Translating Cuba

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

It’s a human drama with obvious political overtones. The regime wants to tell the story their way. People leave the island, they say, encouraged by the Cuban Adjustment Act that awards automatic residence to Cubans who step on United States soil.

It’s true. The frivolity of the U.S. wet foot/dry foot policy, seems like a macabre game. If the gringo coast guard catches you at sea, you’re returned to Cuba. If you manage to touch land, you won the lottery.

Although absurd, the share of moral responsibility remains with the olive green autocracy. Only the despair, the lack of a future, and the economic burden could drive a person to plan this dangerous journey across the sea.

People leave Cuba because things are going badly. Those who don’t have relatives in the United States, or who put off the family reunification paperwork, risk their future on a raft.

Let me tell you a story of rafters that happened in my neighborhood. Since Christmas 2013 Gregorio (name changes) was persuading relatives and friends disposed to change their fate with a marine adventure.

After 1994 when the Fidel Castro regime decriminalized illegal departures to the North, the future rafters plan their projects without too much discretion.

Gregorio was obsessed with the idea of leaving the country. Part of his family lives in Miami. He spent years doing the legal paperwork: “I don’t want to get to Florida when I’m 60.”

Finding allies for such an undertaking is not hard in Cuba. Young people without a future swarm every corner of the island. A priority: people with nautical knowledge.

Guys with experience who failed in other attempts. People with money to build the safest craft possible. Human traffic from Cuba to the United States is a buoyant industry.

But not everyone can afford the $10,000 for a ticket. There are different kinds of immigrants. There are those who choose to cross land borders, jumping from one nation to another in long and dangerous journeys from Ecuador, or paying cash to a Mexican coyote to put them across the border.

Then there are the rafters. According to José,”We are the most desperate. I have friends who have tried dozens of times. If they’re caught by the Cuban or U.S. coast guard, they always intend to try again. Many have become old salts.”

Gregorio had never tried. After recruiting twelve partners (everyone brought something, one sold a Moskovich car, another, two HP computers), they contacts an expert in designing marine craft.

The job isn’t cheap. A powerful and reliable engine is no less than four or five thousand dollars on the black market. They got three GPS for a possible localization, among other goods.

Friends were being added to the adventure. In April 2014 they were 22 people. Gregorio alerted family and friends who have yachts in Miami, so at any given moment, if they washed up on a key, they could be towed to the shore.

The GPA is essential. The artisanal craft designer had to be top of the line. They chose an ex-mechanic of a merchant boat who boasted he knew remote river passages in the Florida keys.

Before departing, at 2:30 in the morning on Wednesday, April 23, they said goodbye to their loved ones with a couple quarts of cheap whiskey.

They were carrying food and water for two weeks in case of shipwreck. A chessboard, Spanish cards and a game of dominoes. As if instead of a risky sea journey they were going on a peaceful safari.

Family in Havana tracked them through an illegal antenna on the cable news updates on Miami TV. Apparently, on Friday at lunchtime good news arrived.

The mother of one of the rafters called his family to say that Channel 23 had aired a story about the supposed boat with a child traveling. The rumor spread like wildfire. The Miami family of the rafters called Krome and other immigration detention centers in Florida. They could not confirm the event. They toured hospitals and coast guard offices. Nobody knew anything of the rafters. They began to panic.

The family members in Cuba called the rafters cellphones insistently. For now, the only signal is a laconic request from a recorded voice saying, “The number you are calling is turned off or outside the coverage area.”

Neighbors and friends try to encourage the rafters’ relatives. “An uncle was twelve days at sea until landfall in Key West.” Or, “You have to wait, they’ve only been at sea for 6 days.” Family members on both sides of of the Strait sleep poorly, eat little and suffer from nerves. They pray to their saints and pray for the lives of their own. Each day that passes without news is synonymous with bad omens. And the death of a rafter, usually, no one can confirm it.

Photo: One of the many rickety boats that came from the Havana coast towards the coast of Florida during the so-called “Rafter Crisis” in August 1994. In these twenty years, despite an increase in the chances of emigrating by legal means , Cubans continue to jump into the sea to try to reach the United States. Taken from Latin American Studies Group.

Iván García

6 May 2014

Freedom of expression, information and access to the internet are inalienable rights of any citizen. If the government of a country denies them, it is not a punishable crime to allow another person to inform them in some way.

Authoritarian and vertical societies like Cuba possess a bunch of rules that allow them to manage the flow of information at will. This control allows them to govern without hiccups, manipulating adverse opinions or hiding them.

The White House can implement policies that contribute to Cubans having diverse sources of information. But with transparency. And not designing strategies that could be interpreted as interference.

It is positive that the United States Interest Section in Havana operates two free internet rooms, where anyone can go, dissidents or otherwise.

Washington’s policy toward Cuba is generally public and transparent. On the internet it is not difficult to find help or money awarded to opposition groups on the island. A good way to bury this obsessive mania for espionage and mystery.

It must be a goal of the United States that the Radio Martí programming is becoming more enjoyable, analytical and professional. Since the 1960s, the Cuban regime used Radio Havana Cuba as an instrument to sell its doctrines to foreign countries.

With the petrodollars of the late Hugo Chavez, Telesur was created, television dedicated to openly spreading and supporting the most rancid of the Latin American left. That’s their right.

But each person should also be respected, according to his opinions, able to freely access the TV channel he desires, listen to the radio station he prefers, and read his favorite newspapers and digital sites.

For the olive-green autocracy, the 21st century is an ideological struggle. And it has orchestrated a campaign called “the battle of ideas.” But on the national scene, opinions that diverge from the official line are not accepted.

Cable antennas are illegal. Internet costs a price unattainable for most ordinary people. Foreign newspapers and books critical of the status quo are censored.

All that’s left is to listen to shortwave. Or sit in the bar of a hotel, spend four dollars to drink a mojito and watch Spanish CNN. The censorship even goes beyond politics.

Although it’s fair to recognize that Raul Castro has allowed Cubans to see NBA and MLB games, foreign games in which players from the island participate are still banned.

It’s the same in the literary, intellectual and musical fields. The singing Willy Chirino, the composer Jorge Luis Piloto, the poet Raul Rivero, the columnist Carlos Albert Montaner, or the writer Zoe Valdez, are prohibited from visiting their homeland for being convinced anti-Castroites.

The Castro brothers suffer from a rare mania: they consider themselves the legitimate owners of the nation. And know how to sell themselves as victims. And mor than a few times, U.S. and European institutions, with their Cold War mentality, give them ammunition.

Iván García

Photo: Flags of Cuba, United States, United Kingdom and the European Union, among others, waving on the balcony of the Hotel Saratoga, where in April 2013 Beyoncé and her husband , rapper Jay -Z stayed. The pretext for the couple to spend three days in Havana was celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary. It was speculated that behind the visit could be Barack Obama, friend of the artists. True or not, the journey was questioned in Cuba and in the United States. Taken from Cubanet .

29 April 2014