Second Open Letter to Raul Castro from Angel Santiesteban

First page of the handwritten letter

First page of the handwritten letter

Mr. Ruler:

On February 28 I completed one year of unjust imprisonment, after a trial where I demonstrated my innocence with multiple proofs and witnesses. In exchange, the Prosecutor couldn’t present one single consistent proof against me, except the malicious – in addition to being ridiculous – one of an expert calligrapher who, after having ordered me to copy an economic article from the newspaper Granma, the Official Organ of the Communist Party, gave an opinion that the height and slant of my handwriting showed I was guilty.

All this happened four years after the supposed event, where they saddled me with a crime that I didn’t commit. To make things worse, this whole circus that went down against me was corroborated by the henchman Camilo, an official of State Security, long before the Court passed sentence.

Being detained – after a demonstration of support by other compatriots in opposition – this official announced to me before witnesses that I “would be sentenced to five years of privation of liberty,” a declaration that he published on the Internet, one month before the official pronouncement of the Court, an organ that should be impartial, should act independently, but that in addition to clearly following the rulings of State Security, perpetrated another flagrant violation during the judicial trial, upon adding to my penalty one more year than the maximum established by the Penal Code.

My case, like many others, shows that after the coming to power of your family, the Castros, there isn’t even a minimum of independence among the legislative, executive and judicial powers, which exists in all nations that are truly democratic.

These powers are managed by you at your whim and convenience. And history shows that when these powers are manipulated by the same entity, whatever the ideology, we are dealing with a dictatorship, where the only thing left to us is the possibility of interrupting and having influence with our opinions in the fourth power: communication, the news, achieved thanks to the development of the Internet, and to thereby circumvent your iron control on the media. And for that I have been punished. continue reading

Since my incarceration I have been physically and psychologically tortured; on several occasions I have suffered cold in the concrete beds of your cells, beatings from your henchmen, and I have rejected all your proposals that I abandon the national territory or desist from my ideals of freedom for my country.

I want to remind you that before opening my blog, The Children Nobody Wanted, where I only said what I thought about the terrible circumstances of the lives of my people, I was an exemplary citizen who, thanks to the literary talent that God gave me, won prizes and recognition from national and international cultural institutions.

But, General, one day I discovered that the ethical price I was paying to be seen as an exemplary citizen for the totalitarian society that your family has imposed on Cubans was too high for my soul and my time in history. I had to overcome the fear of repression with which the institutions of indoctrination created by your family educated me from my birth.

I decided to overcome the fear implanted by you in the generations of Cubans who have grown up under this failure that you call “Revolution,” and, in particular, the muzzle on the conscience of the artists who mainly pretend to support the socialist process that you command, but later are heard criticizing the Regime under their breath, because, apparently, the Cuban people have preferred to take the easiest, but the longest, road.

This reality of social pretense became for me an insupportable moral burden. I didn’t want to continue doing what they were doing – and still do – this large part of the Cuban generations who have been educated under the law of the cynicism of survival, pretending what they don’t feel.

My conscience lead me to open my blog, The Children Nobody Wanted, and beginning with this event, I signed my death sentence, as your repressors have told me on several occasions.

Expressing a critical opinion as a citizen about the social process that you lead is the only “crime” I have committed, and I accept it.

From this moment I have been prohibited from traveling abroad. They have marginalized me from all national cultural activity, and as a very important detail, just after writing you my First Open Letter, a judicial farce began against me for a crime I supposedly committed four and a half years ago.

Doesn’t this seem like a suspicious coincidence?

Now, one year later, I write you this Second Open Letter, running the risk of unleashing even more your cruelty against me, and even, at the risk of losing my life – although it would be so easy for you to accomplish that, only a snap of your fingers and it would happen.

I urge you to do it, by any of the methods you have applied in more than fifty years of dictatorship against many of those who have opposed your plans: a suspicious terminal illness, an assassination because of a supposed brawl with a common prisoner, or an accidental fall, to cite examples.

Your masters, the Russian KGB and the East German STASI, have taught your stooges well in how to eliminate “enemies” while leaving their guilt on the terrain of speculation.

I assure you, luckily for me, that what I was born to do in this life has already been accomplished, because my ambitions are small. This helped me to decide to change my status, my literary future, what some call “to boycott my fate,” since to sacrifice the well-being and happiness of my children, to limit to the extreme my publications and artistic life, I have done only in exchange for one humble aspiration: that my biography show that I struggled for the freedom of my country and against the dictatorship of my time.

That is enough; it’s sufficient for me.

It only remains for me to add that thanks to you and your repressive machinery, I have learned how much capacity for suffering I can stand; I have verified that ravenous hunger, the cold and the beatings were crushed by the force of my ideals and feelings.

I have seen that it’s worthy to suffer for the rest upon seeing them abused by the power that you hold, hurt by the jailers. I have learned to share the last crust of bread with those I live with in the cells to whom I have been drawn.

I have learned to defend my ideas above the hunger and the illnesses, and I have convinced myself that there is no way of making me change my ideas about what I consider just or about the wide universal right that I have to freedom of expression.

I am grateful for this miserable life to which you and your “humane socialist system” have confined me, because I have grown before every obstacle and, above all, because with each test I have become a better human being.

I have taken advantage of the time to write several books which I have collected in a safe place, and in part of them I describe the terrifying and inhumane reality inside your prisons.

The ideals that I brought with me to prison have been strengthened, they have revived with an unimaginable force. For injustice and impunity, I count on you to this day. For telling the truth without fear of your reprisals, I count on me.

May God forgive you,

Ángel Santiesteban Prats

Lawton Prison Settlement, February 2014

Translated by Regina Anavy

The Tax Man and his Aladdin’s Lamp / Gladys Linares

Private taxi — photo Gladys Linares

HAVANA, Cuba. — In 2010, Elvira was dismissed from her workplace. She had no option other than to get a license and open a snack-bar in her home in order to support her mother and son. She started selling coffee, soft drinks and sandwiches. She remarks that working for herself was more convenient, and she believed that she owed nothing to anyone because every month she duly paid her taxes.

Nevertheless, when she heard talk for the first time about the sworn statement about personal income as part of the “perfection” of the Cuban economic model, she never imagined what would happen to her: one fine day, they notified her that she owed nine thousand pesos national currency in debt to the tax authorities, and 500 in fines for fraud in her sworn statement, a total of 380 CUC [around $400 USD, close to two year’s average income in Cuba], hard currency and unattainable.

On inquiring at the Office of National Tax Administration (ONAT), the responses she received left her bewildered.  According to the official, in order to monitor the sworn statement, they consider the work hours, quantity of products sold and their prices, as well as the place where the snack-bar is located. continue reading

Private taxi -- photo Gladys Linares
Private taxi — photo Gladys Linares

Elvira asked how they could know all that, and the worker replied that the evaluation might be direct or indirect.  “You may know that we observe you, but equally we have the option of evaluating you without your knowing.”  And she added that if she did not agree, she could complain.  Elvira, getting to her feet, told her: “I see now that you all get information from Aladdin’s Lamp.” Today she is thinking of turning in her license and working under the table, but first she must devise a way to pay the debt.

A carrier who did not want to reveal his name said that he turned in his license more than three months ago because “the streets are in a very bad state, and I barely earned enough to buy tires and fix the car.”  In spite of that, a short while ago they notified him of a tax debt of 30 thousand pesos national currency, some 1,200 CUC.

One of the topics that lately has caused a commotion among the people is the great quantity of money the self-employed have to pay by way of taxes and fines.

Julio, an honest and enterprising neighbor, closed his private restaurant and turned in his license some time ago. He says that when the matter of the sworn statement about personal income began at the end of the year, he did not understand why, if all those months he paid 10% of his income, he had to pay again at year’s end.

“Marino Murillo said,” complains Julio, “that the payment to the tax system is to diminish the inequalities among the citizens. And I say what must be done for that is to take away privileges from the leaders, officials and their families, who are the ones who live well in this country, at the expense of Cubans.”

Cubanet, February 27, 2014, 

Translated by mlk.

Venezuela, a Truth Between Virtue and Vengeance / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Screen Shot 2014-03-01 at 1.27.07 PMThe 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.

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. continue reading

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

Venezuela is not Angola / Camilo Ernesto Olivera Peidro

Cuban special troops

Cuba is not the same as 40 years ago, but its leaders are the same

HAVANA, Cuba, February — Cuba intervened militarily in Angola on the side of the MPLA in August of 1975.  In 1977 Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) supported the government of Agostino Neto in order to suppress by blood and fire an internal rebellion.

After that moment, the Cuban government took in its hands, in a less surreptitious manner, control of Angola. Within the MPLA there were divergent opinions about the role the Cubans were playing in the country’s political situation. On the death of President Neto in 1979, they pulled strings for the appointment of Jose Eduardo DosSantos to the post.

“In 1978, Fidel Castro knew that he could not count on the USSR unconditionally,” says an ex-official connected to the Cuban embassy in Angola at that time, “and his plan B consisted of strengthening political and military control over Angola.  The Russians involved themselves in the matter when they saw the possibility of trafficking arms in exchange for gold and precious stones. This the high Cuban officialdom did from the moment they gained control of the Angolan governmental entities and the main access roads into the country. The political and military caste that came into power in Russia post-1991, did it, too, with the money earned there and in other low intensity military conflicts.”

Now, in the case of Venezuela, the strategy is different but seeking the same objective. “Venezuela is not Angola, and Cuba is not the same as it was 40 years ago,” explains my interlocutor, “but the individuals in control are the same. They have sent civil collaborators like a screen to try to cloak their strong presence within the structures of all levels of that country. Chavez handed the house keys to the Cuban DGI (State Intelligence Directorate), and Maduro is a bad version of Jose Eduardo DosSantos.” continue reading

If the political situation in Venezuela goes completely out of control, the first victims would be the Cuban civil collaborators. “And in the same way as happened in 1977 when Nito Alves confronted Agostino Neto, it cannot be ruled out that FAR will intervene in Venezuela citing the protection of the collaborators.”

The question of how they will do it is more of form than of substance.  But Angola was a country recently released from colonial domination, in contrast with Venezuela which possesses a democratic tradition that has shown itself to be persistent.  “Nevertheless the silence or complicity of the Latin-American countries with the abuses of the Burro from Miraflores is a bad sign.”

Cuban soldiers in Angola

On the other hand, the government of Raul Castro is facing a difficult choice: “If the military intervention by Cuban troops generates a spiral of such violence that it involves massive deaths among the civilian Venezuelan population and Cubans, the political cost for Raul Castro would be very high within and outside of Cuba. The US government would hold all the cards in its favor to declare it a hemispheric plague. The Latin-American governments would have to take a clear position in the matter or public opinion would hold them to account.” And a possible dialog with the CEE would grind to a halt.

Towards the interior of Cuban, just look at the sad destiny that the African veterans suffer. My interlocutor said: “It is unlikely that a lightning political campaign of Raulism will gain the support of the island’s people for military intervention in Venezuela. At first, he will send elite troops trained in confronting disturbances in urban zones.”

In 1992 Fidel Castro declared that the era of Cuban military missions abroad had ended.  Two decades later, the drums of another fratricidal war may be about to beat on the doors of the Cuban family. The worst scenario possible is not impossible.

Cubanet, February 28, 2014 /

Translated by mlk

Cuesta Morua’s Wife Threatened With Eviction Notice / Reinaldo Emilio Cosano Alen

Gloria LLopis, photo by Cosano Alen
Gloria LLopis, photo by Cosano Alen

Havana, Cuba. – Professor Gloria Llopis Prendes, her daughter Gloria and her 3-year-old granddaughter Amanda, have received an Eviction Notice to vacate their current home located at Avenida 71 Edif. 3, Aprt 10, Zona de Desarrollo, Batabano, Mayabeque province, a community known as Las Casas de los Maestros (Teacher’s House).

How did you become aware of this Eviction Notice?

“On February 20th an official commission showed up at my home to give me an ultimatum, that I had only 15 days to go back to work, otherwise I would be considered an illegal occupant of the premises. Among the local officials were Julio Cesar Martinez, Director of the Ministry of Education (MINED) here in Batabano; Hildo Caballero, general secretary of the Communist Party (PCC) in the municipality; and a lady named Liset, head of the MINED Department of Inspectors in the municipality. I have no choice, if I refuse to vacate the house, all utilities will be cut off, the police will enforce the eviction notice and we’ll be homeless.

What is the basis for this eviction threat?

Our apartment is an asset of Ministry of Education. Once you don’t work for them anymore, you cannot be in possession of such asset. I have been working for the Ministry of Education since January 3, 1983, until two years ago when I was fired for becoming a peaceful dissident, a “crime” sufficient to cause you to lose your job.

Do you know someone who has been given such an ultimatum? 

“Yes, Odalys Fernandez Quesada, History professor, received a similar notification from the same Commission. Odalys is member of the NGO Zero Violence Feminine Platform, of which I am the Coordinator, and associated with the NGO Nuevo Pais (New Country) Forum, presided over by Dr. Manuel Cuesta-Morua. continue reading

Cuesta-Morua is your husband. What is his legal status?

“Manuel is on probation now. He has to go once a week to a Police Station located at Septima y 62, Miramar, Municipio Playa. He was imprisoned some days before the CELAC Summit in Havana for daring to call a parallel convention which did not take place because the government obstructed it. They charged him with “Disseminating False News against World Peace.”

Do you know any other former employee of Ministry of Education in possession of housing that belongs to the Ministry?

“Yes, many. When the Escuelas en el Campo (schools in the countryside) idea failed, some employees went to work in different fields, others took clerical jobs, others were promoted to political or administrative positions, always keeping the roofs over their heads.

“The same thing happens with all the housing that belongs to any government entity. Officials look the other way, they never review the lease as long as the employee continues working for the government*. Whoever is in possession of an asset is tied for life to government entities. Years ago apartment buildings were built in the countryside for those teachers who were permanently working in middle schools and high schools in those areas.”

Gloria Llopis holds a BA History and Social Sience 1983 and a BA Psychology and Pedagogy 1989

*Translator’s note: Since the vast majority of jobs in Cuba are in State entities, this covers most working people.

Cubanet, 28th of February, 2014 Reinaldo Emilio Cosano Alen

Translated by: Rafa

I Defend My Lawyer / Rene Gomez Manzano

The lawyer Amelia Rodríguez Cala. Photo by X.
The lawyer Amelia Rodríguez Cala. Photo by Jorge Ignacio Pérez

Havana, Cuba, February 2014 – Last week disturbing news circulated throughout the Cuban dissident community: The top permanent body of the National Organization of Collective Law Firms (ONBC) suspended Amelia Rodríguez Cala—the great defender of accused opponents of the regime—from practicing law for a period of six months.

As the days passed, additional details about the clumsy maneuver surfaced. It became clear that, although they invoked other reasons, what is at the heart of this new hoax is the aim of punishing this learned woman because of her upright stand in the exercise of her profession.

As usual, other pretexts are deployed. They initiated disciplinary proceedings against Amelia based on alleged complaints from two clients. At this point, it is reasonable to suspect that at least one of them is a provocateur in the service of the regime. In any case, a cursory examination of the two complaints demonstrates the weakness of the allegations.

In the case of Caridad Chacón Feraudy, it is claimed that the attorney did not submit her evidence in time. Never mind that a technical assistant breached her obligation of notifying and informing the lawyer about the matter. Nor that Amelia ultimately won the case, as the evidence was presented to better purpose, and accepted and used by the Court. continue reading

For her part, Regla Capote Alayo claims that there was no notification to the firm to report the judgment in her case. In this regard, the same lawyer exhibits the documents showing she met with that woman no less than ten times, without the woman giving her the courtesy of bringing this up.

Anyone examining the matter impartially would conclude that Dr. Rodríguez Cala should be exonerated. But the outcome was otherwise, and to ask for objectivity from the ONBC leaders is like expecting mangoes from a pine tree. What has now been decided against Amelia is just the latest link in a long chain of constant acts of harassment against her.

We know of the constant harassment that the leaders of the Carlos III Collective Law Firm have maintained against the jurist. In this, the unit director, Ileana Sandoval Roldán, and the team leader Franklyn Menéndez Tamayo, have distinguished themselves.

They have made her life impossible. In haphazard fashion they constantly question her about supposed deficiencies in her work. This has been repeated in the presence of several different clients, who can attest to the despotic and abusive way that the leaders of that law firm treat the attorney. This is no accident.

Rodríguez Cala has defended over a hundred dissidents. At the time she was excluded from her professional practice, she was representing almost all the independent personalities who are today involved in court cases: Berta Soler, Martha Beatriz Roque, Sonia Garro, Ramón Muñoz, Ángel Santiesteban, Marcelino Abreu Bonora, Reinier Mulet, Miguel Ulloa Guinart Angel Yunier Remon, Gorki Águila.

This reality is what arouses the hatred and ferocity of the mediocre, for whom the barrister’s robe is nothing more than another kind of uniform. In their lawlessness, the repressors from the collective law firms have even exceeded their powers. Decree-Law 81, which regulates the practice of law, empowers them to apply to a member of the organization, among other sanctions, that of “transfer to another position of inferior category or, after proper coordination, to another unit nearby.”

The disjunctive conjunction indicates that they can choose between the two penalties: either give you a lower position, or transfer you to another firm (implying, to work there as a lawyer). In this case, in violation of the law, both measures were applied. As for “nearby,” you only have to realize that they sent her to the distant town of La Lisa.

This week, the attorney plans to fulfill her unjust sanction. In her new position she will earn 300 Cuban pesos per month, just over $12. They want to silence her voice, but her honesty and pure love for the profession place her far above all these dirty tricks. Will she be able to work in La Lisa without difficulties, or should we expect more provocations and acts of harassment against her?

We’re waiting on the outcome of her situation. Also that of the political prisoners, whose defense, it seems, the regime wants now to be assumed by the docile lawyers that these same “leaders” of the firm have chosen. As for Amelia, I’ll keep myself informed, not only because she is a colleague who has worn the robe with dignity, but also—and now on a more personal level—because she was my advocate during my second political imprisonment.

Cubanet, 25 February 2014,

Translated by Tomás A. and José S.

Citizens-in-waiting / Regina Coyula

Photo: Luz Escobar

My country is so devoid of citizen initiatives, citizens live convinced that the “citizen” itself is a pejorative and almost criminal term used by the police, so how can they imagine that the word is not only beautiful, but that it has erotic overtones: the citizen-sovereign is he who elects his representatives and removes then if he is not served by them. In this “democracy” that we suffer we have managed to reverse the terms, so these “whatever” slogans and others in disuse lacking a rhythm and the name of the actual leader come into play.

And so, sick to death of these ever repeating slogans, the ailing citizen continues on not knowing who he is, braving the incessant drip of problems that define his life, where he is a victim, hero, anonymous or villain; not understanding, submerged in the everyday, that he will be the star of the democratic transition.

Standing in front of a shop window, looking in a mirror, or facing an abuse of power, the citizen ends up realizing who he is.

Between the cryptic and the serious, I wanted to greet the appearance of the Constitutional Roadmap, which is complementary to the Campaign for the signing of the UN Covenants (without tarnishing other proposals I don’t know of or that don’t interest me: more is better) they seem to me to be good fertilizer for the citizen-in-waiting.

26 February 2014

The Day I Asked Forgiveness from Huber Matos / Camilo Venegas

L. Camilo Cienfuegos, Ctr. Fidel Castro, R. Huber Matos
L. Camilo Cienfuegos, Ctr. Fidel Castro, R. Huber Matos, entering Havana on 8 January 1959

For years I tried to imagine his face, but it didn’t appear anywhere. He had been erased from the national history with meticulous cruelty. They airbrushed him out, even in one of the most iconic images of the Revolution, the one where he and Camilo Cienfuegos accompany Fidel on top of a Jeep, during the victorious entry into Havana.

In the middle of the last decade, Huber Matos was visiting Santo Domingo and they invited me to a meeting with the heroic commander. He was already a fragile cornflower, but kept intact his stature and his strength. When we shook hands he pressed mine firmly. I felt gripped by the bones in his hands.

It was hard for me to ask for the floor, I was intimidated by his glance and the weight of the history he carried on his shoulders. “I would just like to ask your forgiveness, commander,” I said to him. Then I told him of the hatred I had felt for him as a child. “To my generation they instilled in us that you were a traitor to the fatherland and responsible for the disappearance of Camilo [Cienfuegos].”

He stood up and gave me a hug. Again I felt myself gripped. “Thank you, son,” he said, very moved, almost in my ear. Although they couldn’t shoot him, they assassinated his reputation, which is the most cowardly method Fidel Castro has used to annul his adversaries. Because of this the young people in my country know very little about one of the bravest leaders of the Revolution.

The man who died today was one of the first Cubans who warned that that popular feat would turn itself into a shameful dictatorship. The day when history can tell it like it was, Huber Matos will once again climb up on that Jeep from which he never should have been removed. Then, without erasing anyone else, it will be perfectly clear who betrayed whom.

Camilo Venegas from his blog El Fogonero

27 February 2014

Reporters Without Borders Calls for Angel Santiesteban’s Release

Dissident blogger completes year in detentionDissident blogger completes year in detention
Published on Friday 28 February 2014.

Reporters Without Borders reiterates its call for the release of Angel Santiesteban-Prats, a writer who completes a year in detention today and who began a blog in 2008 called Los hijos que nadie quiso (The Children Nobody Wanted) that was openly critical of the government.

Santiesteban-Prats was arrested on 28 February 2013 to begin serving the five-year jail sentence on trumped-up charges of “home violation” and “injuries” that he received at the end of a hasty and arbitrary trial on 8 December 2012. No hard evidence was produced in support of the charges.

After his first six weeks in detention, he was transferred on 9 April 2013 to a prison in the Havana suburb of San Miguel del Padrón where he was repeatedly subjected to acts of mistreatment and torture.

Reporters Without Borders learned on 18 February that the National Association of Law Offices (ONBC) has suspended his lawyer, Amelia Rodríguez Cala, for six months, considerably hampering her efforts to obtain his release. continue reading

Rodríguez also defends other dissidents, including the musician Gorki Aguila and Sonia Garro of the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), a group formed by wives, daughters and other close relatives of imprisoned dissidents that demonstrates peacefully for their release. The European Parliament awarded it the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2005.

“We already criticized the draconian and cruel treatment of Santiesteban-Prats and other independent news providers a year ago,” said Reporters Without Borders head of research Lucie Morillon. “We urge the Cuban authorities to overturn his conviction and free him at once.”

“The intimidation to which journalists are constantly subjected in Cuba is extremely worrying. Cuba is ranked lower than any other country in the Americas in the latest Reporters Without Borders press freedom index – 170th out of 180 countries.”

Although Santiesteban-Prats is the only blogger currently serving a jail sentence, the authorities continue to harass any news provider who challenges the government’s propaganda.

Reporters for independent news websites such as Hablemos Press are often arrested arbitrarily and then released a few hours later. The journalist William Cacer Díaz was one of the latest victims of this form of harassment on 14 February.

At least six other independent news providers – including Magaly Novis Otero, Pablo Morales Marchán, Ignacio Luis González Vidal, Denis Noa Martínez and Tamara Rodríguez Quesada – were briefly detained in January.

An open letter to President Raúl Castro that Santiesteban-Prats wrote from his prison cell was posted on his blog today.

Santiesteban-Prats is registered as one of Cuba’s two detained news providers in the Reporters Without Borders Barometer. He is listed as a detained netizen (blogger). The other is José Antonio Torres, a Santiago de Cuba-based reporter for the Communist Party daily Granma who has been held since May 2011. Torres is listed as a detained journalist.

From Reporters Without Borders

28 February 2014

Huber Matos’ 1959 Letter to Fidel Castro

Letter from Hubert Matos to Fidel Castro

Camagüey, 19 October 1959

To Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, Prime Minister, Havana

Compañero Fidel:

Today I have sent to the Chief of Staff, through regulation channels, a radiogram regarding my position in the Rebel Army. I am assured that this matter will be elevated to you for your solution and consider that it is my duty to inform you of the reasons why I have had to request my discharge from the army, explaining to you the following conclusions:

First: I do not desire to make myself an obstacle to the Revolution and I believe that having to adapt myself or cut myself off so as to do no harm, the honorable and revolutionary thing is to leave.

Second: From an elementary modesty I must relinquish all responsibility within the ranks of the Revolution, after learning of some of your comments in the conversation you had with the compañeros Agramonte and Fernández Vilá, Provincial coordinators in Camagüey and Havana respectively: while this conversation did not mention my name, you were thinking of me. I also believe that after replacing Duque and other changes, anyone who has been talking frankly with you about the communist problem should leave before they are removed. continue reading

Third: I only conceive of the triumph of the Revolution with a united people, willing to endure great sacrifices… because a thousand economic and political problems will come… and this united and combative people will not manage or sustain itself if it is not based on a program and satisfies equally their interests and their sentiments, and with a leadership that captures the Cuban situation in its proper dimension and not as a question of ideologies nor struggles among groups.

If you want the Revolution to triumph, say where we are going and how we will get there, listening less to gossip and intrigues and not branding as reactionaries or conspirators those who honorably state their opinions of these things.

On the other hand, to use insinuation to compromise figures who are clean and disinterested who did not appear on stage on the first of January, but who were present at the hour of sacrifice and who took on this work for pure idealism, is also unfair and unjust, and it is good to remember that great men begin to decline when they cease to just.

I want to clarify that none of this is brought forward to hurt you, or to hurt other people: I say what I feel and what I think with the right that attends my condition as a Cuban sacrificing for a better Cuba. because although you silence my name when you speak and those who have fought and are fighting alongside you, the truth is that I have done for Cuba all that I could, not and forever.

I did not organize the Cieneguilla expedition, which was so helpful in the resistance of the spring offensive for which you thanked me, but to defend the rights of my people, and I am very content to have completed the mission you entrusted me with at the head of one of the columns of the Rebel Army that fought the most battles. As I am very glad to have organized a province as you ordered.

I think that I have worked hard and it satisfies me because regardless of the respect I have earned from those who have seen me close up, the men who know to dedicated their efforts to achieve the collective good, I enjoy the fatigue proportioned by being consecrated to the service of the common interest. And this work that I have enumerated is not mine personally, but a product of the efforts of some few who, like me, have known to do their duty.

Well, if after all this  I’m thought to be ambitious or there are insinuations that I am conspiring, there are reasons to leave, if not to regret have been one of the many compañeros who fell in this effort.

I also want you to understand that this determination, well thought out, is irrevocable, so that I ask you not as Commander Huber Matos, but simply as one of your compañeros in the Sierra — do you remember? From those who came fully prepared to die following your orders, may you respond to my request as soon as possible, allowing me to return to my home as a civilian without my children having to hear later, in the street, that their father was a deserter or traitor.

Desiring every kind of success for you and your revolutionary projects and desires, and for the country — the agony and duty of all — I remain as always your compañero,

Huber Matos, 1959

Obituary

Huber Matos died on the morning of 27 February in Miami. On the 25th he was admitted to Kendall Regional Hospital where he was diagnosed with a massive heart attack. On the 26th he asked that they withdraw his respirator because he wanted to say goodbye to his wife María Luisa Araluce and to his children and grandchildren.

During the day he received calls from Cuba and the main leaders of his party, the Independent and Democratic Cuba (CID) movement, who assured him the organization would not rest until the island is free.

Activists in Holguín sang the national anthem to him and members of the organization throughout Cuba were notified of the situation and of the commitment of their leader. His last words were: “The struggle continues. Viva Cuba Libre!”

Huber Matos left a political testament and a letter to Venezuelans. There will be a service for him in Miami on Sunday, 2 March, and he asked to be taken to Costa Rica, the country that sheltered him when he went into exile the first time during the Revolutionary struggle in 1957. It was from Costa Rica where he left for the Sierra Maestra to join the guerrilla war, and to this nation that he returned after spending two decades in prison in 1979.

“I want to return to Cuba from the same land whose people always showed me solidarity and affection, I want to rest in the earth of Costa Rica until Cuba is free and from there go to Yara, to accompany my mother and reunite with my father and with Cubans.”

Huber Matos Benítez was born in Yara, Cuba, in 1918. He earned his PhD at the University of Havana in 1944 and was a member of the Orthodox Party.

He resigned his position as Commander in 1959 in protest against the communist government’s deviation from the democratic principles of the Revolution.

Fidel Castro condemned him to twenty years in prison in a trial in December 1959, a sentence which Matos served to the last day.

His autobiography, “How the Night Came” (2002), describes his rupture with Castro, his trial and his years of prison.

27 February 2014, Cubanet

Former Commander Huber Matos Dies

Huber Matos

Former commander of the Cuban revolution Huber Matos Benítez, one of the most important figures of the opposition to the regime of the Castros, died early Thursday morning in a Miami hospital, reported his organization Independent and Democratic Cuba (CID). He was 95.

Matos (born in Yara, Granma province, on November 26, 1918) had  been admitted two days earlier to Kendall Regional Hospital “where he was diagnosed with a massive heart attack” according to the CID report.

“On the 26th he asked to be disconnected from breathing equipment because he wanted to say farewell to his wife María Luisa Araluce, his children and grandchildren,” it added.

The organization said that during his hospitalization Matos received call from Cuba from the principal leaders of his party, “who affirmed that the organization would not rest until the island was free.” continue reading

According to CID, shortly before he died Matos declared “The fight goes on. Long live free Cuba!”

There will be a wake in Miami next Sunday for the former commander, who participated in the struggles that brought Fidel Castro to power and then spent 20 years in prison on the island for dissenting from the direction that the regime took.

CID said that Matos requested that his body be taken to Costa Rica, the country that welcomed him when he was first exiled in 1957 and from which he went to the Sierra Maestra to join Fidel Castro’s men.

Costa Rica was also Matos’s first destination in 1979 when he was released after serving two decades of political imprisonment imposed by the regime.

“I want to make my trip back to Cuba from the same land whose people always showed me solidarity and affection; I want to rest on Costa Rican soil until Cuba is free and from there to Yara, to rejoin my mother and my father and all Cubans,” Matos explained about his wishes.

Huber Matos, a school teacher, opposed the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was captured in 1957 for participating in operations providing logistical support to the rebels who were in the Sierra Maestra, but managed to escape into exile in Costa Rica.

In the Central American country he gathered weapons that arrived on a cargo plane in the Sierra Maestra and were instrumental in the offensive against Batista’s troops.

Because of his courage and leadership, Matos was the rebel who rose fastest through the  ranks to commander, as head of the Antonio Guiteras 9th Column, in charge of the positioning, surrender, and capture of the city of Santiago de Cuba.

In 1959 he was named Commander of the Army in Camaguey province. Having discussed several times with Fidel Castro the increasing alignment of the revolution with communism, he resigned, stating that this was a betrayal of the democratic principles that the Revolution had promised the Cuban people. In response, Castro ordered his arrest on October 21, 1959, a week before the mysterious disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, who according Matos shared his concerns.

Matos was subjected to a summary trial for sedition in December 1959. During the process, he insisted on denouncing the deviation from the goal of the revolutionary movement for which he and others had risked their lives.

He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, which he served in full.

In exile, Matos tirelessly denounced the betrayal by the Castro regime.

In 1980 in Caracas he founded Independent and Democratic Cuba, with social democratic leanings, today headquartered in Miami, and claiming activists throughout the island.

In his autobiography How Came the Night, which, according to CID has sold over 100,000 copies and that circulates clandestinely in Cuba, Matos recounts in detail his participation in the revolutionary army, his subsequent imprisonment and the tortures to which he was subjected.

Diario di Cuba, 27 February 2014

Translated by Tomás A.

Enrique Colina: Utopian Obstinacy Turns Dreams into a Nightmare / Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada

Enrique Colina

Taken from OnCuba, by Cecilia Crespo

In November last year, the French channel France O aired the documentary “The Marble Cow” by the renowned critic and film producer Enrique Colina. It was only shown once in Cuba, during the last International Festival of New Latin-American Cinema held in Havana.

Some days ago, a Spanish friend who saw Colina’s documentary asked me about Ubre Blanca. For those who do not know, this was a cow that turned into a media phenomenon in the 1980s. In only one day, it produced 110.9 litres of milk and 27,674.2 litres in 365 days of lactation, pushing Arleen, the North American champion, out of the Guinness World Records.

At that time, many people thought that with this cow, Cuba’s economic problems would be solved. The dream fell apart several months later. Colina, a Cuban master of documentaries, took advantage of the story of Ubre Blanca (White Udder) to metaphorically discuss other failed economic plans carried out some decades ago on the island.

Given the insistence of my friend to know more about this documentary, I decided to contact Enrique Colina. We began by talking about “The Marble Cow”, but this wound up being just a pretext for one of the most lucid intellectuals of our country to talk to us about how he sees the present and the future of Cuba.

Tell us about “The Marble Cow” and its relationship to the Cuba that Cubans experience.

The starting point of this film is the never-ending phenomenon of gauging facts that are somehow exceptional and converting them into paradigms of reality. The documentary expresses what one of the people interviewed says about the Cuban press: it is more propaganda than thoughtful, and it does not offer the symptomatic analysis of reality that we need as citizens.

This is currently being demonstrated in what is happening with the exorbitant price of cars. Everyone in the streets is talking about it and nowhere has the media referenced this event. After yet another meeting of the Union of Journalists, in which they all speak in favor of reflecting reality, nothing ever appears in this respect.

The media phenomenon of Ubre Blanca in the 1980s was impressive. Some years after the propaganda paraphernalia that surrounded its appearance I was on the Isla de la Juventud, where I visited the workshop of the sculptors who made the marble cow. It had already been finished for several years and the authorities had not yet decided where to place the sculpture, whether at the entrance to the airport, in a public square, or at Ubre Blanca’s original home. The sculptors were anxious to get the statue out of the workshop because it took up a lot of space.

From that moment I had the idea of making the documentary, in which this cow could become a symbol, a metaphor of a deranged reality. It is a disorder that even today continues to be represented officially in the cult of a hero placed on a pedestal that, even though there is an overflowing trash bin at its base, is always framed so that only the hero and pedestal appear. continue reading

We are living in a time that is the expression of this obstinate deformation and which remains irreversible as long as there is no recognition of the causes and people responsible for the mistakes they have made.

The story of the cow is the magnification of an exceptional natural phenomenon, which, however, does not deny the fact that serious scientific work was done. It was explained that experiments were made to create cattle that were resistant to heat and cows that produced a lot of meat and milk.

In 1981, an extraordinary milk production process was achieved. What happens is that to manage this production with F2 animals, the result of crossings that were made and in which there is a scientific reason and success that I appreciate, there had to be favorable conditions.

A lot of milk was produced in the 1980s because there was economic support to sustain this type of national cattle raising. But this support was due to Soviet help and not to an internal economic structure that reproduced the necessary wealth to sustain this type of plan.

We have lived embracing myths. And one of the aims that I lay out for myself as a filmmaker, in the few years that I may have yet to live, is to contribute to recovering some of the historical memory of this process.

Not the memory of the transcendent facts praised and stained by official rite, but rather the memory of the daily routine of a national life seen from the ground and not from the wishful illusion of disastrous consequences, in other words, those rains that brought the type of mud that is precisely what this documentary is about in a certain way.

Ubre Blanca is also the 10 million ton sugar harvest. It is the Havana Belt, the micro-jet banana, the zeolite… it is a little of all of these economic plans that in a wishful way, and I do not doubt with the best intentions, failed.

Wanting to rapidly detach itself from underdevelopment and without its own wings to fly, reality has referred us to the magic mirror, that of the queen in Snow White, which the generation of filmmakers in the 80s critically compared Cuban television to, until one day the mirror told the queen she was not the fairest of all and she broke the mirror.

Tell me about Cuban cinema. What do you consider to be the positive and negative aspects of current film production in Cuba?

Cuban cinema is composed of different generations and many different views. It is in a delicate state of health due to a lack of material goods, and we all know it is difficult to make a film without money.

But on the other hand, another factor has facilitated filmmaking: the advent of new technologies. They are now talking about the protests made by a group of filmmakers against bureaucratic aspirations to restructure the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) without consulting the producers.

One of the things protesters are aiming for is the legal recognition of independent production, since the ICAIC does not have the resources it once had when between 6 and 8 full-length films, some fifty newsreels, and other documentaries and animated films were made every year.

This ended, the bubble exploded, and because of this we have to recognize that one has to fight independently, but with a national institution that is neither patronizing nor censorial, but rather a promoter of incentives to maintain and defend, with its collaboration, that film culture that the Revolution stimulated.

I think that interesting things are coming out of this. I recently saw works by two young producers, Melaza and La Piscina, and they seemed quite suggestive. Both expose conflicts in current reality that must be tackled from different esthetic, human, and critical angles.

This new generation has its worries, its sensitivity, and it is facing a very contradictory reality that projects an uncertain future. There are documentaries in the Young Directors Film Festival that reveal this critical, anti-conservative, and polemic view of unstated topics and taboos.They do not turn their backs on conflicts and because of this, because they are uncomfortable, are not made public or shown on television.

Another problem of Cuban cinema is its exhibition. What condition are the cinemas in? Where is the money to equip and repair them? One can make independent films, but what then? Where to show them? They took away private 3D cinemas and what is the alternative? Positive changes have been seen, but all the changes must be recognized as being due to citizen participation, discussion, and forecasting.

Many times measures are taken to stretch and shrink because they do not foresee the consequences of of their decisions. It is as if we are trapped in a cage; the mess is not only material but also ideological, and the modification that we need is not only tactical and partially economic, but also political. Paraphrasing Raúl, the only commitment that Cuban cinema has is to maintain a serious and thoughtful artistic dialogue with the national reality.

Colina, you speak not only about past, present, and future Cuban cinema, but also about Cuba. Do you consider yourself a filmmaker that questions the society in which you live?

Utopian obstinacy turns dreams into a nightmare if there is no criticism, no debating of ideas. I share the humanist ideas of the Revolution and I obsessively rebel against the practice of its distortion.

In the 1980s, I dealt with esthetics, where I addressed the theme of beauty as a need to reaffirm the human condition. Socialism, in spite of developing education and culture, has always neglected the teaching of esthetic sensibility in the appearance of dynamic urban surroundings.

Today associated with poverty, loyalty has been imposed as an expressive master of the crisis. You see places where everything is ugly and poorly made, which is also reflected as a symptom of distortion in botched jobs and “I will also make you cry”, referring to the poor quality of state services.

In “Neighbors” I highlighted the conflicts of living together and the social indiscipline tolerated by an irresponsible permissiveness, etc. Anyway, I have made different documentaries that reflect problems that already existed in the 80s and which have degraded to terrible levels today.

Beyond calling myself a critic, I think I am a person who lives in this country and who sees this reality clearly and without prejudice at the cost of experiencing bitter disappointment. Far from paralyzing me, it compels me to protest. It seems to me that there is nothing exceptional in what I do. I have an opinion and it is my right to express it.

It is a shame that this attitude is not more widespread. My point of view is that we have made ourselves a type of citizen that has not developed an elemental civic feeling. To be revolutionary has historically meant obeying, following leads, completing the tasks assigned, and it has relegated to demagogic rhetoric that…

 Translated by: M. Ouellette

24 January 2014