos, depending on the need we have, with no delays to collect.”

Víctor clarifies that his workshop buys from intermediaries, who in turn pay between 50 and 60 pesos per kilogram of cans to the collectors who look for the raw material on the streets. “Everyone wins because a relationship is established, and the intermediary is the one who responds to me, the one who shows his face and has to guarantee that the merchandise he sells me is good.”

The arrival of the pandemic, the closure of the borders to tourism and the drop in the number of visitors to the Island have also influenced the number of aluminum cans that are discarded every day. “It’s not like before. There are fewer, and many collectors have left because they can no longer earn the same, plus the prices of food and everything else have risen a lot.”

The arrival of the pandemic, the closure of the borders to tourism and the fall in the number of visitors to the Island have also influenced the number of aluminum cans that are discarded every day

The fall into disgrace of State premises for buying raw materials is evident. On a visit to the 12th Street of Reparto Nuevo Llano, this newspaper found that in mid-December there was only one employee, who warned collectors who arrived that they were not buying due to “lack of money.” In another, located on 28th Street of the Reparto Pueblo Nuevo, the scene was repeated: two workers with their arms crossed due to the absence of a budget.

In Victor’s workshop, however, the coming and going doesn’t stop. “We have a lot of demand for pots, pans, kitchen utensils, buckets, pitchers and many other products we make,” the entrepreneur acknowledges. “Here the oven stays on for a good part of the day, and when a can arrives, it comes out on the other side in the form of a lemon juicer or a ladle.”

“Even people who can buy an electric pressure cooker in MLC [freely convertible currency] also want to have their aluminum pitcher to heat the coffee,” he says. “They are durable things that can be used for many years, and if they are broken it is not a tragedy for the family; they buy another one and that’s that.”

With instruments, also handmade, they produce kitchen utensils out of aluminum. (14ymedio)

The ruin of the State houses for buying raw materials is the result of the national crisis in which Victor and his employees get profits. “With the opening of the MSMEs [small businesses], a few more cans of beer and soft drinks arrived. That makes us happy because the customers buy them; they buy a lot.”

Thrown on a street or inside a garbage container, Ramón’s agile hands will find that empty can left by a tourist or a national. A large, dark stone, taken from a nearby river, helps him reduce it to a thin sheet. Then it goes into the sack, later into the hands of the intermediary and then into the oven.

In her kitchen, the experienced Luisa knows that the slotted spoon she uses to stir the rice once contained beer or Coca-Cola. The path of recycled aluminum that people like her helped to start remains open.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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‘Writers and Artists Under Communism’, a Chronicle About the Cuban Government’s Hatred of Culture

Caption – Alfredo Guevara, Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier talk to Fidel Castro at a reception during the second UNEAC Congress in 1977. (Mario Ferrer/Cubadebate)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, January 6, 2024 — “Down with the apolitical writers! Down with the supermen of literature!” “Their original sin: they are not authentically revolutionary.” “Outside the Revolution, no rights.”

The law of eternal return presides over the tension between the intellectuals and communism. Guevara repeats Castro, and Castro repeats Stalin or Mao. Hundreds of pages can be filled about espionage, shootings, accusations and complicity with “red-flag fascism”. This is demonstrated by the formidable Writers and Artists under Communism (Arzalia), by the Spanish journalist Manuel Florentín.

The vortex has its origin in Lenin, the historian Antonio Elorza explains in his prologue to the volume. In 1905, long before his troops assaulted the Winter Palace, the Bolshevik leader defined what he would do with writers and artists if the revolution materialized. In one of his libels, Lenin openly affirms that the problematic Russian intelligentsia should behave like another “wheel and screw” of the great social watchmaking. For the misfits, exile or bullets.

Since then, the communist regimes of any continent have followed the advice of Moscow. The intellectual must be an “engineer of the soul,” a servant of the State, which will pamper him with perks and recognitions, or he must not exist at all. continue reading

As a reader and imitator of Lenin, Fidel Castro dodged the “problem” of the intellectuals until 1961. By that time, the writers close to the “maximum leader” had already prepared the ground. The well-known “guilt” for not having fought in the Sierra Maestra – of which Guevara knew well how to take advantage – impregnated numerous poems and slogans: “We, the survivors, to whom do we owe survival?” the cultural commissioner Roberto Fernández Retamar wrote early in 1959.

European revolutions failed or were corrupted; the Cuban one was the hope of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Saramago, of Feltrinelli, Sontag and Graham Greene

The “great illusion” of the intellectuals was followed by the “great disenchantment,” says Florentín in the chapter of his book dedicated to Cuba. European revolutions failed or were corrupted; the Cuban one was the hope of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Saramago, of Feltrinelli, Sontag and Graham Greene. Others, such as Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, soon traveled to Havana, invited by the Casa de las Américas.

The disappointment could be seen coming. Politically and militarily, dissident heads had fallen since 1959 itself, with Huber Matos and other senior officials. Castro’s chess was aggressive and incessant, and when it was the writers’ turn, he already had enough power to speak clearly.

The son of communists – and “vaccinated,” he clarified, against the viruses of Moscow – Guillermo Cabrera Infante was sitting at the same table as Castro during his famous Words to the Intellectuals. With a privileged view of the caudillo’s revolver, he soon understood what for several decades the lobotomized intellectuals tried to hide: culture was – and still is – a slave of ideology.

As a minor diplomat in Brussels, Cabrera Infante’s break with the Regime was the loudest and most militant until the arrival of Reinaldo Arenas. For Cabrera Infante, Cuba was “far from God and close to Mefistófeles”; for Arenas, who had a rougher time and life, his was a country of “scoundrels, criminals, demagogues and cowards.”

Cabrera Infante’s break with the Regime was the loudest and most militant until the arrival of Reinaldo Arenas

Florentín dedicates a section to the closure, in 1965, of Ediciones El Puente. Friends of the American poet Allen Ginsberg – who was expelled from Cuba for denouncing the persecution of homosexuals – the young, avant-garde poets were sent to the camps called Military Units to Support Production (UMAP), and, over time, they marched into exile. The cigar wrappers on which Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez wrote his poems from prison are the symbol of a generation.

But nothing better illustrates the tension between Castro and the Cuban intelligentsia than the Padilla case, in 1971, which has been the subject of debate again after the eponymous documentary by Pavel Giroud, with unpublished recordings of that day. Everything that the ideological purge had as a ritual is evident in those images.

Heberto Padilla’s punishment was the initial shot in an “uncomfortable” hunt. Paradiso, from Lezama, was removed from bookstores; Virgilio Piñera and Antón Arrufat saw their careers as playwrights cut off; hundreds of manuscripts were discarded as unpublishable; and Norberto Fuentes – fallen out of favor and rehabilitated several times – had to resort to powerful friends like Gabriel García Márquez to earn Castro’s favor once again, lost when he published Condenados de Condado.

The survival of the Cuban regime is an anomaly. So is its cultural apparatus, composed of bureaucrats and informants whose careers depend on their almost abject loyalty to power. Florentín closes his Cuban chapter with a biographical sketch of the poet Raúl Rivero, forced into exile, a long tradition that began in the 19th century with José María Heredia and continues today with so many writers and artists from the Island.

However, the worst thing – says Florentín – is the naivety, always complicit, of those who defend communist regimes as dreams of freedom. They are not, and Rivero, who suffered several boycotts from young pro-Castro attendees during his conferences in Spain, made it clear: “Their dream is the Cubans’ nightmare.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Three Kings Day in Cuba Accompanied by High Inflation

Stuffed dolls at an open-air market in Havana go for 6,000 pesos apiece.

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Havana, January 6, 2024 — “I didn’t suddenly wake up this morning flush with cash so my children are only getting cookies and soft drinks this year.” This is how one woman summed up her financial situation on Saturday. She and a friend were at the open-air market on Central Havana’s Galiano Street, looking for something to give her children on Three Kings Day. Surrounded by dolls, tiny fire trucks and stuffed animals with Minnie Mouse faces, the two friends perused the items for sale.

“Everywhere you look it’s 3,000, 4,000 or 7,000,” lamented the woman after inquiring about the price of several products. “That Barbie over there costs 6,000 pesos. That’s two months’ pay for me,” she added after asking about a box that also included a couple of changes of clothes and shoes for the lanky plastic body crowned with platinum blonde hair. “For that amount of money she ought to be able talk.”

The vendors brush off the criticisms and refuse to lower their prices. “Expensive?Everything is expensive here in Cuba. Just coming here cost me money in transportation and investment costs,” replied one young man to a father who criticized him for charging 3,000 pesos for a stuffed Pokemon doll. Not far away a brightly colored plastic telephone, with keys that light up and beep when they are pressed, costs 5,000 pesos. “I came here without my daughter because she would be upset if she saw this.”

Although Cuban officials downplayed Three Kings Day celebrations for decades — the most ideological hardliners describe them as evidence of the “capitalist fever of consumerism” — many families have tried to revive the tradition in recent years. Though state-owned stores currently sell few toys, and certainly not expensive ones geared towards this holiday, sales of children’s items have been growing on the informal market and at small, privately owned businesses more recently.

While some parents buy presents weeks in advance, others wait until January 6, hoping to find something at a close-out sale or because they had not been able save up enough money until then to buy a baseball and bat, a water pistol or a small kitchen with cups and pots. But the rise in the cost of living is also having an impact on children’s entertainment. This year, the Three Magi rode into town atop runaway inflation faster than any camel, which makes any gift that a child ultimately receives smaller and more ephemeral.

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From Christmas Dinner to Epiphany Gifts, the Festivities in Cuba Are Paid-for by Emigrants

Many emigrants buy food through e-stores such as Katapulk, Supermarket 23 or Cubamax. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 30 December 2023 — Two bottles of oil, Gouda cheese, 10 pounds of white sugar and a pork leg top the list of food Yoel bought for his family in Cuba this New Year’s Eve from Miami. The Cuban émigré laments, “it’s the same story every December, since 2015”. Without their sacrifice, however, their relatives’ Christmas celebrations in Havana “would be sadder than they already are”.

“This list is just the one that’s meant for my mom. I have to add what I send to my children,” he tells 14ymedio. According to his estimates, the purchases he made through the Katapulk online store amount to almost $400. “I also sent a dozen bottles of beer and a cake, because, if not, it doesn’t feel like a celebration and you always want them to enjoy it”, he says.

“Every year when December approaches I start putting together money to buy food for Cuba. This year, however, the situation was worse, because everything is more expensive and there is nothing there. Before, at least one would send money, and since there was not much inflation or shortages, the family itself could get the ingredients for Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve dinner, plus something that one would buy in virtual stores”, Yoel recalls.

Every end of year’s he tries to send food to his family in Villa Clara so they can have a “decent” holiday

“My brother made his purchase through Cubamax, which has a sales method that allows people who are getting the package to choose the food they want. Coffee, chorizo, pasta, and all kinds of legumes – lentils, red beans, white beans and peas – was what they asked for. It amounted to 22 pounds of things that haven’t been seen in Cuba for a long time,” he adds. continue reading

The situation of Leticia, who has lived in Spain for five years, is similar. Every year’s end she tries to send food to her family in Villa Clara so they can experience “decent” festivities. “This year I bought two pork legs of more than 20 pounds each, for my in-laws’ house and my father’s. My brother from the United States helped me by sending a box of beer and some sweets. In total, everything worked out for us at about 200 euros,” she tells this newspaper.

Since her arrival in the Spain, Leticia has explored different ways to send to Cuba what she buys for her family. “Finally, I send everything I can with friends, and in these cases, I buy things in Miami through my brother, because everything is more expensive from here. I also look for individuals who sell the food within the country and deliver it at home, because in virtual stores they bleed you dry,” she says.

Leticia acknowledges that she is upset that all the money she sends or spends on food for her family “ends up in the hands of the Government”, but at the same time she considers that it would be “very painful” if her family could not enjoy that day of peace. “That is another reason to buy from individuals, but it also has its pitfalls. If you start to think about where they get the pigs they kill, the beer, the cheeses and everything else they sell, you realize that you are probably buying stolen food from some state warehouse or some hotel”, she says.

At the end of the year, she continues, everyone who sells food in Cuba “becomes rich.” “This time, the person who sold me the hams told me that I had to wait several days for mine to be distributed, because he had a long list of people in front of me. In the end, the meat arrived on December 24,” she says.

Irene, another Cuban from Holguín who came to Mexico with a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree, tells 14ymedio about the challenge of sending food to her family by the end of the year. “They don’t pay me much because of the scholarship, so I always prioritize buying items that last, like clothes, shoes or medicine. This way my parents can use all their money to buy food”, she explains.

One of the products most requested by Cubans from their emigrated relatives is coffee. (14ymedio)

At the end of the year, however, “things change, because, in Cuba, we have a tradition of getting together with relatives and celebrating by eating congrí (a traditional dish of rice and beans cooked together), roast pork meat and opening at least one bottle of cider. There is none of that in Cuba, and “you want your family to have a good time despite everything, so you end up spending an arm and a leg”, she continues.

From Guadalajara, where Irene resides, shipments cost about 350 Mexican pesos per kilogram (about $20), in addition to whatever must be paid for the product being sent. “Things are cheaper here than in Mexico City, for instance, but the expense is still enormous”, she says.

This year, Irene has noticed a peculiarity among her friends who also send food to Cuba. “Everyone is sending rice and beans. That is something that I had never seen done before, because sending a kilogram of rice costs more than 20 dollars and it’s barely enough for a meal for four people,” she reflects.

To this she must add the cost of delivering products outside the capital, which she adds another 700 Mexican pesos ($41) to the bill. “With that amount I can buy two weeks’ worth of food in Mexico”, she compares. “At least from here the shipping is direct. From other states, where there is no one traveling to Cuba, you have to pay extra to send things to a big city”, she asserts.

“We emigrants have started supporting those who stay there. If previously we bought what they didn’t have – shoes, clothes, or a recharge for the phone – now the need for everything in Cuba is covered by the Cuban community abroad,” she adds. “I will also be sending Three Kings’ Day gifts for the children this January”.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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To Reduce Its Expenses, the Cuban Government Will Lower the Highest Pensions

The public policies of the Cuban Government are leaving the elderly in the oldest country in Latin America unprotected. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 7 January 2024 — The collapse of the finances of the Cuban State, the accelerated aging of the population, the increase in life expectancy and the loss of tax income due to the massive emigration of workers, have led the Council of Ministers to modify the method for calculating pensions for retirement and total disability. The regulations seek to reduce public spending with new regressive scales, which will penalize employees who receive earnings above the average.

The decree, adopted on November 29 by the Government, came into force with its publication on January 4 in the Official Gazette and will apply to those who request retirement from now on.

The basis for calculating the pension for age and total disability will be determined on the average monthly salary resulting from the highest salaries earned by the worker during five years, selected from the last fifteen calendar years prior to the application for the pension. As for the payments – and here is the novelty – which “form part of the calculation basis for long-term benefits,” they will be subject to a regressive calculation: “Up to nine thousand five hundred and ten pesos, one hundred percent is considered as the basis for calculating the pension [while] to the excess of twenty-eight thousand five hundred and thirty pesos, twenty percent is applied.” continue reading

The justification for the change highlights that when considering the payment of pensions the distribution of earnings have been generated “with high amounts”

The justification for the change highlights that by contemplating the distribution of earnings for the payment of pensions, “high amounts” of remuneration have been generated. The solution is to change the calculation base for retirements “in order to mitigate the expenses of the social security budget.”

“The aging of the Cuban population affects the increase in expenses of the budget of the social security system,” underlines the official text. The decree indicates that, on the one hand, the number of people who reach retirement age and the time during which they remain as pensioners increase and, on the other, the number of contributors decreases as the employed workforce is not replaced, that is, the working population.

The legal text indicates that the change is inserted in the new socioeconomic scenario that the Island is experiencing. The payment of pensions was modified in 2020 when the minimum pension was set at 1,520 pesos, however the gradual devaluation of the Cuban peso means that many elderly people are in a situation of poverty in the face of high prices resulting from inflation.

The previous decree eliminated the limits on the amount of monthly salaries to be distributed by each worker and added the payment of earnings to the calculation basis for social security benefits, a formula that led to higher pensions in many cases, overloading the state budget.

The previous decree eliminated the limits on the amount of monthly salaries to be distributed for each worker and added the payment of salaries to the calculation basis for social security benefits

For its part, the new Decree 99 maintains these special conditions of exceptional payments for activities such as work related to loadind and unloading ships “that are applied in port activity or other legally recognized payments that do not constitute salary and that form part of the base of calculation for long-term benefits.”

Likewise, the regulations warn that those who have started the retirement process before the publication of the current decree will comply with the provisions of the previous legislation.

In 2018, the minimum pensions rose from 200 to 242 pesos, by provisions of Raúl Castro and, just over two years later, with the Ordering Task*, the minimum amount rose to 1,520.

According to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (Onei), at the end of 2022, 22.3% of the Cuban population was over 60 years old and life expectancy exceeds 77 years.

*Translator’s note: The “Ordering Task” was a collection of measures that include eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso as the only national currency, raising prices, raising salaries (but not as much as prices), opening stores that take payment only in hard currency which must be in the form of specially issued pre-paid debit cards, and a broad range of other measures targeted to different elements of the Cuban economy.

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The Official Protestants Appreciate the ‘Facilities’ the Cuban Regime Gives Them in Cienfuegos

The pastors were even more specific and asked God “to support all the expectations of improvement to which Cubans aspire.” (5 de Septiembre)

14ymedio, Havana, January 6, 2024 — An unusual article, which asks for God’s blessing “to the country and the province” during 2024, appeared this Friday in 5 de Septiembre, the Communist Party newspaper in Cienfuegos. The article describes a ceremony in which “numerous religious denominations”, such as the Church of the Foursquare Gospel and the Brethren in Christ Society, prayed for “love and unity” in the country in front of local authorities.

To leave no doubt about the “thematic axis” of the celebration, the pastors, the text adds, were even more specific and asked God “to support all the expectations of improvement to which Cubans aspire.” “Blessings to the nation and the city” followed, as well as “high-flying artistic numbers with careful stage composition.”

Immediately afterwards, Israel Curbelo, provincial representative of the ruling Council of Churches of Cuba, took the floor to thank “the facilities and willingness provided by the authorities of the territory” to carry out what he described as a “public act” at the Tropisur complex in Cienfuegos. He then spoke with the special envoys of 5 de Septiembre and gave an account of his organization’s agenda, in addition to reiterating his gratitude for the ceremony, “the fifth activity of this type that is carried out publicly in Cienfuegos.” continue reading

“Blessings to the nation and the city” followed, in addition to “high-flying artistic numbers and careful scenographic composition”

In another forum, no longer religious but digital, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized this Tuesday that Cuba and Nicaragua were included, for yet another year, in the list prepared by the US State Department of countries that violate religious freedom.

The echo of his statement, published on the social network X, did not appear in the official press. Several articles commented on Havana’s “exemplary performance” or – like 5 de Septiembre – covered events that, in their opinion, demonstrate that religion is not only tolerated but also encouraged in Cuba.

During the last weeks, and anticipating the publication of the list, Havana took several steps to clean up its image, among them the meeting of Miguel Díaz-Canel, on December 19, with Jerry Pillay, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches. The religious leader complimented the president and asked for the end of the US embargo on the island and the exclusion of Cuba from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism.

Pillay’s statements provoked outrage from several international religious communities, such as the organization Outreach Aid to the Americas (OAA), which in a statement on December 28 urged the reverend to “defend religious freedom in Cuba.”

“His visit, apparently closely orchestrated by the Cuban Government, has not provided him with an accurate understanding of the state of the fundamental right to freedom of religion or belief in Cuba. Worse still, we are seeing that the Cuban Government is using his visit, and specifically his statements celebrating religious freedom in Cuba, to reinforce his absurd claim that Cubans do enjoy this fundamental freedom,” denounced Teo Babun, the director of OAA.

Babun also commented on the “dark reality that the faithful live in Cuba” and asked Pillay to “raise his voice on behalf of the afflicted and oppressed in Cuba.”

Babun also commented on the “dark reality that the faithful live in Cuba” and asked Pillay to “raise his voice on behalf of the afflicted and oppressed in Cuba

An episode that exemplified Babun’s statement was the police summons, in December, of the evangelical bishop Jorge Luis Pérez Vázquez, leader of the Rehobot Ministry on the Island. The pastor published a video on social networks showing the document issued by the Police of Santiago de Cuba. “I want to record this and leave it as evidence. Our only ministry in this nation is to preach the gospel, help widows, orphans and prisoners,” he said.

For exiled Baptist pastor Mario Félix Lleonart , the summons – for which the cause was not clarified – constitutes another demonstration of the activity of “repressors and violators of religious freedoms in Cuba.”

The interest of the Cuban Government in gaining the support of the religious institutions of the Island has led it to meet on several occasions with their leaders to demonstrate the religious communities’ support for the State. This happened last June, when Díaz-Canel traveled to the Vatican to meet with Pope Francis. From the conversation, which was expected to handle delicate issues such as the release of political prisoners on the Island, only words of support for the regime from the Catholic headquarters remained.

Last September, the Bible Society of the Council of Churches was established, with a representation of Catholics and Greek Orthodox, who were not part of the group, made up mainly of Protestant churches. During the event, in which Caridad Diego – in charge of Religious Affairs of the Communist Party – was present, the representatives of the institutions sent bibles dedicated to Raúl Castro, Díaz-Canel and Esteban Lazo.

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Two Cuban Companies Compete in the Blue-Scorpion Fraud Against Cancer

The directors of Labiofam in Las Tunas launched a crusade on Wednesday to contain “the indiscriminate hunting of the blue scorpion.” (Periódico 26)

14ymedio, Havana, January 5, 2024 — Gema, a 65-year-old from Havana, received the news in 2013 that she had liver cancer at a fairly advanced stage. In a rapid physical decline, she clung to the recommendation made by a neighbor to look for blue scorpion venom, because the product could “stop the advance of cancer.” In a tiny jar accompanied by a dropper, the woman obtained a few millimeters of a liquid that she had to mix with plenty of water and consume every day. When the amount of venom in the bottle decreased, she made new contacts to buy the “miracle formula.”

Without a label, expiration date and sold in the informal market, the veracity and effectiveness of the product was based on trust. “The person who sells it to me gets it from a laboratory, where they discovered its properties,” she said one day to friends who were curious about the venom. Hundreds of pesos later and after many glasses of diluted drops, she died. She still had two jars of scorpion venom left that her nephew sold to another interested patient. A couple of small, amber-colored jars, unlabeled, surrounded by promises of improvement and recovery.

Patients from all over the world have come to Cuba as a lifeline since, in 2011, the state-owned Labiofam introduced Vidatox, a drug whose active ingredient was the venom of the Cuban blue scorpion (Rhopalurus junceus), to which it attributed “proven anti-tumor, analgesic and anti-inflammatory efficacy.” The researcher in charge of explaining the product – and its master mind – was the young microbiologist Alexis Díaz, who then reported that there were already customers eager to try it in Spain, Italy, Albania and several Latin American countries.

In a few years, the drug was so discredited worldwide that some customers and relatives of deceased patients ended up calling it “Cuban water”

Vidatox was not the hen with the golden egg that Havana was hoping for, although hundreds of patients bought it, and many paid for months of continue reading

treatments in Cuba. Soon, international oncologists began to warn cancer patients about the scam. In a few years, the drug was so discredited worldwide that some clients and relatives of deceased patients ended up calling it “Cuban water.” To keep a low profile, Labiofam then began to qualify Vidatox as a homeopathic product (a pseudotherapy based on water and alcohol solutions).

In an unprecedented acrobatic maneuver in Cuban Public Health, the creative team of Vidatox – including Díaz – shut down Labiofam and formed a new international research group, Lifescozul, which claimed to sell “the most advanced formulation of the blue scorpion venom” – Escozul – while harshly criticizing Vidatox.

Vidatox, they insist, is manufactured by Labiofam, a company that specializes in “products for veterinary use,” and does not contain “a single molecule of the blue scorpion venom.” But the criticism doesn’t stop there, Díaz’s team warns. Vidatox not only does not cure anyone but also “causes and accelerates metastases due to the high degree of alcohol it contains.”

On the contrary, they argue, the Escozul brand – “created by Cuban scientists” supervised by Díaz – is available in more than 30 countries, although “it is in the Health Registration phase” for commercialization. The company’s website has several spaces devoted to “scientific data” disproving the effectiveness of Vidatox.

The fine print of the Lifescozul chronology clarifies the origins of the scism: the group “was founded by Cuban scientists and doctors who once worked at Labiofam and decided not to continue when the management of Labiofam chose to market a homeopathic product without the properties of the blue scorpion venom. That product was called Vidatox 30CH.”

The Cuban State facilitates the work of Lifescozul and does not penalize its activity in any way. The most solid proof is the commercialization of treatments with blue scorpion venom offered to foreigners

How is a discord of that level possible between two pharmaceutical companies that belong to the same State health system? Does the Ministry of Public Health punish Díaz and his team for selling a drug that competes with Vidatox, manufactured in the same laboratories as the advertised Cuban vaccines against the coronavirus?

The answer is negative: the Cuban State facilitates Lifescozul’s work and does not penalize its activity in any way. The most solid proof is the commercialization of treatments with the blue scorpion venom. The treatment is offered to foreign patients and has to be done in a hotel or in hospital facilities administered by the Government, such as the La Pradera International Health Center, founded by Fidel Castro in 1996, and the Lifescozul headquarters in Havana.

If a cancer patient wants to be treated by Escozul in Cuba, he will have to pay $1,200 – perhaps more, if he goes in the “high season” for tourism – and spend three months in Cuba for an initial treatment. The cost includes the visa, insurance, stay, transportation, food and the “appointment with the producer.” If he wants the medicine to be sent to his country, he has to pay between 80 and 110 dollars per month for the duration of the treatment. But, they clarify, the most advisable thing is to go to the Island.

The empire continues to grow, always under “the highest authority” of Díaz. In 2018, they agreed on a research project with the University of Chile and the University of Talca, also in Chile. In 2021, they signed two contracts in Mexico, with the companies Pharmometrica and Research Pro. In 2022, they closed a deal with the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, to give more scientific weight to Escozul’s work. Díaz’s ambition is to obtain the Health Registry of the product, which would allow its authorized sale worldwide.

Labiofam managers in Las Tunas launched a crusade this Wednesday to contain “the indiscriminate hunting of the blue scorpion

However, new obstacles have appeared, and the future of Escozul and Vidatox – which the Cuban Government continues to sell – is in danger from the same source. The directors of Labiofam in Las Tunas launched a crusade on Wednesday to contain “the indiscriminate hunting of the blue scorpion and the misuse of its venom for health treatments.”

In the northern part of the province, where scorpions abound, an emergency meeting took place with the hunters, to make them see “reason.” Labiofam informed them that the arachnids “are part of the food chain with insects and pests in their diet,” so their extinction would be a problem for the local fauna.

Negotiation through the way of conscience did not, apparently, have too many results. Labiofam ended up promising “a payment system to hunters,” to “include them in the company’s human resources and thus ensure that the activity is safe.” To manufacture Vidatox in Las Tunas, they pointed out, between 400 and 600 scorpions must be hunted annually. They remain in captivity for two years and then, supposedly, about 14,000 are “freed” every year throughout the country.

Despite the “campaigns” of Escozul, Labiofam continues to sell its panacea against cancer and, in October 2022, protested because the United States prevented the purchase of about 50,000 bottles of the drug – the price of each: $40.78 – to “meet the potential demand” of Vidatox in that country. It was two million dollars that Cuba stopped earning due to the well-known blockade, said the company, which also complained about the “disinformation campaigns that hinder its registration and commercialization in some markets,” although it did not allude to Escozul.

The medical consensus on both products is categorical: it is not scientifically proven that scorpion venom can cure cancer. The prestigious cancer research center Memorial Sloan Kettering – founded in 1884 in the United States – has explained that the benefits attributed to Escozul and Vidatox “are mostly based on anecdotes, testimonies and experiments that may not have been executed correctly.” And it adds that “in Cuba, where these products originate, the Government rejected the use of Escozul in 2009 for not having enough information.”

Beyond the controversies between Vidatox and Escozul, the very expensive treatments and the undisclosed numbers of deaths of patients who trusted Labiofam and Lifescozul, the stories of patients who relied on scorpion venom are tragic, but they haven’t stopped the false hopes.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Cuba Registers a ‘Large-Scale Electrical Breakdown’ in Santa Clara, the First of the Year

The workers of the Cuban Electrical Union had to spend the night fixing the pole and the collateral effects. (UNE)

14ymedio, Havana, January 5, 2024 — Bad news for the year’s energy forecast. The collapse of a pole in front of the Unión Cuba Petróleo Company (Cupet) at the exit of the Santa Clara Subplant, in the province of Villa Clara, is the first incident described by the authorities as a “large-scale electrical breakdown.”

The event occurred at 3 in the afternoon on line 861, 33kV, and left six circuits of the main city without electricity. According to Yadier Ruiz Sánchez, director of the load dispatch of the Electric Company in the province, after 4 in the afternoon the service had been restored in half of them, with three others still affected, the 5th, the 9th and the 17th.

The broken post was not the only problem. According to the local press, “when service was returned to these circuits, a technical problem also occurred in the corresponding substation,” so repairs had to continue during the night. The workers spent the early morning replacing the pole and, at the same time, “regenerating the damaged disconnectors,” said the manager, who announced that the work would continue as long as necessary. continue reading

“The circuits that already have the service may have a blackout again precisely to carry out the synchronization itself”

“Once both breakdowns have been resolved, the reconnection process may take some time, so as not to cause other accidents, and the circuits that already have the service may have a blackout again precisely to carry out the synchronization itself,” added Ruiz Sánchez.

“We started the year well,” was the general reaction among Santa Clara residents to the information offered by the different channels of the Electrical Union of Cuba (UNE) and Villa Clara’s citizen and media portals. “The maintenance that leaves us without power for more than six hours, what are they for?” asked a customer. “Isn’t the entire circuit checked? Because not long ago there was maintenance on that line and now a pole is broken, which was surely in poor condition, we have been without electricity for more than five hours and there are children without food. If maintenance is carried out, it must be carried out correctly, because they leave us without electricity that day and then a pole breaks without any wind. If we get hit by a cyclone, we will spend weeks without power.”

Almost at the same time, the official Canal Caribe broadcast a report that tried to answer the question : What are the forecasts for electricity generation for 2024 in Cuba?

In it, the UNE prided itself on having been able to reduce “unforeseen outages” – in reference to the disconnections of the thermoelectric unit system – compared to 2022. According to its data, Cuba had almost 70% less time with blackouts due to a deficit in generation capacities and all thanks to planning and preventive maintenance.

“This inevitably results in a better service and greater generation for our people,” says Edier Guzmán Pacheco, a UNE thermal generation engineer who explained all the work successfully carried out in 2023, including those of the two main central plants, the Lidio Ramón Pérez, from Felton, in Mayarí (Holguín), and the Antonio Guiteras, in Matanzas.

Both have once again suffered a year of working and failing, some planned and others “unforeseen,” which summarizes Guzmán Pacheco’s description of the arrangements.

“This inevitably results in a better service and a greater generation for our people”

“Last year it was confirmed how much preventive maintenance represents to avoid failures and stoppages (…) This maintenance, which was not deep, which was not fundamental, which did not solve the fundamental problems but which was programmed and effectively executed where they needed the machines most and where it had the most influence on the stability and reliability of the units,” he said.

For this year the same will be attempted, he said, although among the main works will be that of Guiteras, with a “capital intervention” that requires bringing parts from abroad, some in the manufacturing process and others in the contracting process.

In January 2023, after a year marked by blackouts, the protests that followed them and the dismissal of the Minister of Energy and Mines, his replacement, Vicente de la O Levy, promised an improvement in the situation thanks, also, to more maintenance. The leader assured that the power outages would be “two or three hours long. And not to everyone and not to all provinces,” but it only took one month for six-hour blackouts to begin to be reported and in summer the blackouts already exceeded 12 and 14 hours.

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The Perpetrator of Cuba’s First Femicide of 2024 Was Released on Bail for Another Crime

Cervantes was 29 years old at the time of her death. (Facebook/Diana Rosa Cervantes Mejías)

14ymedio, Havana, January 5, 2024 — The femicide of Diana Rosa Cervantes Mejías in Camagüey, which occurred on January 2, was confirmed this Thursday by the independent journalist Henry Constantín, who interviewed a relative of the victim and provided more details about the crime. The murder of Cervantes is the first case of violence against a women resulting in murder recorded by the independent media in 2024, after the previous year’s figure of 87 femicides on the Island.

According to a note published on Facebook by La Hora de Cuba, a media outlet directed by Constantín, Cervantes met her ex-partner last Tuesday in the house where they used to live together before separating, located “near the factory known as La Baldosera, in the Juruquey neighborhood” in Havana.

The 29-year-old victim was brutally beaten by the alleged aggressor, whose identity responds to the initials C.A.G. The man, said Constantín, who interviewed Cervantes’ mother, was on bail and awaiting trial at the time of the murder for having assaulted a co-worker “with a machete.”

Likewise, an anonymous source consulted by ’La Hora de Cuba’ characterized the alleged killer as “an abuser”

Several social media posts in recent days alleged that Cervantes had been beaten with a bat “out of jealousy.” Likewise, an anonymous source consulted by La Hora de Cuba characterized the alleged killer as “an abuser.” The aggressor “is now imprisoned,” this media confirmed, adding that Cervantes “left behind a nine-year-old boy.”

This Monday there was also news of the femicide of Nurisbel Guerra, a nurse resident in the Granma municipality of Cauto Cristo, who was serving on a medical mission in Venezuela. After returning to the Island for a few days on December 24, she was killed by her husband, who committed suicide after cutting her throat. The man, identified as Oreste Tamayo, from whom she intended to separate, was a worker at the Electricity Company of the province, as several media reported at the time.

The name “Guerra” was the last one added to the 87 femicides – more than double those quantified a year earlier (34) – that occurred on the Island in 2023, as confirmed by independent platforms and media.

This type of crime, which is not classified in the Criminal Code, has managed to attract the attention of the Island’s population, who demand a response from the authorities in the face of the “wave of violence” in the country that has claimed the lives of dozens of women.

For their part, both the official press and the authorities keep their distance from femicides, and their promises to prevent and quantify cases of violence against women in real time remain unfulfilled.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Etecsa Promises To Crack Down on ‘Digital Criminals’ Who Attack the Cuban Government’s Servers

A battalion of engineers has been training at the University of Computer Science for several years. (Facebook/UCI)

14ymedio, Havana, January 6, 2024 — The Cuban communications monopoly, Etecsa, revealed this Saturday that its cybersecurity experts recorded 2,600 incidents from January to September 2023, including numerous attacks and “complex intrusions” into banking and government servers, which are characterized by “the use of unauthorized systems and devices to share data that are of a confidential nature.”

Daniel Ramos, Business Director of Etecsa, said that most of the attacks have to do with “the sending and receiving of spam, malicious traffic generated by malicious codes, service scans and exploitation of vulnerabilities that have compromised websites and other computer elements.”

However, the official said he felt reassured about the future of cybersecurity in the country: a battalion of engineers has been training at the University of Computer Sciences (UCI) for several years, with a course plan that will train them to become the digital elite, with one goal: to make war on “cybercriminals” with a spoonful of their own medicine, Artificial Intelligence (AI), among the other tools used by “criminals,” Ramos said. continue reading

“Human error is one of the main causes of cyber incidents in State entities,” Ramos said

“Human error is one of the main causes of cyber incidents in State entities,” Ramos said. The cause: “violations of information security policies by those responsible for computer security and users of these technologies.”

In addition, he pointed out, in “work devices” – computers and the industrial phones of cadres and workers, subsidized by the Government – “weak passwords” are used, and it is common for “staff to visit unsafe websites.”

Some 8.4 million Cubans have an Internet connection, which also makes them vulnerable to threats, Ramos alleged. Some 70% of the cybersecurity “incidents” counted by Etecsa refer to “cyber harassment, identity theft and scams through digital social networks and electronic payment channels” such as Transfermóvil and EnZona, Ramos said.

Etecsa considers cybersecurity as an indispensable condition for the banking process set up by the authorities in August 2023. Without “high levels of security in the technological organizations involved” there will be no banking, the official warned. Ramos also asked for a “permanent update” of the telecommunications laws in Cuba.

The director of Etecsa, who alluded to Cuban servers as victims of “cyber enemies,” did not say a word about the complaints of international cybersecurity companies, which have warned about the intensification, since 2019, of the information manipulation campaigns that several Governments – including that of Cuba – have put at the center of their political agendas.

The proliferation of anonymous profiles, the generation of images and videos with AI and the dissemination of false content are some of the activities that characterize the work of these Internet groups, related to the Island’s regime and the governments of Russia, China, Iran, Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador and, in addition, organizations in Ethiopia, Indonesia and Ecuador, according to the American company Mandiant.

Although Mandiant does not reveal to what extent the Cuban regime is involved in the financing of these groups, its report takes as an example one of the false profiles created by a group related to the Government of Havana. The technique, they say, is the recreation of a digitally altered face so that it looks like the profile of a real person.

For more than a decade, activists have pointed out the ICU as the origin of these campaigns. Even the testimonies of graduates of that center confirm the hypothesis that students, among their teaching tasks, must carry out hacking and denial-of-service attacks on dissident sites, techniques that are now learned professionally, as Ramos explained, in the recent Cybersecurity major of the ICU.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Misogynist Graffiti in Havana Becomes an Enigmatic Message

Two men taking a break on Thursday in front of a hand-painted sign at the corner of Belascoaín and Zanja streets.

14ymedio, Natalia Lopez Moya, Havana, 4 January 2024 — “I buy women in bad shape,” the message read back in April, when 14ymedio first reported on it. As of a few days ago, all that was left were the words “in bad shape,” which now seem like a cryptic description of that corner, of the city and of Cuba itself.

On Thursday, two men were sitting in front of it, taking a break. Some passersby could not help but make a joke. “Look what you’re doing there in front of that sign criticizing the state,” a security guard from the nearby Banco Metropolitano remarked ironically. Only then did both individuals turn their heads and read the words.

One of them got up a few seconds later and continued on his way. The other wasted no time picking up the bag he had left on the ground and also walked hurriedly away from the site. This odd, green-lettered graffiti no longer carries the suggestion of mockery or harm to women but rather something worse in the eyes of many Cubans: “an anti-government slogan” in the words of a resident on nearby Tetuán Street. continue reading

That’s how it’s been for months. No one seemed to care. My prediction is that it won’t long before they erase it completely.

“That’s how it’s been for months. No one seemed to care. My prediction is that it won’t be long before it’s gone completely,” she concluded. The question for some residents is why the person who got rid the the first four words did not go to the trouble to erase the rest. “It looks like they did it with the same paint as the wall, so they must have been well-organized.”

In a country where the number of murdered women just keeps growing due to inaction by the state, this enigmatic phrase is more frightening than the previous sexist statement.

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A New Slogan for the Cuban Revolution on Its 65th Anniversary: Get By on Less

“Then it will be here tomorrow,” says an elderly woman sarcastically, as she walks past the place. “The 65th anniversary is off to a good start.” Text of sign: “Today there is no yogurt nor milk nor eggs nor cheese.”(14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Havana, 5 January 2024 — State-run media has been flooding pages and screens for days with the faces of Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl and other bearded “heroes” on the occasion of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Cuban revolution. In the official rhetoric, there is only room for triumph and volunteerism, not for the impoverished reality that the Cuban people are experiencing.

It is Friday and nothing in Havana suggests that this is the eve of a Catholic holiday: Three King’s Day. Deserted streets, uncollected garbage, houses for sale. All are part of the backdrop that a stroll through the capital provides.

The only thing the establishment has to offer are cans of sugary soda, the kind of universal food that remains available even in the midst of misery

There is nothing special to buy in the shops either, especially in the most depressed neighborhoods such as Lawton and Tenth of October. At a small, privately owned store on the corner of Porvenir and Pocito streets, a discouraging sign is propped up on the counter: “No yogurt, no milk, no eggs, no cheese today.”

“Then it will be tomorrow,” says an elderly woman sarcastically as she walks past the place. “The 65th anniversary is off to a good start.”

The only thing the establishment has to offer are cans of sugary soda, the kind of universal food that remains available even in the midst of misery. The store provides a corner from which to observe the true portrait of the revolution: one of shortages and hopelessness.

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A Peculiar Almanac

Reading has become like a secret sect: its members recognise one another in trains and cafés. (Facebook/La Nave Antiquarian Bookshop)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 31 December 2023 – In a freezing bookshop in Burgos; with an antiques dealer in Salamanca; talking to a bookseller in Seville; awaiting the post from a miserly bookseller from La Rioja; rooting through a hundred stalls at the Madrid fair; unpacking packages that arrive from Cuba: to narrate my year is to narrate my books. In each case I know how much they cost, where I bought them, and what they brought to me that was new to my life and to my library.

A sporting spirit brings a reader to make lists – not only of the books they’ve read but also the ones they’ve acquired, the ones they’ve lost and the ones most wanted. My list – which contains all of the above – is divided into months, and it resembles a list of diary entries of where I found each book, as well as any notes or reflections that seemed worth jotting down at the time. It’s not a bad habit to have if you’re going to want some content for future use in novels or in columns.

In my diary – a lovely little Moleskine – I also describe meals, or the weather, people I’ve met and places visited. Observations from a bewildered point of view, because, for someone who has left their native country, although they might have a bed and a roof over their head, beyond that, everything appears exotic. The reader’s diary is not short of heroes and villains, unexpected luxuries and moments of extreme hardship. (In interviews, Borges said that he had known extreme poverty. “When, Borges?”, Soler Serrano asked him in 1980. “The poverty of not getting to the end of the month”, the blind man replied.) continue reading

People who read, they get up every day with an impulse that asks them “to save Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, Havana cigars, penicillin, the iPhone and the Kalashnikov”

People who read, they get up every day with the sense of responsibility described by María Stepánova: it’s an impulse that asks them “to save Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, Havana cigars, penicillin, the iPhone and the Kalashnikov”. Stepánova wanted the same thing as Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald and George Steiner – all stateless people whom I have read with some attention this year.

I discovered Sebald via his book Austerlitz, (published by Anagrama) in Burgos, just after hitting my head on a ceiling beam: I was on the second floor [third floor, to Americans] of a bookshop, and I’d just had to climb a narrow staircase in order to reach it. When I recovered, I saw the spine of the book. Pain and illnesses also form part of memory’s arsenal. A simple example is a strip of esomeprazol, a pill with literary prestige – Arturo Belano and Roberto Bolaño took them – which marks the rhythm of my own week.

But if anything has defined my ups and downs this year it has been the hunt for the catalogue of a publisher which doesn’t exist: The Kingdom of Redonda. There are 40 coloured volumes, published by Javier Marías, with a sharpened arrow on the cover, by little known but always exceptional authors. These are cult books, other-worldly objects, which are disappearing from the bookshops. The quest for them and for reading them has shaped even my travel.

I travelled through Castilla y León by train whilst reading Los Recuerdos de este fusilero (Memories of this Fusilier), the tale of a British soldier who made this same journey on foot during the Napoleonic Wars. I travelled to Seville in search of The Religion of a Physician – the classic essay by Sir Thomas Browne – but I couldn’t find it. I eventually ended up haggling in a raised voice over the price of a copy, with a bookshop owner in Logroño. I discovered, in The Fall of Constantinople (which inspired more than a few passages from The Lord of the Rings), that the Ottomans were planning to do what Cortés actually did, shortly after, on the other side of the ocean – he dragged his ships overland, because the sea was closed by a “thick chain”, similar to the one that blocked the way of English ships during the Siege of Havana in 1762. As I’ve already said, other-worldly books, for readers from another world.

Like an inquisitive dog, a reader will always try to see what book a potential ’partner in crime’ has under his arm

Reading has become like a secret sect: its members recognise one another in trains and cafés, they show kinship for one another through the simple fact of each having the same book in their hands. Like an inquisitive dog, a reader will always try to see what book a potential ’partner in crime’ has under his arm. And if he recognises it, at the risk of appearing indiscreet, he can’t avoid breaking the ice (or at least enjoy the coincidence in silence if he’s too timid).

Winter, of endearing and indifferent books like Lolita; Spring, of Simic, Paz and Abilio Estévez; tropical August, with Divine Bodies by Cabrera Infante and The Colour of Summer by Arenas; Autumn, of classics – Jenofonte, Seneca, Homer and of obsession with Steiner, the “lay rabbi” whose books offer so much calm and optimism. Tonight, that which awaits me is The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T E Lawrence, the unforgettable Lawrence of Arabia; and for desserts an English edition of King Solomon’s Mines.

I’ll spend the close of the year reading, or talking about books. Or, at least surrounded by them, which – in these times of people being wrapped up in radicalism or poverty, political correctness or intellectual destitution – continue to be the best of company. And, obviously, with a cigar and a glass of something to hand. No need to overdo it.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Putting Yourself in the President’s Shoes

All that remains of Tomás Estrada Palma are his shoes, which sit atop a desecrated monument on Avenue of the Presidents.

14ymedio, Yunior Garcia Aguilera, Madrid, January 4, 2023 — If you came here thinking that I would be talking about Díaz-Canel or his shoes, you would be mistaken. To be president of a republic, you need to be elected, at least by a parliament. And electing someone implies being able to choose between two or more options. In the case of this individual, he was the only candidate on the parliamentarians’ ballot. So they elected nothing and he presides over nothing. Díaz-Canel is just an appointed director, a front man, Raul Castro’s latest whim.

The person I intend to talk about in this column was the first Cuban president to be elected by popular vote. At school they told us little more than that he favored annexation by the United States. Official historians have emphasized that he requested, begged, implored the U.S. to occupy Cuba a second time. Less mainstream journalists revel in anecdotes about his legendary stinginess. But the truth is that, in Cuba, little is known about who our first elected president was.

All that remains of Tomás Estrada Palma are his shoes, which sit atop a desecrated monument on Avenue of the Presidents, known locally as Avenue G, in Havana’s Vedado district. His statue, which was the creation of the Italian artist Giovanni Nicolini, was unveiled in 1921 and destroyed in 1959 in a fit of collective hysteria. continue reading

Estrada Palma’s presidency was austere, yes, but no one could call him corrupt. His motto — “more teachers than soldiers” — was consistent with his vocation and the needs of the country

The story goes that it was the people who ripped his statue off its pedestal back in the 1970s but ordinary people do not have cranes. Its destruction was not the result of a truly popular rejection but rather an order from powerful officials with a very clear purpose: to erase history. They say that one of Estrada Palma’s sons was staying at the Hotel Presidente Hotel at the time and witnessed this official act of iconoclasm. Perhaps his only revenge was seeing how his father’s shoes clung to the marble.

Years later, a group of pedestrians happened to walk past it without any idea what the monument represented. Some thought it was perhaps an homage to that poem about the rose slippers by Jose Martí. The stubborn bronze shoes remained there until 2020, when the Office of the City Historian finally decided to finish the job, remove them from public view and store them in their archives.

Tomasico* was was born, it is said, on July 9, 1835. He was the only child of Andrés Maria his wife Yaya. His father died when he was little and he developed a singular attachment to his mother. Perhaps because of that bond, he was unable to finish his studies in Seville. He returned to his hometown to be with her and to run La Punta, his family’s hacienda. He was named petty-lieutenant in Bayamo, an administrative position with about as much authority as its pleasant phonetics imply.

When war broke out, Tomás was sent to by the authorities to negotiate with the insurrectionists but ended up joining them. He managed to rise through their ranks, ultimately becoming president of the Republic in Arms. There were more losses than victories, however, and those defeats would leave their mark on him.

La destrucción de la estatua de Estrada Palma no fue el resultado de un rechazo auténticamente popular, sino una orden del poder con un propósito muy claro: borrar la historia. (CC) — The destruction of his statue was not the result of a truly popular rejection but rather an order from powerful officials with a very clear purpose: to erase history. (CC)

His dearly beloved mother died in the mountains of hunger after being captured by the Spanish and then released into the wilderness alone. He himself was captured near the end of the war by Cubans who sympathized with Spain. During his imprisonment in Morro Castle, no Cuban went to visit him. The colonial government spread the news that he had switched sides and he was unfairly assumed to be a traitor. To withstand the December cold, he had to rely on clothes given to him by Spanish soldiers.

Perhaps this is why he had little faith in Cubans’ ability to govern themselves. It was in the United States where rediscovered his love of teaching and where he found a degree of respect and dignity. He regained his belief in Cuba only because someone with the stature of Jose Martí rekindled that hope in him.

Estrada Palma’s presidency was austere, yes, but no one could call him corrupt. His motto — “more teachers than soldiers” — was consistent with his vocation and the needs of the country. Those who insist he favored annexation by the United States ignore his efforts to make sure the Isle of Pines remained part of Cuba and to reduce the number of American naval bases from five to just one.

He was not perfect by any means, but nor was he the rube nor the sellout portrayed in Cuban history classes. A country was being forged and, in such times, it is all too easy to get burned. Perhaps one of his most famous lines says it all: “We have a republic but it does not have citizens.

*Translator’s note: Spanish diminutive of Tomás.

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Three Hours Stranded on the Highway, Cubans and Tourists Suffer the Negligence of Viazul

After half an hour, the driver gave his diagnosis: the transmission belt broke and, worst of all, he didn’t have a spare. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, 4 January 2024 — The trip from Ciego de Ávila to Havana by bus is neither short nor cheap, but Maidelys is already used to it. This habanera has been traveling that road by public transport for ten years every time she has a vacation, to visit a sister in the central province. Although the distance is about 400 kilometers, or 250 miles, the trip between the two cities by road takes almost eight hours. That is, if there are no unforeseen events like those that happened this Wednesday, which caused her to arrive three hours later.

As has been customary for a long time, another brother, an emigrant, had given her the ticket, which cost 28 euros, buying it on the Viazul website, where payment is only accepted with foreign cards. Very few can afford these prices, so the vehicle, coming from Santiago de Cuba, was full of foreign tourists, many of them Cuban-Americans, with very few domestic travelers.

The bus left at six in the morning from Ciego de Ávila, and Maidelys fell asleep right away, until they reached the next stop, Sancti Spíritus. “Fortunately it was one of the comfortable buses, because in some Astros [National Bus Company] I can’t get a wink of sleep,” she says. “Once I traveled in one that had no floor in front of my seat, and I spent the whole trip thinking that if I fell asleep I would fall through the hole.”

“There’s a goldmine here,” is how Maidelys described the atmosphere of Las Palmas restaurant. (14ymedio)

Another advantage of going in a “tourist” vehicle is that they have hot food at the stops. “With the bus of the proletariat, there’s only sugar and more sugar,” Maidelys jokes, referring to the soft drinks and cookies sold at the government stops.

At kilometer 139 of the National Highway, after passing Santa Clara, the bus stopped for breakfast. “There’s a goldmine here,” is how Maidelys described the atmosphere of the Las Palmas restaurant, a “grill” where the meat dishes cost 2,000 pesos, the sandwiches go from 600 to 1,200, and a continue reading

malted milkshake costs 500. They also sold boxes of cigars for 120 dollars, although some foreigners haggled until they got them down to 110.

Everything seemed to be in order – they had already passed through the provinces of Cienfuegos and Matanzas – when with just under an hour and a half left to reach the capital, at kilometer 72 on the highway, at the height of Nueva Paz in Mayabeque, the vehicle stopped.

“At first you only heard the driver and someone else, like a baggage handler, and no one worried,” says Maidelys. “But then the air conditioning turned off, and people began to protest, saying it was a lack of respect, what with the cost of the ticket.”

An almendrón — a classic American car operating as a shared taxi — stopped to help, but they didn’t have the right part, and then a Transgaviota bus, which didn’t have any spare parts either.” (14ymedio)

After half an hour, the driver gave his diagnosis: the transmission belt broke and, worst of all, he did not have a spare. He did not say if they would have to wait for another vehicle or if the company would send help. “There is a review department that is supposed to handle all breakdowns,” Maidelys says. “It shouldn’t happen because they’re charging you up the nose, and none of these buses have the comfort they’re supposed to have.”

The driver himself, she says, acknowledged his impotence before the travelers who complained about the breakdown: “He told us that the rule said that after five years the buses should be renewed, but that Viazul has not had new buses for at least 15 years.” The laughter of those present testified to the lack of credibility of the driver’s excuse for such precariousness: “the blockade.”

Soon, as the minutes passed and there was no solution, the good mood gave way to restlessness. “There were people with flights at two in the afternoon, another with a ticket for 1:00 pm, but he already knew it was lost,” says Maidalys. The most dramatic case was that of a young mother who was traveling with her daughter to get to Nicaragua — from where she would probably make the journey to the United States: she cried when she saw her money for the bus tickets wasted.

Those who did not have a plane to catch were the most resigned, and they spread out on the ground. (14ymedio)

Those who did not have to catch a plane were the most resigned, and they spread out on the ground, like Maidalys. From a mound she saw how the bus driver desperately stopped other vehicles to ask for help. “An almendrón [a 1950s American car operating as a shared taxi] stopped, but they didn’t have the right part, and then a Transgaviota bus, which didn’t have spare parts either,” she says.

And she continues with the surreal parade that soon populated the place: “A pastry seller appeared and then someone who sold preserves, to get us to buy a kilo, but the worst thing was that an old woman who got on in Santa Clara began to hyperventilate. I don’t know if it was from anxiety or fatigue, but they said that there was no ambulance to pick her up.”

It was more than an hour after being stranded that they began to call the passengers whose final destination was terminal 3 of the José Martí International Airport, to get them into another vehicle. “But they were warned that they had to stand up,” Maidelys says. With that bus, a fan belt also arrived, but it didn’t solve the problem either.

“We had to wait almost three hours for another bus to come and pick us all up.” (14ymedio)

“We had to wait almost three hours for another bus to come and pick us all up,” says Maidelys, who finally arrived at her destination, the bus terminal near the Plaza de la Revolución, at the end of the evening. “I had a piece of meat in my suitcase. It was frozen but I was already afraid that when I arrived in Havana it would be cooked. Rather than Viazul, they should call it Viacrucis [the Way of the Cross].”

The only happy person during the trip, she indicates, was a passenger who, in the middle of the journey, learned that she had received Spanish citizenship: “She started screaming like crazy, and it’s no wonder. She’s not going to have to put up with the things of this country anymore.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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