Translating Cuba

Operation Cleansing / Yoani Sanchez

Infanta and Vapor Streets, eight at night. The scaffolding creaks under the weight of its occupants. The area is dark, but there are still two painters passing their brushes over the dirty balconies, the facades, the tall columns facing the avenue. Time is short, the 2nd Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) will start in just a few hours and everything should be ready for the guests. The streets where the presidential caravans will pass will be touched up, the asphalt addressed, the potholes and poverty hidden. The real Havana is disguised under another stage-set city, as if the dirt — accumulated for decades — was covered by a colorful and ephemeral tapestry.

Then came the “human cleansing.” The first signs of one more stage set being erected comes via our cellphones. Calls are lost into nothingness, text messages don’t reach their destinations, nervous busy signals respond to attempts to communicate with an activist. Then comes the second phase, the physical. The corners of certain streets teem with supposed couples who don’t talk, men in checked shirts nervously touching their concealed earphones, neighbors set to guard the doors of those from whom, yesterday, they asked to borrow a little salt. The whole society is full of whispers, watchful and fear-filled eyes, a huge dose of fear. The city is tense, trembling, on alert: the CELAC Summit has started.

The last phase brings detentions, threats and home arrests. Meanwhile, on TV the official announcers smile, comment on the press conferences and carry their cameras to the stairs of dozens of airplanes. There are red carpets, polished floors, tree ferns in the Palace of the Revolution, toasts, family photos, traffic diversions, police every ten yards, bodyguards, accredited press, talk of openings, people threatened, dungeons filled, friends whose whereabouts are unknown. Not even the Ñico López refinery is allowed to let its dirty smoke leave the chimney. The retouched postcard is ready… but it lacks life.

Then, then everything happens. Every president and every foreign minister returns to their country. The humidity and grime push through the fine layer of paint on the facades. The neighbors who participated in the operation return to their boredom, and the officials of #OperaciónLimpieza — Operation Cleansing — are rewarded with all-inclusive hotels. The plants installed for the openings dry up for lack of water. Everything returns to normal or to the absolute lack of normality that characterizes Cuban life.

The fake moment has ended. Goodby to the Second CELAC Summit.

28 January 2014

Manuel Cuesta Morua Arrest Confirmed

Yesterday opposition leader Manuel Cuesta Morúa member of the Progressive Arc Party and organizer in Cuba of the 2nd Democratic Forum on International Relations and Human Rights (parallel to CELAC) was detained and held at the 7th Police Station in La Lisa the outskirts of the Cuban capital.

The news came through the opponent and Cubanet columnist Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna, who confirmed the facts earlier today .

This arrest is part of the crackdown of State Security (the secret police) in the environment of the Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which takes place in Havana starting today with the presence of delegations from 33 member countries.

The whereabouts of Cuesta Morua, an attorney with the independent Legal Information Center (Cubalex), are now unknown.

This morning a measure was also signed by the attorneys Yaremis Flores, Laritza Diversent and Barbara Estrabao Bichili, who demand attention to the disappearance of independent counsel Veizant Boloy in the area of the CELAC Summit.

“He phoned at 7:05 in the morning when he left his house and headed to the Cubalex office located at 169 Lindero on the corner of Angeles, in, El Calvario, Arroyo Naranjo. About 700 yards from his home, he was approached by at least three cars, 4 State Security agents on motorcycles, and a police patrol, number 572. He remained in communication with members of the office while under persecution from the agents . At 12 noon (Monday) he communicated that he was at the Czech Embassy for his turn to connect to the internet and had been escorted by two motorized patrol agents and patrol 572. Since then his whereabouts are unknown.”

Cubanet, 28 January 2014

The President of Argentina Lunches with Fidel / Juan Juan Almeida

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner left the Hotel Nacional at 12:40 (local time) heading to the residence of Fidel Castro to share a lunch with him, according to what the president herself told the press.

Previously, having received in her room a girl of 9 who wrote her a letter in which she said she’d been born on the same day as Néstor Kirchner.

27 January 2014

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The Attendees of the II CELAC Summit Should Know the Authorities’ Deception / Angel Santiesteban

Disgracefully the image of José Martí (January 28, 1853) has been used from one side to the other, for one thing or another, thanks to its universal meaning. And his great image.

Tomorrow will be another one of those days when the Castro brothers use the birth of the Apostle to dirty his ideas.

To assume that Marti would support the “revolution” is one more of the frauds to which we are accustomed. It’s no secret to anyone that they are taking up the old practice that “the university is for revolutionaries,” so those who don’t participate in the political convocations are stigmatized as being against the regime, disaffected from the regime, and therefore will suffer the consequences. Secondary-school and pre-university students will never reach a higher level, and those who now have finished their studies could lose their graduation certificate.

But the blackmail won’t end even after graduation, because they won’t get the degree until two years later, after they’ve completed their military service. Then they will need an endorsement of good behavior and political participation to be situated as qualified professionals in suitable positions.

Nor will the odyssey end there, because the threat and constant blackmail of being unemployed is permanent. Maintaining a correct affiliation with the Castro brothers is the only indispensable requirement for surviving on the Cuban archipelago.

The presidents who attend CELAC should know this. We are a repressed people, with a guillotine hanging over our necks, and with the least breath, whatever the capacity for respiration, the bloody blade will come down. Keeping sight of that cutting blade creates major fear for Cubans. Their perpetual torment.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton Prison Settlement. January 2014

Translated by Regina Anavy

27 January 2014

Calle Obispo: Look But Don’t Touch / Jose Hugo Fernandez

Two old men play the guitar, and she passes the hat.

HAVANA, Cuba, January, www.cubanet.org — If the caviar leftists from abroad saw what their eyes can see in Cuba, and not only what they want to see, a walk through Old Havana would suffice for them to discover the impassable class wall that the regime has raised between them and our common people. They do not even need to cover all the historic town. It will be sufficient for them to walk two or three blocks along Obispo.

As well as the most prominent tourist corridor, this street is the most populous on the Island. In no other place do foreign visitors and humble Cubans converge in such a large scale and physically close way. It seems obvious that the regime, through its viceroyalty in Old Havana, is taking advantage of the history of Obispo as a very busy commercial artery, in order to use it as a propaganda showcase, set aside to disguise the shameful ghetto that common citizens suffer from their status as zoo animals who are barely observed at a distance by visitors.

But it happens that here too the habitual clumsiness of our bosses surfaces. Being the point of closest proximity between Habaneros and visitors, Obispo offers an unequaled occasion to test the abyss the separates them.

Along its twelve blocks, from the banks of the bay to Monserrate, besides being the Cuban street with the greatest number of police spies, it is a unique commercial boulevard. Nevertheless, almost all of its stores sell in foreign currencies. So that the role of the Habaneros is to serve as decorations, placing themselves picturesquely at the site, going to look or looking at those who look, but without being able to touch, because nothing is within reach of their pockets. Also, in some cases, they go with the hope of getting something from the tourists. continue reading

On Obispo there are 39 stores, but none sells in the national currency. There are a dozen restaurants, of which only one accepts the money that Habaneros are commonly paid on their jobs. There are dozens of bars, cafeterias, trinkets, kiosks, almost all dedicated to commerce in “hard currency.” There are barely any self-employed and some small state shops where one can buy (in Cuban pesos) light food of the worst quality.

Beggars and fighters for pesos

On the corner of Havana there is a type of market and dining room for poor people (the only one in Obispo), which is an authentic dump, dark, dirty, with an interior atmosphere of oppressive misery. On its facade they have written a kind of ad that is a coarse joke, as much for its consumers as for the tourists: “Bargains and services of excellence. All in national currency.”

Only the beggars and fighters for pesos exceed the number of police and tourists on this historic street, which dates from the 16th century, the first in Havana to be paved and also the pioneer in street lighting. In the current number 462, between Villegas and Aguacate, there lived the illustrious philosopher and priest Felix Varela, in a house where today a small library and a souvenir kiosk for tourists share space. Also celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, who wrote part of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls in the Ambos Mundos hotel (Obispo and Mercaderes), spent the night here.

The center of what was called “the little Habanero Wall Street,” Obispo conserves some of its former headquarters, like the current building of the Ministry of Finances and Prices, from 1907, considered the city’s first “skyscraper;” or that in which the first Spanish-American photographic studio was inaugurated (no. 257, between Cuban and Aguiar). Other historic buildings of this street are currently museums: the numismatic, the mural painting, natural sciences, the goldsmith, and even the museum of the CDR, which is all a monument to hate.

Especially popular since the 19th century for its commercial establishments, fashion houses, boutiques, confectioners, renowned pharmacies, restaurants, bars, hotels, cafes… Obispo has not stopped being the place most frequented by Havana residents. It’s just that today, by the work and grace of the viceroyalty of Old Havana, far from being what it was, it has become a street of infamy.

Photo journalism by Jose Hugo Fernandez

Yesterday perhaps he wanted to be like Che…

Cuna del Daiquirí, a la entrada de Obispo

Cradle of the Daiquiri, at the entrance of Obispo

Muy politizada la venta de libros en la mayor librería a cielo abierto, Plaza de Armas, al final de la calle

Very politicized the sale of books in the biggest open air bookstore, Plaza de Armas, at the end of the street.

En Obispo también hay "estatuas humanas"

In Obispo also there are “human statues.”

Obispo Street is full of police.

Nunca llegó a rascar el cielo el primer rascacielos de Cuba

The first skyscraper of Cuba never got to scrape the sky.

Empty can collector

Único mercado en Obispo para habaneros de a pie

The only shop in Obispo for common Habaneros.

January 24, 2014 / Jose Hugo Fernandez

Note: The books of this author can be acquired at the following addresses: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DYC1R0 and www.plazacontemporaneos.com

Translated by mlk.

“Unity in Diversity” / Reinaldo Escobar

The host country of the Second CELAC* Summit proclaims on its public billboards the principle of accepting diversity within unity. The invited guests should know that the main purpose of the Cuban government is that the other members of the Community should accept a peculiar feature of Cuba which makes it different from the rest: that within the Island political diversity is not accepted, and much less are those with political positions distinct from the ruling party able to meet in an Alternative Forum to debate in a parallel way the issues of concern to the Summit.

*Community of Latin American and Caribbean States

27 January 2014

Angel Santiesteban Asks the CELAC Summit not to convert their visit into support for Raul Castro’s regime

From Prison:

Cuban writer sends message to the attendees at the CELAC Summit.

Ángel Santiesteban, sentenced to five years in prison, asks the leaders invited to the meeting to not convert their visit into an act of support for Raúl Castro’s regime.

The writer Angel Santiesteban is sentenced to five years in prison (Cortesía).

Luis Leonel León / Special

The Cuban writer, Ángel Santiesteban, sentenced to five years in prison, asks the presidents and international political figures invited to the Second Summit of the Community of Latin Amerian and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Havana, that they not convert their visit into an act of support for Raúl Castro’s regime.

“The Castro brothers have been the most skilled manipulators in the hemisphere. Their political astuteness has kept them in power for more than half a century. To support relations with the dictatorship is a shameless act that the attendees will add to their curriculum vitae,” Santiesteban declared, in a message sent from the Lawton Prison Settlement in Havana.

Santiesteban, one of the most prominent contemporaneous writers of the island, affirmed that Cubans could never resolve their internal problems by way of civic protest, since any popular demonstration would be suppressed in hours, as happened on August 5, 1994. continue reading

“We don’t have the possibility nor the way to decide our future. All of us who have taken this step find ourselves in prison or obligated to abandon the country,” the intellectual pointed out.

The CELAC Summit will take place in Havana on January 28 and 29, with the attendance of some 20 heads of state and governments, including the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, and the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, José Miguel Insulza.

Santiesteban, 48 years old, was condemned under charges of “violation of domicile and injuries” against his ex-wife in a controversial judicial process. He entered prison on January 28, 2013, and since then has gone on hunger strikes to protest the conditions of his detention and “a fabricated trial.”

“My crime has been to write what I think about Cuba and its dictatorship, something that I’m not going to stop doing,” said Santiesteban in an interview granted from prison to Diario Las Americas.

A few days ago, several officials violently ransacked his cell, since they presumed he could be preparing to make a statement to the foreign press.

During the search, they confiscated the magazines and books they found, among them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the by-laws of Amnesty International and a story that he hadn’t finished writing.

Although other Cuban intellectuals have been interested in his case, the government continues to keep him isolated “hoping that they forget about me.”

During the beating that a group of agents from State Security gave him before he was sent to prison, one of them warned him that he could have something happen to him like the opposition leader Oswaldo Payá, who died in a controversial accident in July 2012.

“When you get out of prison, you could die as if it were an accident,” Santiesteban remembered an agent warned him while they were beating him in November 2012.

That year Santiesteban also wrote an open letter to Raúl Castro, in which he accused him of intensifying the repression against the opposition. Days after sending it, they charged and condemned him for the supposed crime of domestic violence, which under a normal proceeding would have been sanctioned only with a fine.

“Since I began my blog they always told me to give it up and occupy myself with literature. As I didn’t stop, they fabricated a case of domestic violence in which they alleged that I entered the house of my ex-wife, the mother of my son, to beat her. They used false witnesses, hoping to silence the true reason they were prosecuting me, which is my dissidence,” argued the writer.

Amnesty International

Intellectuals, activists and human rights organizations have requested that Amnesty International recognize Santiesteban as a prisoner of conscience, but up to now the organization hasn’t responded.

However, he considers that “something strange has happened.”

“I don’t know what purpose those lists serve,” he declared. “Except to support a cause and offer cover to someone in the claws of a totalitarian power, to more or less assure his life.”

He remembered that two days before going to prison he received a call from Amnesty International assuring him that they recognize his cause, but that they couldn’t add his name to the list until he was in prison. Later he learned that someone in Cuba had bothered to puruse it, because the organization had placed his name on the list of political prisoners without consulting him.

“However, it doesn’t make me lose sleep. I can’t turn back from the road I took. Everything started when I expressed ideas that were adverse to totalitarianism. My crime has been to think differently.”

False proofs, manipulations and silences

To reveal the falsity of the judicial process they planned against him, Santiesteban used the collaboration of a friend who pretended to be a prosecutor and demanded that the false witness tell her the truth about what she maintained about the accused.

“The conversation with the supposed prosecutor was recorded,” he said. In it the witness confesses that she had been pressured and bribed to testify against me.”

He described that during his presentation in court, searching for arguments to condemn him for the supposed maltreatment of his ex-spouse, they ordered him to write a sentence extracted from the newspaper Granma (the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba).

“After analyzing my handwriting, a proficient calligrapher dressed as a soldier certified my guilt, saying he found a certain inclination and a suspicious size in my letters. It would be a joke if I weren’t in prison,” he commented.

Six months ago, the request for review of the case was delivered to the Minister of Justice, where they allege that the documents have been lost and that they don’t know who removed them. Recently the attorney who represents Santiestbean discovered that some of the documents had been extracted from the file.

“The regime is hoping that they will forget about me, in order to kill me later,” reported Santiesteban. “They’ve threatened me with that on multiple occasions,” he pointed out.

Published in Diario las Americas

Ángel Santiesteban, a victim of the repressive politics in Cuba

The Cuban writer is in the Lawton Prison Settlement, in Havana.

Ángel Santiesteban, Cuban writer. (otrolunes.com)

Iliana Lavastida/Special

@IlianaLavastida

Destroying the image of their political adversaries is a tactic of regimes that want to control the masses. The same as the Nazi ideologues, who achieved the manipulation of the minds of million of followers, totalitarian governments like the Cuban one use the method to destroy the figures who oppose them.

Ángel Santiesteban, winner of various Casa de las Américas prizes and winner of such prestigious competitions as Juan Rulfo and Alejo Carpentier, is recognized as one of the strongest voices in contemporary Cuban literature. However, his decision to dissent and to dare to question the repressive methods of the regime and open up through his blog on the Internet, which he considers “a space for constructing free thought,” implicated him in a judicial trial, after which he ended up being condemned for a common crime.

After a rigged trial, the prosecutor came forward with an order of 15 years of privation of liberty against the intellectual, who was accused of rape, robbery and attempted murder against his ex-spouse, the mother of one of his two sons, and they also prohibited him from approaching her for two years.

In these moments, the writer is in the Lawton Prison Settlement, in the Cuban capital. From one of his cells, thanks to the collaboration of activists inside and outside Cuba who support the dissident, the photos of Santiesteban behind bars accompany as graphic testimony the interview he granted to Diario Las Americas.

The five years of prison he is serving, according to the figureheads of power, are intended to make him desist from his interest in writing about the truth, but the same declaration of principles published by Santiesteban while he awaits sentencing define exactly what he has chosen as his lifeline.

“Since I undertook my journey with the blog, I felt the energy of a liberty that I didn’t know. And once it’s tried on, now it can’t be missed. It’s as essential as oxygen itself.”

Published in Diario las Americas

Translated by Regina Anavy

24 January 2014

Detained Half an Hour on Marta Beatriz’s Stairway / Lilianne Ruiz

Community Communicators' Network on the ground floor of the building -- Courtesy of Marta Beatriz — Community Communicators’ Network on the ground floor of the building — Courtesy of Marta Beatriz

HAVANA, CUBA — This last Wednesday, I was walking quickly through Belascoain, disgusted by the odor of urine from the doorways. Every once in a while a peddler called his wares. On arriving at Zanja, crossing the street, the area was deserted. Three men in plainclothes blocked the door of building 409, where Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello lives.

I tried to ignore them and continued. The door was locked.

“Where are you going?”

“Who’s asking?”

The man, with an eastern accent, responded while putting in front of my eyes an identity card with initials in red: DSE.

“State Security Department, my dear,” he said with that lack of professionalism that one cannot imagine.

He did not clarify what it was all about. He again asked me the first question, and I told him that I was going to see Marta Beatriz Roque.

He took my identification and led me inside the building. He called one of his minions, a black man about two meters tall and more than 50 years of age, whom he called “brigade-ist.” And he told him, “Keep her here, she cannot go up to see Martha Beatriz.”

A thermos of coffee on one of the steps of the wide staircase betrayed the complicity of some neighbors with the political police. Two uniformed policewomen appeared on the scene. The “brigade-ist” charged one of them with watching me. continue reading

I tried to find out what had happened to the boys of the Communicators Network, which was supposed to meet like every Wednesday in the home of Marta Beatriz, director of the group. The answer could be assumed, but getting a statement from the authorities is always the most difficult. I did not get one.

Beginning last November 19 there has been a police blockade around Roque Cabello and the group of community reporters who from their locations in 9 provinces report on events that affects the lives of common Cubans: collapses, evictions, disasters in medical care, and social security. All these testimonies absent from the massive official medial, monopolized by the State.

In all, the members of the Network come to 127. They have a common denominator: They are not afraid; at least this situation has not managed to paralyze them. They have managed to get people to tell their stories with their complete names and photographs! Sometimes even their personal address.

They have a bulletin entitled Hairnet which is published every fifteen days. Hairnet is printed and distributed clandestinely within Cuba.

Other digital sites like Cubanet, MartiNoticias, Diario de Cuba, Miscelaneas de Cuba and Primavera Digital publish their accounts. They have served other independent reporters by identifying items of interest.

Precisely, I had gone there in order to write about the boycott, the physical attacks, acts of repudiation, arbitrary detentions of them; perpetrated by the political policy with the collaboration of some neighbors of the building. The only thing that I could do was try to obtain more information.

I again asked the uniformed policewoman about the members of the Network.

“Are they detained?”

“I do not know. I cannot explain it to you.”

“Can I make a telephone call?”

“No.”

I asked her if she had no doubts that what she was doing was correct.

“You’re going to convince me that what Marta Beatriz is doing is fine?” she asked me.

It seemed to me that she doubted.

“What do you think that Marta Beatriz does? It’s not going to be the bad thing they have told you,” I said at my own risk.

I got no answer. I went on to explain to her that citizen journalism is a right protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that if she was not familiar with the document, I told her that in the civilized world anyone can express his opinions, even against official policy and not be bothered for it. Much less by the police, charged with protecting the tranquility and freedom of citizens.

She ordered me to shut up. A commotion ensued that made the second woman police officer come down the stairs. Until this moment, she had been on the landing obviously in order to impede Marta Beatriz from leaving her home. The two policewomen and I were arguing with raised voices when we saw Marta Beatriz taking photos on the stair landing. One of the women ran after her, jumping the stairs. She shrieked, “Stupid, get in the house and don’t even stick your head out!”

They opened the door each time some neighbor entered or left. The terrifying thing was seeing how the tenants greeted the police or simply moved along.

That made me think that, indeed, we would not have to wait to become a majority in order to obtain constitutional recognition.

Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello directs the Cuban Community Communicators Network.

After about 30 minutes, they took me to a patrol car. On arriving at the traffic light of Calzada del Cerro and Rancho Boyeros, they handed me my identity card and I understood that I could go home, when the same policewoman who argued with me said with gritted teeth:

“Freed today.”

On arriving home I called Marta Beatriz. She told me that that day they had detained 16 people at the door of her home; 15 journalists plus a server. But those were freed in places as distant as the “La Monumental” highway or the municipality of Caimito in the former Havana province (today Mayabeque). They left me, I do not know why, at the corner of my house.

January 24, 2014 | Lilianne Ruíz

Translated by mlk.

The Curse of the Evil Eye / Regina Coyula

I don’t belong to the nomenklatura, I don’t receive remittances, I’m not self-employed, I don’t work in any foreign firm not in the tourist sector, I don’t operate in the black market, for me the New Year celebration is as modest as for the majority of my countrymen. But when one thinks things couldn’t get worse, the Devil shows up and breathes on you.

Do you remember in the previous post I had strictly domestic plans? Right. My mom at 97 tried to stand on leg that went to sleep; she fractured her femur, operation included, and I became a nurse. A brief stay between 20-24 December at the Fructuoso Rodriguez orthopedic hospital let me see the lights and shadows of the healthcare system first hand.

And for three weeks I moved to my mom’s house. She didn’t have to worry, it was divine, walking from the second day after the operation, and up and down the stairs of the house. All under the supervision of the little old people who are the candle that creates things and when they come and have to go back to the surgeon it’s for being intrepid.

I didn’t feel well on 24 December and was sick the whole week, but at with both my mother and all because my sister — also — had a blood pressure crisis and had osteoporosis so she couldn’t lift even a bucket of water and my niece was traveling.

Dragging my feet and dying of fever, I took care of my mother and crawled back to lie down in bed. On the 30th my son, extremely worried, insisted on taking me to the doctor and it turned out I had dengue fever.

Tremendous alarm, I didn’t want to infect my mother, but without mosquitoes there is no infection, and in my mother’s house there are no mosquitoes. When my niece got back from her trip I went home, on January 14. Can you imagine a house with two adult (and unconscious) males adrift for three weeks?

In a fit (having nothing to do with the state of the house) I grabbed the scissors. With hypothyroidism, menopause, and red dye, all mixed up, I made my hair a dull crown on a brilliant mind. Now, in addition to ugly hair, it’s badly cut. In the meantime, I broke a tooth and haven’t been able to go to get it fixed. More? Yes, more. The refrigerator, that essential, stopped chilling, and for 25 CUCs, in less than half an hour, the mechanic opened it and injected gas. I think I’m beat.

Plans for this year? Visit the endocrinologist and the dentist and measure the view for new windows. That’s what I want, I leave the rest to you.

24 January 2014

“Getting Drunk is the Only Way You Can Endure the Problems” / Jorge Olivera Castillo

HAVANA, CUBA – In Cuba, every year hundreds of people die from alcoholism. A recently published study on the issue of alcoholism in the Americas, in the magazine “Addiction,” says that the mortality indices affect mainly Cubans between 50 and 69 years of age.

The information, gathered by the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization, is hugely useful in looking at a phenomenon that affects every social strata. The issue could be more dramatic and shown in the study, and also affect youth. It’s well known that alcohol consumption among young people is increasing.

A tour around any area of the capital, especially the neighborhoods in the outskirts, is sufficient to feel discouraged about a solution to the problem.

In addition to the ever increasing amount of alcohol consumed, there is also the constant decline in the quality of the product. There are many clandestine factories where adulterated alcoholic drinks are produced. Whatever drink comes out of these places is full of dirt and rust and it sells like hotcakes.

A good part of the market is supplied by these producers. Even the dollar stores take advantage of the illegal supply of rums and liquors, made with raw materials stolen from the state companies. continue reading

In addition to the painful deaths that result, the addicts who consume these low quality products can suffer long-term neurological and digestive damage over the long time. Assistance programs lack a systemic focus and only reach a tiny part of those affected.

The proliferation of poverty, the increasing spiral of traffic infractions, and the standardization of violent events associated with alcoholism are the affects, apparently irreversible, of a process of political, social and economic collapse.

“Getting drunk is the only way to endure the problems,” I hear from Roberto, a 60-year-old man, just before he takes a plastic bottle filled with cheap rum in a part where he gets together with other alcoholics.

The lack of housing, of fairly-paid work, and the absence of any perspective of the future, are some of the causes of this problem for the majority of Cubans who can’t live without alcohol.

“I have work, and what? My salary doesn’t support me. To live in a house that is on the verge of falling down with nine other people and without any hopes of anything,” says a woman called Marlen, who works as a cleaner at a Ministry of Transport company.

“Alcohol takes the weight off a little. I drink every day I can’t sleep without a swallow. My life is a dead-end with no exit,” she adds.

According to the report, Cuba appears along with Argentina, Canada, Costa Rice, Paraguay and the Unites States among the countries with the highest rates of addiction among the age-ranges cited at the beginning of the article.

This data never appears in the official press. Much less the number of deaths related to alcoholism, the numbers confined to asylums, and those who roam the streets like zombies.

Cubanet, 23 January 2014 | Jorge Olivera Castillo

Ladies in White Want a Meeting with Insulza During the CELAC Summit

Diario de Cuba, 23 January 2014 — The Ladies in White will seek a meeting with Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), during the CELAC Summit in Havana, according to what their leader, Berta Soler, told the AFP press agency this Wednesday.

“We will request a meeting with Insulza, OAS Secretary; tomorrow we will submit the request,” Soler said.

The office of the OAS office in Washington reported Friday that Insulza “responded positively” to the invitation to the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), on the 28th and 29th of this month.

This will be the first visit by a Secretary General of the OAS to Cuba in half a century, since the island’s membership was suspended in 1962; Cuba refused to return in 2009, when the organization lifted its veto.

At the 1999 Ibero-American Summit in Havana, heads of state and government, foreign ministers and senior officials from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, held meetings with dissidents in Havana.

The activist Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said the visiting statesmen’s agenda is “very limited” and his organization does not foresee any meetings.

“Other times we talked to dignitaries (who come to Havana) but it was on their initiative,” said Sanchez, one of those most active at the summit in 1999.

He said that “there is some nervousness on the part of the government and there is a police presence on the homes of active opposition” to avoid demonstrations at the meeting.

For his part, former political prisoner Jose Daniel Ferrer, who from Santiago de Cuba leads the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) told AFP: “I will participate on Tuesday the 28th in the second Democratic Forum on International Relations and Human Rights,” which will be held in Havana, sponsored by Argentina foundation Center for Opening and Development of Latin America (Cadal)

He recalled that the first forum took place in Santiago de Chile, in January 2013 , prior to the CELAC-European Union Summit.

He said the venue of the meeting as het to be decided, but he expects the participation of other opponents.

A Coming Summit / Fernando Damaso

It’s almost obligatory to write about the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), to be held in Havana on the 28th and 29th of the present month. To demonstrate efficiency, the organizers have already prepared the installations for the Summit, repaired and decorated the roads by which the participants, guests will travel and taken all the corresponding security measures. As always, those affected have been the citizens, who for some days have collided against the prohibited access, rerouted transit and many other regulations applied by the authorities.

CELAC, as we know, does not have among its interests the economic integration of the region; rather it is an instrument of coordination and agreement for Latin American and Caribbean cooperation. Thanks to this, the United States and Canada –possessors of great natural resources and developed economies — have been excluded from membership. That is, from its beginning, its principal promoter, the late Venezuelan president, applied the politics of his master, the ex-president of Cuba. It seems Canada was excluded so that the United States could be.

Although CELAC doesn’t interfere with the politics of each member country, it’s absurd to proclaim respect for the uniqueness of each individual,for diversity and differences, when the member countries don’t do so and harass people within their own territory. At least, respect for individuals should constitute a moral imperative.

Thirty-three countries are members and it’s notable that the majority — although the most radical criticize the politics of the United States — have continued to belong to the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered in Washington, with the exception of Cuba, expelled in the early years of the sixties, for not sharing the organizations democratic principles, and its inclusion has been proposed for some time, declined by the Cuban president, perhaps not wanting to support a new expulsion, its political interests not coinciding with those of the organization.

Despite these absurdities, the idea of regional cooperation at all levels is positive, whenever the Latin American and Caribbean presidents are capable of putting the ideological and political interests of the region ahead of their own, and engaging and respectful and responsible relations among themselves and with their close neighbors and the rest of the world. On an ever more globalized planet, its impossible to develop in isolation.

24 January 2014

Independent Forum Parallel to CELAC is Being Blocked by State Security / Jorge Olivera Castillo

HAVANA, Cuba – Around 9:00 last night two officials from State Security’s Department 21 presented themselves at my house to warn me that the Second Democratic Forum on International Relations and Human Rights (independent) would not be allowed to be held in Havana this coming 28 January.

The opposition forum is scheduled parallel to the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), to be held in the Cuban capital on the 28th and 29th, with the presence of heads of state and governments, as well as high level officials from the 33 member countries.

The meeting that the political police are trying to block has among its objectives to put into perspective the incompatibility of the one-party political system in Cuba with CELAC’S Special Statement for the Defense of Democracy.

One of the agreements made at the founding meeting of that organization, held in Caracas on December 3, 2011, says, and I quote:

“We agreed on a clause committing to promote, defend and protect the Rule of Law, democratic order, sovereignty of the people, Human Rights and fundamental freedoms, including among others the right to life, liberty and the security of the person, not subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, or to make them objects of summary and arbitrary executions or forced disappearances, and [to respect] freedom of opinion and expression.”

A brief review of what is stated here is enough to question the regime serving as a host for the summit. continue reading

The systematic arbitrary arrests, acts of repudiation and trials without the minimum procedural safeguards, against pro-democracy activists, express a behavior that contravenes international standards that guarantee the exercise of all the rights of citizens, regardless of the politics and ideologies of governments.

In addressing other points of gross human rights violations, we should highlight the appalling prison conditions and the chances of being detained without having broken the law. The offense of “pre-criminal social dangerousness” contemplates imprisonment without evidence. Dozens of opponents have gone to prison under this legal (?) provision.

Moreover, it is ironic that the Cuban government carries out many humanitarian actions in several Third World countries, sending health professionals to areas of extreme poverty, while engaged in inciting mobs to beat the Ladies in White in the street, forcing its citizens to work for about a dollar a day in state enterprises, and maintaining full prisons, where, incidentally, more than 80 political prisoners languish.

The worst of this nightmare is the impunity. There are no legal means for the protection of citizens. The life of an ordinary Cuban passes among the misery and repression. Alternatives to escape the suffocation are in reality to leave the country by any means or to risk one’s luck on the black market. To survive through honest work has become a utopia.

In over 50 years of Real Socialism, inefficiency, lawlessness, lack of control, apathy and state terrorism have been regularized

Pavel and Pedro, the two agents who visited me, were emphatic in their warnings.

What else can one expect from the executioners who sometimes present themselves as teachers of tolerance and decency?

I know the names they gave me are false but that’s not important. What is beyond question is their determination to prevent, by all means at their disposal, our meeting of 28 January.

oliverajorge75@yahoo.com

Cubanet, 24 January 2014

What’s-his-name? / Yoani Sanchez

A crowd was waiting outside the mansion in Vedado with a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the garden. The language school opened its doors to new registrations and in the days that followed tested the attitudes of those interested. Everyone waited nervously, thinking that they would be evaluated on a pronunciation here… a mastery of vocabulary there. To our surprise, the main questions weren’t about language, but rather alluded to politics. By mid-morning a young woman who had been rejected warned us, “They’re asking the name of the first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in Havana.” We stood there mouths agape, who would know that?

A few decades ago the leaders of the so-called “political and mass organizations” were figures known throughout the country. Whether through their excessive presence in the official media, long tenure in their jobs, or simply because of personality, their faces were easily identifiable, even to kids in elementary school. We relentlessly heard talk of the secretary of the Young Communist Union, saw on every newscast who was leading the PCC in a province, or overdosed on declarations from some president of the Federation of University Students. There they were, clearly recognizable. Some even came to have nicknames, along with numerous jokes about their quirks and inefficiencies.

This morning on national television they mentioned Carlos Rafael Miranda, national coordinator for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). And it started me thinking about how blurred these positions have come to be, posts that before seemed to have so much power to decide the fate of so many. People now unknown leading institutions that every day fall deeper into indifference, are more forgotten. Leaders whose led can no longer remember their exact names and surnames. Figures who came too late to stand in the flashes of the camera, to be included in the analyses of the Cubanologists, or — at least — to be the targets of some joke. Mere shadows of a system where charisma is increasingly scarce.

25 January 2014

Oscar Elias Biscet Prohibited From Leaving His Home

Oscar Elias Biscet and his wife Elsa Morejon

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was arrested this morning near his home in the Lawton neighborhood, according to his wife Elsa Morejon’s Twitter account. Cubanet called the home of the opposition leader and was surprised when Biscet answered. He had been released.

Biscet told us that early in the morning two security officials came to his house and warned him not to go out into the street during the preparation for the CELAC summit, that is, from now until the presidents invited to the summit leave the Island. The meeting of the 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries is scheduled for 28-29 January.

The opponent protested that he was not going to abide by that dictatorial measure. And he would go where he had to go. Half an hour later they grabbed him in the street.

He was walking four blocks from his home when a civilian car stopped and two individuals identifying themselves as State Security got out. One of them asked Biscet for all his documents, keeping them. And told him he had to accompany them. That is, they took him into custody.

They drive about two blocks to what looked like a workplace. There one of the officials — according to Biscet — called his superiors on the phone to ask them what to do with the detainee. Evidently they told him to let him go. They returned to the car and took him back to his house. Repeating the warning that he was not to go out into the street or he would be arrested.

Oscar Elias Biscet told us that the headquarters of the Union for Cuba, on 100th Street near Fortuna, is surrounded by forces of the regime. No one can come closer than two blocks .

Last November, the Cuban government was prevented Elias Biscet leaving the country, after he was invited by President Barack Obama to the White House ceremony for the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in Washington. His wife, the activist Elsa Morejon, attended the celebration. On that occasion she visited Cubanet.

Cubanet, 24 January 2014

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