Repression by Episodes / Yoani Sanchez

Photo from http://www.ojocientifico.com/

What does the insect caught in the web feel as it watches its predator approach? What are its thoughts in the seconds between the anticipation of the attack and death? It must be a lot like the days in which a repressive trap is built around an individual, a group, a society. Similar to that script that builds the justifications for a blow, molding public opinion, filling in the archive that will later be presented to the press or the courts.

The current strategy against the Cuban opposition resembles the slow creep of the spider’s legs toward its victim.

We are living in a soap opera episode-by-episode, an attempt to demonize technologies and the dissidence, who knows if to repeat those dark days of the Black Spring of March 2003. The blow approaches, in the insistence in which the press repeats certain refrains, its obsession with themes like Zunzuneo and trying to link it with the violence of four supposed terrorists recently discovered in the country. Like in a bad TV show, the threads are showing in the tying together of mobile phones, Twitter, death and war. Fortunately these soap operas barely work any more on a Cuban public too focused on their daily needs, overwhelmed by material shortages, saturated with ideology and obsessed more with escapism than with civic consciousness.

The trap is almost set. Will it be used? Who knows. But there’s not much that can be done to stop it, except to denounce it. At the end of the story the spider is always bigger, stronger, more imposing.

12 May 2014

Looking for the Origin / Fernando Damaso

Photo: Rebeca

There is constant talk and articles about the need to rescue values, the good habits, and eradicate social indiscipline and rudeness. It’s true and should be done, but no one talks or writes about the real origins: the loss of civility and morals.

Most citizens, in the early months of the political, economic and social experiment, accepted and even applauded that the right to elect our leaders every four years was removed, as was the right to publicly state an opinion, to have parties and political organizations, to educate our children according to our desires, and, something terrible, they allowed someone, like a feudal lord from another eta, to decide who was Cuban and who wasn’t, which partitioned the nation and is a national shame. continue reading

In addition, the state banished what they called bourgeois values and put in their place a double standard, awarding mediocrity, unconditional support, betrayal, jealousy, envy, rudeness, lack of respect, citizen violence and other evils.

Time has passed and they are trying to forget these barbarities, suggesting, without asking forgiveness, a clean slate, as if it never happened and affected the fabric of our society, but the facts are there. It’s a pity that our ruling historians dare not address them.

You always reap what you sow. A generation that lost civic and moral values and was left fanatic and vulgar, passed it on to their children and they to theirs, in a continuous chain of all these evils. Here are the results.

They suggest that the family and school are crucial to the rescue of the missing values, but what is lacking is a different family, where the members practice civility and morality, rather than the fractured current one, accustomed to putting the individual first, far from social and national interests, although they attend the rallies, vote unanimously for everything put in front of them and even participate, with enthusiasm, in the massive parades. It is, simply, their way of not looking for problems and solving their own.

9 May 2014

GABO RELOADED / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Of García Márquez and other Demons
By Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Prolific, brilliant, celebrity, provocateur, agent, incisive, insidious, one of the last intellectual icons of the Latin American left has died: Gabriel García Márquez, el Gabo.

His claim on immortality is supported by a Nobel Prize, which owed a lot to the Latin American literary “Boom” of the 1960’-1970s which in turn owes a lot to that totalitarian regime still called “the Cuban Revolution.”

In the early 1980’s Cuban adolescents read and loved García Márquez. In Castro’s Cuba, García Márquez’s books held a mirror up to  Cuba’s “official culture,” dictated by Fidel Castro, that also reflected  the Soviet Union and its Socialist Realism. Castro was obsessed with his control of the island’s cultural affairs, and even the best Cuban writers of the time were forced to imitate the worse of Soviet propaganda, stopped writing, such as poet Dulce María Loynaz, playwright René Ariza, and the novelist Reinaldo Arenas, jailed or fled in exile such as Heberto Padilla, Lydia Cabrera, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. There were many others. continue reading

In his 1982 Nobel Prize speech, García Márquez courageously recounted the repression of Latin America’s military dictatorships, civil wars that led to genocides, and the state terror that killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to leave for Europe and the United States.

I was in secondary school at the time.  I had read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and like many other young Cubans considered Gabo the most important writer in the Spanish language of all times.

As my generation grew up and began to express our own truths, it became our turn to be repressed. (I haven’t been able to work or publish in Cuba since 2008, when I created a blog Lunes de Post-Revolución.) In 2003 during the Black Spring, when three young Cubans were shot and 75 political dissidents were arrested and sentenced to 28 years in prison, García Márquez took notice of this other face of his friend Fidel Castro.

When writer Susan Sontag asked him about it, García Márquez answered: “I can no longer calculate the number of prisoners, dissidents and conspirators whom I have silently helped to get out of jail or emigrate from Cuba during the last 20 years.  Many of them do not even know that I helped, but it is enough that some know and my conscience is at peace.”

The word “but” is quite a dangerous monosyllable for anyone living under a monolithic ideology. In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s speeches are baroque rhetoric incarnated; he could speak for hours. Only for García Márquez was there an intellectual hidden in his speeches-in-chief. García Márquez fell in love in the time of the Revolution and got lost in its totalitarian translation for the free world.
Gabo had to believe that the crimes of Castroism were justified by “historical necessity,” Fidel’s wisdom, and other Marxist or “magical” categories. Otherwise, his fidelity over more than five decades cannot be understood. Nor can the considerable time he spent in Cuba, enjoying the mansion and other privileges he was provided, while ignoring the plight of Cubans —repressed writers included— all around him.

After half a century of solitude and without much sense of solidarity with pro-democracy and human-rights activists in Cuba, Gabo has died, and now there’s no one left with his intellectual firepower to provide cover for the Leader Maximum.

Editor’s note: Original post is in English

10 May 2014

The Guantanamo Way of Life or The United States of Americastro / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

47271972-monument-colonAt the beginning of the Revolution, when he realized that his “Soviet brothers” would not launch a nuclear war against “Yankee imperialism,” and after blatantly collaborating in the anti-Castro plot that killed President JFK, Fidel Castro had his hands free to make the United States whatever he pleased according to the historical period.

Now that technically he is no longer among the living, we Cubans can finally confess to ourselves: in many ways, Fidel Castro was the equine caudillo not only of those who endured the barbaric boot of island socialism, but also of those who believed they had escaped the Stable-State when they crossed themselves before the Statue of Liberty or Miami’s Freedom Tower. continue reading

But in a totalitarian Revolution, like the recurring nightmares of childhood, no one ever quite escapes. And we have that awful Oedipus complex called Cuban-American culture to prove it.

To make matters worse, there is some kind of perverse plagiarism in the Capitol in Washington DC, compared with the exceptional trashiness of the original, there, a little south of Miami and the Keys and their historic horizon, in a Havana also, subtly, DC (Después [after] Castro). Meanwhile the obelisk of the American capital–where Cuban spies sojourn, generation after generation–now presents a rough reflection of the war monolith in the Plaza of the Revolution.

Those who most collaborated with continental Castroism, pretending exactly the opposite, may be precisely those irreconcilably anti-Castro, among whom we find, as is now obvious, the paranoid patria of Fidel Castro himself, who had more infiltrators and agents in “extremist” exile than in his sacrosanct Department of State Security.

Not to mention the American Academy, whose textbooks are written with the same Revolutionary rhetoric, a rhetoric that implies the right of Cubans to live without rights in order to preserve our “sovereignty” a short 90 miles from the USA. And with a Yankee naval base — the crude Guantanamo — standing against bellicosity!

I wonder why it hasn’t occurred to any “pro-democracy” Cuban to launch a media campaign or to lobby Congress to demilitarize this base as old as a landmine, which could well be returned immediately to the non-Castro Cuba of the rest of the world, the lost pariahs of our post-national diaspora, wandering natives, so at least we could go back to that bit of non-communist Cuba, creating there an exclusive civic-commercial enclave, Taiwan-style or like the Panama Canal Free Zone.

I wonder why we don’t ask ourselves what the Castro clan could do in the face of this Taiwaintánamo City which, without ceasing to be U.S. territory, would exemplify the concrete Cuba of a future as capitalist as it is democratic, without the anthropological defects of Castroism.

I suspect that at this point in a history without histology, we Cubans lack political imagination. Our exhausted chanting in the key of Socialism-sharp-major, conguita of a cool-Castrosim, was constitutionally forced into our bodies. Castro castrated us, to the point where we no longer find even his Cadaver-in-Chief very difficult, after that civil war that lead to State slaughter when the international community abandoned us.

The United States should pay this moral — and mortal — debt now. Better late than never Mr. President.

It’s painful to say it, but the Cuban exile — and the more radical it is, the more prone to the ridiculous — was always easy to manipulate according to the criminal convenience of the ex-Commander-in-Chief, particularly with regards to the hieratic milestones of anti-Catroism, as well as the emigration stampedes within the Island and the extremely limited Embargo Act intended to “asphyxiate” the Havana government. A government which, over more than half a century of Democratic and Republican administrations in the White House, made a mockery of such “emphysema,” trafficking funds to international terrorism left and right. They arrived only through violence and only through violence will they go.

Of course, before the start of the lobbying for Taiwantánamo City, one would have to wonder at what point does Fidel Castro no longer serve as the good villain of the film before and after the Cold War, the sympathetic assassin of Hollywood and The New York Times. And yet, perhaps Special Agent 01-01-1959 not so secretly safeguarded the most intimate — and intimidating — interests of Washington DC .

The mistake of Fidel Castro, so distant from the Cuban people, and the fate of the United States of America, suddenly seem to be under only one sun: A despotic pluribus unum, novus ordo seclorum invisible but indivisible, with liberty and justice for none.

From Diario de Cuba

28 April 2014

For Venezuela From Venezuela / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The Cuban people will go down in history as the people who most contributed to Latin American disintegration. Disguised by the ideological hatred of capitalism, we bit into the core of fratricidal hatred on our continent. This guilt today covers several generations, irreversibly anthropologically damaged. There is no forgiveness capable of freeing us from this criminal responsibility.

Since January 1959, a bourgeois and pro-democratic revolution, with strong hints of urban terrorism and a certain Cuban-style Protestantism, was re-channeled by Fidel Castro into an agrarian and anti-imperialist process, and ultimately turned into a dictatorship of the proletariat and an extreme alliance with Moscow in the context of the Cold War. continue reading

The United States did nothing to avoid the artificial radicalization of the Revolution. Rather, great arrogance and a touch of ignorance led to the victimhood with which we Cubans justify a regime of injustice and impunity: massive social programs but not for those human beings who weigh in with an opinion (whether for or against, discipline in the face of despotism was always the key to survival in times of revolution).

Thus, Castro took thousands and thousands of lives, not only of his opponents (many of them armed), but also of Cuban revolutionaries, the majority executed extra-judicially — many of them were tried after they were shot — as soon as they manifested the least symptom of dissent to the official totalitarian discourse.

Cuban society came unhinged within a few months. No press remained. No religion one could publicly confess. No independent education, only that imposed “for free” by the State. Nor was there personalized healthcare. Nor commercial brands. Nor “human rights,” a term that still today sounds like an insult within Cuba. All exchange of international currency was abolished. We could not leave nor enter the country. We could not connect by phone with the outside nor receive a letter without being fired from our jobs.

Those who could flee, fled. We are still fleeing. It is our permanent plebiscite before a government that never listened to its own people: flight as a reaction to asphyxiating Fidel-ity. Those who remained on the island shut up or went to prison with long sentences — and terribly cruel tortures — like those that made Nelson Mandela, for example, a global icon.

We non-Castroite Cubans never became icons of anything. We were simply “worms,” “traitors,” “scum,” the “lumpen” of the “first free territory in America.” In American academia, especially, where Castroism had been “politically correct” from the very beginning, the greatest Cuban intellectuals, like the exiled and ultimately suicidal Reinaldo Arenas, never found shelter.

Then we imposed death on Asia, Africa and the Americas. We tried to spark 1,959 Vietnams all over the planet, possibly with nuclear missiles installed in Cuba behind the backs of the Cuban people. We invaded sovereign nations like Venezuela, and forever traumatized the fragile democracies of the hemisphere in the interest of a violent seizure of power, in uprisings or false populist movements that implied the scaffold for class enemies.

Just around the time our failure was obvious, with the fall of the global Socialist Camp, we used the money from other genocidal powers — such as Libya, North Korea and Iran — to encourage the false socialist democracies of the 21st century. Finally, it’s now Venezuela’s turn. A country that for many decades has been on Cuba’s death row, as General Angel Vivas reminded us a few days ago from his besieged home.

The Venezuelan people slept, like so many in the region. And in addition, it was a nation that evolved in its incessant clamor for a more just social system and less political demagoguery; this sequel we’ve dragged with us in Latin America since independence only bequeathed to us its retrograde string of caudillos.

Free Cubans, in Cuba and in exile, deplored Hugo Chavez from before his triumphant election. We never believed in his cynical smile. We didn’t even trust his most transparent election. Cubans know that the butcher’s hand of Castro never fails. But the world labelled us, then, reactionaries, “Batistianos” (half a century after Batista), and “Washington’s mercenaries” (as, in effect, many of us had no choice, having lacked a country in perpetuity). And, still worse, they spat in our face the stigma of being the intestinal traitors of the universal cause of Revolution.

Today Venezuela has taken to the streets, it “has had enough and has begun to march,” to the scorn of Ernest “Ché” Guevara, Salvado Allende, and other victims of Castroism still not recognized as such. In Venezuela the exploding popular tide is not political, but rather one of founding resistance. There where dictators and democrats have failed, the Venezuelan people understood that they were looking at their last chance. The alternatives to Chavezism, with or without cancer, were becoming obvious to Venezuelans after a decade of decline: Castroism in perpetuity or Castroism in perpetuity. They would never escape this monolithic idiocy if they didn’t escape it now.

Venezuelans are a lovely and free people, as were Cubans. It is now that they have to break the chains of constitutional fatigue. The Castro regime has never before been in such danger of finally beginning to disappear, with or without octogenarian Castros dictating their death ordeals from an interred, inhuman Havana.

Your freedom is now or now, Venezuela, still miraculously alive in this terrible trance were even vengeance seems like a virtue.

1 March 2014, From El Nacional, Venezuela

Editor’s note: This article was uploaded to the site on 3 March but apparently never appeared. Our apologies.

A Hero and a Villain / Angel Santiesteban

The citation document sent to Angel Lazaro Santiesteban Prats to put him in prison.

To be a Cuban dissident in prison — who doesn’t tremble at denouncing the Castro dictatorship — and to be designated by Reporters without Borders as one of the “100 Heroes of Information,” is not only an immense honor but also makes Angel Santiesteban-Prats worthy of some “benefits” that only Raul Castro’s state security knows about and can grant.

And yes, Angel Santiesteban — before knowing that he was one of the 100 Heroes — suspected that something had happened. Mysteriously, that day Officer Abat came to the settlement to order the guards to have more control and security over him. Later, when he knew about this, he understood that it was apprehension and fear that made them send the officer to order such measures. continue reading

Not being satisfied with increasing the harassment of Angel, they decided to “honor” him. Nor were they original in this; they repeated a “detail”: The next Friday again all the prisoners would leave on pass, and Angel would remain alone with all those jailers, which the poor Cuban people are obliged to pay. He must be a very important prisoner to make them pay so much for the salaries of his many “guards,” a privilege that he shares with Raul Castro himself.

But before State Security knew that they held a hero in prison, already they strove to transcend the brilliant Kafka, speculating on new chapters of “The Trial” against Angel.

Not even Franz himself would have been able to imagine that the review of the judgment, delivered on July 4, 2013, to which they never responded, was archived because one paper was missing. They would respond when the state investigated. Then they went back to start the proceedings. This time the Court answered the Minister of Justice, who was the one who accepted the request for review, that the number 444/2012 didn’t correspond with the name of Angel Santiesteban.

They said that from the First Chamber of State Security, which was where it materialized. They are blatantly delaying the delivery of the file; they are hiding it because they know that they don’t have any proof that sustains the claim. This coming week, the attorney, Lourdes Arzua, who replaced the disabled Amelia Rodriguez Cala, returned to present herself in the Department of Revision of the Ministry of Justice, in order to point out and insist on the petition of the file from the Tribunal. Now we will see what they come out with this time. The capacity they have to manipulate and violate the law is infinite.

These days they have also confiscated a legal construction that Angel had in Vedado, Plaza Municipality. Part of the money he earned from his books went into that construction. Before going to prison, they had already seized an apartment, also in Vedado; it went to State Security. He didn’t want to denounce it because he felt ashamed to raise his voice for material goods when his country has lost things that are needed more: liberty and spirituality.

Raul Castro, you have not taken me seriously when I told you so many times that the free world has its eyes on Angel Santiesteban. There can only be heroes if there are villains. You yourself already have recognized that he is a political prisoner when you offered him “freedom” in exchange for renouncing his political position. You never imagined that an intellectual would not cede to blackmail and violence to make him desist from his convictions.

All that arbitrariness and violations of his rights do nothing but increase his strength and demonstrate that all those denunciations are true. Only a dictatorship imprisons those who oppose it; only a dictatorship uses Justice as a weapon to impart vengeance.

If you were a democratic president in a country where rights prevailed, Angel or anyone could call you a dictator or whatever occurs to them, and they wouldn’t go to jail for that. A democratic president can be upset or angry about what is said about him, but just by being the leader of a democratic state, he knows that this is the price he pays for having power in a system where freedom and rights prevail.

Only some days ago, you yourself said at the closing of the Eighth Congress of UNEAC, that “it’s very good that everyone has said what they think, although I do not agree; but I respect those who disagree, because I am an absolute enemy of unanimity.” Pretty words, certainly. Now comes the moment to put them into practice.

Grant Angel Santiesteban a fair trial with all the procedural guarantees; return to him the goods that were confiscated without a reason; free him until this new trial is held, when he will be absolved, because there is no proof against him and he DIDN’T commit any of the crimes that they impute to him. Show that your regime is not a dictatorship; free all the political prisoners and stop the harassment and the use of violence against the dignified Ladies in White; call for free and multiparty elections; stop the harassment of the independent press and all its journalists.

It’s up to you to show that you don’t erase with your elbow what you sign with your fist.

The Editor

Have Amnesty International declare the dissident Cuban Angel Santiesteban a prisoner of conscience.

To sign the petition, follow the link.

Translated by Regina Anavy

3 May 2014

The Collapse of ETECSA / Lourdes Gomez

ETECSA (Telecommunications Company of Cuba) telephone office on Callejón del Carmen, in Santiago de Cuba

“The mobile phone you are calling is turned off or is out of the coverage area,” is the response Cuban mobile phone users commonly receive these days. As a result of the cellular blackout and lack of official information, rumors run rampant. All the blame has fallen on the Nauta email system, for taking over the lines.

Finally, on Thursday, April 24, on the national TV news, Hilda Maria Arias, the director of mobile services of ETECSA, the only Cuban telephone company, said: “The problem that most people have encountered is access to the base stations, which is the component of the mobile network closest to the user, through which the signal passes; and data transfers are consuming more resources of that network.” continue reading

The Cuban mobile phone system is the world’s most expensive, and users have no guarantee of receiving services: the monopoly on communication promotes the imposition of abusive prices but does not guarantee anything.

“You send an SMS and arrives the next day, it seems that ETECSA misjudged the mails and now we’re paying the consequences,” says Pedro Ramirez, a 34-year-old craftsman. “Most Cubans don’t have a landline, this service is essential even if its only texting and ringing.”

It certainly seems that they did not expect such a large influx into Nauta mail, opened on March 3: “100,000 new customers have come just for Nauta mail since the service opened, and we are talking about nearly one-third of what we envisioned for the entire year, “said the official. “For more than a year we studied and implemented the processes of needed investments, but did not calculate the fast pace of demand in the short time in which it showed up.”

Not only was the technological part of the business’s infrastructure not ready, but the social as well: access to the offices has become almost impossible due to the long lines for mail and internet.

In the main ETECSA office in Santiago de Cuba, located on Carmen Alley, a user waiting in line who requested anonymity, said: “I just came to pay the phone bill, and you get stuck here for an hour among internet users, those refilling their cell phones, and now the emails. I don’t know how they will do it, but this doesn’t work. They charge too much, don’t take complaints, and we have to put up with it because there’s no competition.”

The solution to network congestion, according to the official, will come within a “short time” because the investments have already been made. But the population does not believe it. The uncertainty continues. For many, the real solution would be to create another telephone company that competes with the outdated monopoly, but already on the TV Roundtable show dedicated to foreign investment it has been stated that telecommunications is not a priority.

So Cubans continue to dream of having normal connection services with the world, as the government makes fun of us, while charging us dearly.

Lourdes Gomez, Santiago de Cuba, May 1, 2014

From Diario de Cuba

6 May 2014

Are the Castros Using Civil Crimes to Imprison Their Opponents? / Angel Santiesteban

The Cuban writer and blogger, Angel Santiesteban-Prats, imprisoned since 2013 by the Castro brothers’ regime, spoke from prison in an exclusive interview with “Zoom to the News” of NTN24.

The dissident, who is serving a sentence of five years for supposed charges of inter-family violence, criticized the Castro regime and said “I don’t believe in the alleged intention of political opening.”

He even claimed that “as in my case, the Castros are using civil crimes to imprison their opponents.”

“In no moment will there be an opening for a national consensus”: Santiesteban.

[site manager: Our apologies, this video is not translated.]

Translated by Regina Anavy

6 May 2014

Passports, They Can’t Or They Don’t Want To? / Juan Juan Almeida

Raonel Valdes Valhuerdis, the Cuban accused of carrying out the greatest gold theft in the history of Florida, arrived in the United States this Wednesday under extradition. Detained in Belize when he tried to cross the border on his way to Mexico.

What is striking is his name being on the lists of the most wanted criminals and although the Revolutionary government asserts it does not encourage criminals, at the time of his arrest, the bandit was carrying a Cuban passport in his name issued December 28, 2012 by the Office of Cuban Interests in Washington, two months after the fugitive committed the armed robbery in Miami.

It all seems to indicate, and the facts speak for themselves, that the Cuban consulate in Washington hinders the consular processing of normal citizens but readily accepts common criminals.

Translated by mlk.
8 May 2014

A New Festival in Santiago de Cuba / Juan Juan Almeida

May, the month of flowers.  In order to be in tune, and to pretend that everything runs smoothly and without bumps, cultivators and florists from Havana, Granma, Guantanamo and Santiago de Cuba participated this past weekend in the Festival of Flowers. According to what the press says, the objective of the event is to exchange experiences about the marketing and manufacture of flower arrangements. The newspaper report insists that the recently unveiled Festival of Flowers serves to show a new image of florists and to develop the culture of the use of flowers in society.

I don’t understand; for years they repeatedly nagged us that the culture of flowers was a bourgeois leftover and, to the contrary, flowers of yore are imported, beautiful for sure, but the price besides being prohibitive is in CUC.  Do not let yourselves be confused, such a Festival is to please someone. Palace whim.

Translated by mlk.

6 May 2014

Behind the Scenes of the First of May / Angel Santiesteban

The May Day parade in Cuba

“I have little to lose by going,” I heard him say to a civil worker in the military enterprise where they keep me stowed away. “And I say little because if I lose that, I’ll be up in the air.”

Those who were listening shook their heads in agreement; it was a general fact. “My son studies at the university,” said another. “He has to fake it until he graduates. He even has to be a militant in the Young Communists in order to open doors and be trusted, and when they give him the first opportunity to travel, he will stay.”

There was a poignant silence. “We have to do what we can,” said the first guy. “The little we have is a pittance; we have to care for it more than if we had a lot. I can’t give myself the luxury of losing even a hair.”

“The parade, I’m going to the parade,” said the single man. “I will repudiate…I’m going to scream and kill if it’s necessary. I have to survive.”

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton Prison Settlement. April 2014.

Have Amnesty International declare the dissident Cuban Angel Santiesteban a prisoner of conscience.

To sign the petition, follow the link.

Translated by Regina Anavy

7 May 2014

Rebellion Against the Moringa / Tania Diaz Castro

HAVANA, Cuba – Not that my neighbors would agree. It was purely coincidence. While the workers on the state payroll marched in the Plaza of the Revolution, my closest neighbors ran out of patience; they rebelled and demanded that I cut down my moringa tree.

It had been planted in November 2011, less than three years ago, when at the behest of Fidel Castro several trucks handed out saplings in polyethylene bags to the residents of Santa Fe, Cangrejera, Baracoa, Jaimanitas and the residential neighborhoods adjoining the Commander in Chief’s exclusive enclave, known as Ground Zero. continue reading

Along with the free saplings they also delivered a brochure printed for the occasion, explaining the properties of this plant, native to India, which according to the government is able to raise the dead and to nurture the living with protein, without the need of eating beefsteak, something the Commander forbade to us decades ago.

I got into the habit, I have to confess, of dropping its leaves into soup, for its spicy flavor and with the idea that it would infuse protein, as the Comandante recommended to us.

But the neighborhood refused to eat moringa. Pánfilo, a neighbor who repairs bicycle taxis, told me not to talk about it; what he wanted was a good steak. Pedro, the carpenter who had gone to prison for helping to kill a cow, said the same. Chicha and Sonia, their wives, would not even try the recommended infusion, and Angelito, the messenger, said that he was opposed to that nonsense. Even my neighbors the prosecutors, who in compliance with the “guidance from above” had dutifully planted one at the entrance to their condo, were never seen plucking a twig for the daily meal.

I can swear to you that I alone honored the moringa. Until yesterday, May 1st. As thousands of workers marched like migratory animals in front of the successor dictator of the Castro dynasty, some other workers, my neighbors, said that they were not going to put up with any more trash that blew off my moringa, invading walkways, patios, and kitchens. They were talking about the pods, seeds and leaves, which fell onto their food plates.

“Either you cut it down,” I heard them angrily say, “or we will.”

That’s how determined my neighbors were—Laima, a corporate accountant, Juan, a burglar-alarm technician, Yohanny a security guard, and several more.

I argued that it was a one of “Fidel’s trees” and they responded with outrage. They were also aggressive. I said that many had planted moringa in the patios of their homes and I hadn’t heard other protests and couldn’t understand their outrage. They all argued with me at the same time. And while they were doing so, I asked them why the hell they weren’t in the Plaza at the time, because it was May 1st.

Finally, at ten a.m. I gave up and, against my will, asked a friend to cut down the offending tree.

At dawn, when I looked out the window of my room, I saw its sawed off limbs. They seemed like dead skeletons. I couldn’t sleep, and battling insomnia I considered the exaggerated size that my little moringa had acquired, and especially the northerly wind gusts, which contributed to the daily defoliation and launched its thick, spiky seed pods left and right, at the head of anyone around

In addition I realized that, without being aware of it, perhaps because of a love for nature, I had become an accomplice in the last folly of the Maximum Leader of Cuba, when he sent a moringa to be planted at every house, because under his rule none of the workers who marched on May Day in the Plaza had the right to eat a steak, or to drink the glass of milk that his brother promised seven years ago.

May 6, 2014 – Cubanet

Translated by Tomás A.

Cuba: The Numbers Don’t Add Up / Ivan Garcia

A young woman admiring items for sale at at hard-currency shopping mall in Havana. Source: Secretos de Cuba.

Olga, a 62-year-old engineer, spends 11.50 CUC a month (about US $13.00) on two bags of powdered milk for herself and her family.

“I don’t consider a glass or two of milk in the morning for breakfast a luxury. My 93-year-old father drinks as much as four glasses. A relative in Switzerland sends me 100 euros a month so I can provide the old man with beef, milk and cheese. On my 512 peso salary (about $22.00) I would never be able to afford it,” says Olga.

The new price increases set by the government of President Raul Castro mean that the Havana engineer will have to pay 13.20 CUC for two one-kilogram bags, an increase of 1.70 CUC. continue reading

The problem in Cuba is that from 2005 until now prices for a variety of goods that can only be bought with hard currency have risen between 20% to 60%.

In 2005 beef, chicken, cheese, milk, yogurt, oil, sausages and toiletries for a family of three cost $100. Nine years later the price has almost doubled.

Some increases happen without any warning. “One fine day you go to the store only to discover that cheese which cost 4.40 CUC the day before now sells for 4.95. It’s really galling. Everything is blamed on the economic crisis, on the U.S. blockade (embargo) and rising food prices worldwide,” says a woman outside a store on San Rafael Boulevard.

It is true that since 2007 the prices of certain foods have soared in the global marketplace. But Cubans wonder if this has also caused the prices of plasma TVs, computers and refrigerators to go up.

A 32-inch television that cost a little over $200 in Miami is priced between $640 and $750 at hard-currency stores in Cuba, where the average monthly salary is no more than $20.

An LG dual-temperature refrigerator cost $571 in 2004. The same model is now worth 760 CUC, about $850 at the official exchange rate.

Detergent, oil and soap have also risen between 20% and 35% in the last ten years. These actions were taken by an irate Fidel Castro after the United States discovered in 2005 that the Swiss bank UBS had been retiring old banknotes in an account worth more than $4 billion controlled by the Cuban government.*

Castro then imposed a 20% tax on the Yankee dollar. With an innkeeper’s mindset, he jacked up prices on items sold in hard currency by 200% to 500% in order to subsidize his social programs.

It proved to be a windfall. Following Robin Hood’s playbook, dollars were taken from those who had them in order to finance government programs such as school lunches, the energy revolution and the “Battle of Ideas.”

With abject hatred towards Cubans who have left their homeland for political or economic reasons, the military autocrats have (now underhandedly) imposed outrageous fees on goods and services purchased with remittances from overseas. These include telephone services, internet access and exorbitant surcharges on car sales.

With the recent price rise powdered milk is the latest to be added to this list. But the explanation for this does not stand up to scrutiny. If we go online, we find that the price trend worldwide is down.

According to the Uruguayan daily El Observador prices for powdered milk have dropped 10% over the last two months from $5,005 to $4,439 a ton. The decline is expected to continue until year’s end when it could reach as low as $4,200. That would amount to a roughly 16% drop from the beginning to the end of 2014.

Recently, a reporter for Martí News, Pablo Alfonso, published an article which exposes the Cuban regime. Alfonso reports that Global Dairy Trade — an auction platform for internationally traded commodity dairy products which holds an auction twice a month in which over 90 countries participate — reported that in the last twelve months sales of milk powder fell 8.4%. In the latest transactions the commodity sold for $4,033 a ton.

In the case of skim-milk — the kind sold on the island — the decline was 9.6%, equivalent to $4,126 per metric ton. Global Dairy Trade’s figures also indicate that the price for powdered skim-milk on the international market was $4,372 a ton in January 2014 and $4,452 in February.

According to official figures released in Cuba, however, the price for a ton of powdered skim milk was set to increase from $4,720 to $5,563. One might ask the country’s foreign trade officials where they are buying powdered milk because what they are paying does not match the published purchase price.

Even the official Cuban newspaper Granma has published comments highly critical of the price increase for powdered milk. A Cuban doctor serving in Saudi Arabia noted that a one-kilogram bag of the best quality powdered milk costs her only about five dollars.

Orestes, a Cuban living in Hialeah, is at a loss for words to describe the regime’s arbitrary pricing schedule.

“It’s robbery,” says Orestes. “In Brazil, bus fares rose 20 cents and people took to the streets. Here in the U.S. not many people buy powdered milk. A gallon (3.8 liters) of fresh 2% fat milk or skim-milk costs $3.89. All these price increases are designed to get emigrants to pay up.”

In Cuba only children up to seven-years-old and people on medically prescribed diets have the right to consume milk at the modest prices set forth in their ration books. In a speech in 2007 in Camaguey, Raul Castro stated, “We have to erase from our minds this up-to-age-seven idea that we have been carrying around for fifty years. We have to produce enough milk so that anyone who wants a glass of milk can have it.”

Seven years later Cubans are still waiting for this promise to be fulfilled.

Iván García

* Translator’s note: U.S. officials discovered that UBS had allowed countries such as Cuba, Iran and Libya to retire old banknotes by replacing them with new ones. This was a violation of an agreement with the Federal Reserve which stipulated that the bank would not accept cash from or transfer cash to countries on which the United States had imposed sanctions. (Source: The New York Sun)

25 April 2014

Manuel Cuesta Morua Nominated for the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize

Manuel Cuesta Morúa. (EFE)

The Program for International Democratic Solidarity of CADAL, Democracy Bridge, has nominated Cuban dissident leader Manuel Cuesta Morúa spokesman for the Progressive Arch Party, to the Václav Havel 2014 Human Rights Award, according to their press release.

The award “aims to reward civil society action in defense of human rights in Europe and beyond. The candidates must have made a difference in the human rights situation of a determined group, have contributed to the exposure of large-scale systematic violation, or have successfully mobilized public opinion or the international community to review a particular case,” said CADAL (Center for Democratic Opening in Latin America), based in Argentina. continue reading

Cuesta Morúa founded the Progressive Arch with other dissidents in 2008, “with the intention of bringing together organizations of a social democratic nature, hitherto scattered in and out of Cuba,” said CADAL.

The opponent is also an activist for racial integration and against violence on the Island.

This last January he was arrested in Havana when he organized, along with CADAL and other organizations, a Democratic Forum on International Relations and Human Rights, to be held parallel to the Community of Latin American and Latin American States (CELAC) Summit.

The Cuban authorities accused him of “spreading false news against world peace.” Recently, the regime lifted a provisional release measure that obliged him to present himself to the Police weekly and blocked him from traveling abroad.

The Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize is annual and is awarded by the Council of Europe in collaboration with the Vaclav Havel Library and the Charter 77 Foundation.

The award was created in memory of Havel, playwright, opponent of totalitarianism, architect of the Velvet Revolution of 1989, President of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic, and “an enduring symbol of the opposition to the dictatorship,” noted CADAL.

From Diario de Cuba, 2 May 2014