Unification of Dual Currency, but the Economic Future Remains Uncertain / Miriam Leiva

HAVANA, Cuba , December, www.cubanet.org – Monetary and exchange rate unification was addressed by Raúl Castro in his speech at the closing session of the National Assembly and by Vice President Marino Murillo Jorge, on December 21, according to the Cuban media. The interest of calming the population can be seen in the president’s assertion that there will be no affects on those who legally earn income in hard currency and in Cuban pesos, nor on the cash in hand of the population, or on deposits in the national banking system. continue reading

He also added that “it will not be a magic solution to our problems, but it will contribute decisively to improving the workings of the economy and the building of a prosperous and sustainable socialism, less egalitarian and more fair, which will ultimately benefit all Cubans.” It will begin with legal entities (agencies and state enterprises and cooperatives) and will continue with natural persons, but currently plans for its implementation are still be developed.

Meanwhile, Murilla said that in the coming two years the more technical and complex tasks of updating the economic model will be undertaken. He confirmed that the CUP (Cuban pesos) will be the only currency in the country and that in no case would there by any impact on people’s purchasing power, as the financial capacity of the CUC (convertible peso) will be respected.

He reiterated that the measure will not by itself resolve all problems, but that it should be undertaken within the “guidelines” (the adopted measures for updating the economic model), to continue promoting the development of the state socialist enterprise, unleashing the productive forces and creating an export mentality.

Undoubtedly, the tasks are immense, as it is almost impossible to achieve efficiency in a socialist enterprise. First there must be an effort to overcome all the characteristic deficiencies of the Cuban system, such as reliability in accounting and respect for contracts, eliminated in the 1960s as “capitalist malformations.” The value of work must be recovered, through conscious and creative participation of the workers, which is not resolved by the Labor Code adopted at the National Assembly session on 21 December.

Increases in production and productivity will be required in order to be able to adequately reward employees whose salaries don’t cover their basic needs and who feel no incentive to work hard and, therefore, to consider work as a social honor. The diversion of state resources as compensation for the poverty level wages or to increase one’s economic level — enrichment Cuban-style — must be eliminated; in short, the corruption generated by the system must be eradicated.

Unleashing productive forces is an imperative, but how? The straitjacket of central planning and socialist enterprises, the rejection of market forces, the restrictions on farmers and the self-employes, and other problems, prevent it. To day, the measures implemented under the adopted “guidelines” to update the system have not resulted in increases in the food supply, which in many components has declined. Manufacturing production is also falling and the private activities permitted do not complement the straitened macroeconomics of the country.

We can see that in developed countries and in those that have overcome poverty, small and medium enterprises (PYMES) carry important weight in the national economy. The vicious circle of scarcity of products for the national and international market, and the situation of nothing to export and the importing of what could be produced in Cuba, continues. An export mentality could be created, but will it happen? Will there be solutions in the “more technical and complex tasks” as predicted by the vice-president?

Miriam Leiva

25 December 2013, Cubanet

Currency Unification: Causes and Limits / Dimas Castellano

The road to exit the crisis is clear; what is lacking is the political will to travel it. Among the partial reforms the government of Raul Castro announced was the enforcement of a timeframe for measures to eliminate the dual currency, implemented following the loss of Soviet subsidies.  A look back at the topic helps to identify some of the causes and limitations of the announced timeframe.

In the period between the two great wars of independence that took place in the second half of the Cuban 19th century, the Island became the first country to exceed a million tons of sugar, of which more than 90% was exported to the United States.  That permitted the neighboring country to impose on Spain the reciprocal trade agreement known as the McKinley Bill, through which was established the free entry of Cuban sugar into that nation.

At the same time there was a high concentration of land ownership, especially in American companies.  In that condition of economic dependence, at the end of Spanish domination, the occupation government introduced the dollar as the basic monetary standard, which was imposed until the disappearance of the other currencies (French, Spanish, Mexican), which explains the presence of the dollar in the first years of the Republic born in 1902. continue reading

In that context, with the nationalist purpose of diminishing the dependence with respect to the American dollar, the government of General Mario Garcia Menocal dictated in 1914 the Law of Economic Defense, which gave birth to the national currency. That law established a gold standard as the monetary unit with the same weight and purity as the dollar. So, from a nationalist decision emerged the first version of dual currency in Cuba, which lasted until the ’50’s of the last century.

In a different way, in 1991, the disappearance of the Soviet Union provoked the loss of the enormous subsidies based on ideological relations, which overlapped decades of inefficiency of the Cuban model.  That fact, united with the depression in sugar prices, drove the country to a profound structural crisis baptized with the euphemism Special Period in Times of Peace. In answer to the crisis, the Cuban government, instead of undertaking a profound reform aimed at achieving a proper and efficient economy, defined a strategy aimed at saving the model and maintaining power. With that goal it introduced several contingency measures.

In 1993 the Basic Units of Cooperative Production were created, by which a beneficial interest in idle state land was given to workers; farmers markets and self employment were authorized; tourism and foreign investment were introduced; family remittances from abroad were admitted; possession of the dollar was decriminalized, and, in 1994, its free circulation was authorized, giving rise to the current dual currency.

As one might appreciate, the dual currency introduced in 1914 was motivated by reasons diametrically opposed to what happened in 1994. The first created the introduction of a national currency parallel to the dollar, the second legalized the dollar as a parallel to the national currency.

The road and political will

The causes that led to the dollarization in 1994 have their roots in the first revolutionary measures, whose declared goal was the disappearance of all commercial relations and, with them, the disappearance of money.  In 1960, all domestic and foreign banking entities that existed in Cuba were nationalized, in 1961 they were centralized in the hands of the State, while the direction of those activities was placed in the hands of the revolutionaries from the armed struggle.

The same thing happened with figures whose conception of the economy differed from those of the leader of the revolution, as happened with the economist Felipe Pazos Roque, founder and first president of the National Bank of Cuba since its foundation in 1948, who in spite of abandoning that responsibility because of his position against the Coup of 1952 and being named again as head of that institution in 1959 was replaced some months later by commander Ernesto Guevara.

The course of the process was more or less the following: the dollar was introduced in 1994; the convertible peso (CUC), a second national currency as an alternative to the dollar and the same value as the dollar, was created; in 2004 the circulation of the dollar was eliminated; then a tax of 10% was imposed on the dollar, and the CUC was re-valued relative to the dollar by 8%; in March of 2011 the original one-to-one value was resumed but the 10% tax remained. In summary, the duality was maintained thanks to which Cuba is the only country in the world with two national currencies, neither of which is really convertible.

The dollarization and the dual currency, besides magnifying social differentiation, increased the loss of value that the Cuban peso already had, one of whose manifestations was the expressed inflation in prices on the black market, the drop of wages and the discouragement of production.

Cuban currency, a representation of money, lost or reduced its functions as a means of value, an instrument for acquisition of goods, a means of accumulation of wealth, an instrument of liberation from debt and a means of payment. That’s why monetary unification, even if it constitutes an essential step for the current or for any other Government, will not resolve the current structural crisis, due to the fact that Cuban currency is not backed by the Gross National Product, that is to say, by the sum of goods and services that permit it to resume its functions and to be compared with foreign currencies.

The way out is in prioritizing productive efficiency, for which domestic and foreign investment is required, which would provide the country with capital, technology and markets, which in turn demands a new Law of Investments and the elevation of current salaries, which do not manage to cover more than one-third of basic necessities.  But as one can only distribute what is produced, the Government faces a complex contradiction: without increases in salaries, Cubans are not ready to produce, and without production, it is impossible to raise salaries, which will make monetary unification by itself futile.

In short, a comprehensive project that includes the decentralization of the economy, permits the formation of a middle class, removes the obstacles that stop production and restores citizens’ rights and liberties is missing. The road is clear, what is lacking is the political will to travel it.

Translated by mlk.

Taken from: Diario de Cuba
17 December 2013

Gone With the Revolution / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

OLPL in front of the UN in NYC

What is our lesson after 55 years of the Castro regime, more than there were before Batista in Cuba (“Castroism” predates Castro), and there are still more to come, as long as the Castro brothers don’t die (there will be no Castroism after Castro), and the violence of freedom finally begins? Is there a lesson? What a perverse historical pedagogy! But yes. And if there isn’t any, then there should have been.

Like the good teachers in the public elementary schools, I would like to reduce everything to a couple of elemental points, although they will seem farfetched juxtaposed on the blackboard. I promise to be brief. Also, the chalk disappears quite easily before a damp rag leaving no trace in the classroom’s memory.

1. From the beginning, the Revolution was a fallacy in our national imagination. It wasn’t betrayed by Fidel Castro, far from it. In fact the Revolution was the foundational cause of our independence and it was this we were playing at during the Republican period, aborting any instant of understanding. We believed in the violent transformation of society. We tried our contemporaries so as not to criminally succumb before them.

Castro was carefully incubated by Cubans, until he accumulated sufficient critical evil to become what he is: an evil unbeatable without applying sufficient evil. With luck, or as revenge, Castroism should mean, then, the end of that string of Cuban Revolutions.

We have to stop thinking and acting revolutionarily, because all of the initial allies of the Revolution, betrayed, imprisoned, exiled or murdered, also committed the sin of complicit naiveté: they purposely ignored that no Revolution ever in the key of death has brought anything but that, more death.

2. Organized communism has committed genocide in Cuba.  It sold the nation to foreign powers, under a popular and nationalist disguise. It made a pact with a charismatic gangster, a permanent dictator, watching while he and his clan lived. It cauterized all civic life: meaning it disintegrated the nation, fostering an exile that irreversibly diasporized Cuba.

It abolished the idea of the individual, and it did this from Marxism not as a concept but as a historical juncture (we now know that a capitalist communism is viable).

It debased the god in man that lived in Cuba, leaving us as a people despotically exposed before the State. Left without any hope of change in the future. Thus it has lost is right to form any part of a more inclusive future, after the debacle that will follow the fall of the Castros.

Although few Cubans have the courage to mention it (an exception is Oswaldo Payá Sardiña’s Transition Project), as long as organized communism on the island is not illegal, there will be no national reconstruction that isn’t controlled or hijacked by organized communists.

Like every good elementary public schoolteacher, I earn no salary for my chalk lesson on the blackboard. I’ve fulfilled my promise to be more than brief. I don’t lie to the students. Now they can erase me. Or leave the classroom.

25 December 2013

Perspectives and Wishes for the Coming Year / Rebeca Monzo

In a country like ours, completely bankrupt, where all future promises have been broken, where the citizens have been cheated again and again, few expectations remain.

The majority of the young people with whom I have spoken would like to live in a country where their dreams and perspectives are unlimited. Sadly for them, they dream of emigrating because they know that here and now there is no other option.

Older people look forward to their retirement, a product of so many years of accumulated work. They hope it might allow them to live comfortably and treat themselves to a little luxury once in a while without having to depend on help from overseas relatives. Besides being humiliating, this is a constant reminder of the failure of their lives and the separation from family, both very painful and difficult feelings to overcome. Others even less fortunate find it necessary, in spite of their advanced age, to clandestinely sell “jabitas” (plastic bags), homemade candies and loose cigarettes outside farmers’ markets, always running away from the police who harass them.

And those of us who are no longer so young but not yet so old want freedom for Cuba and the restoration of the democracy that was lost more than half a century ago. We long for a country where the dreams and aspirations of all Cubans can be fulfilled without having to abandon the place where they were born. But it is not enough to only dream about this; one has to do something to achieve it and fundamentally it has to be done from within.

In spite of this dark present, I wish all Cubans — especially my readers, wherever they may be — a bright future in a free country, where we share joys and sorrows together in an embrace. Merry Christmas!

24 December 2013

Elian: The Dauphin Not in Line / Angel Santiesteban

Elian Gonzalez and his mother

This teenager pampered and used by both sides, has had the sad task of erasing and criticizing the dreams of his mother. No mother makes plans for herself, and everything she did was to try to bring her child a future far from this dictatorship that today has been converted into a semi-literate, as can be corroborated in the Tweets that he has sent through the social networks from Ecuador.

He must have inherited the skewed intelligence of his father, who before turning himself into the most loving father ever, was a “fighter” who sold bottle of liquor that he smuggled out of the hotel where he worked in Varadero, and
someone who found it impossible to string together a sentence.

For the most part, those who pay little attention to studying engage in pillaging, and it was the crack he found that turned him into the political pawn of Fidel Castro, who dragged the Cuban people along, in exchange for the excessive expense of the rescue, he cried for the return of the child Elián.

Everyone knows that for Castro, the thing of least interest was the child. His obsession was always the power struggle with the United States and winning, discrediting them before international public opinion. And the caudillo saw the immediate opportunity that presented itself.

Now the dauphin has grown up in the dogmatism and interests of his father, who kept him in a military school (Camilitos), and having been certified as tames, it’s time to repay all the sleepless nights and expenses invested in him, or so think all his ideologues or trainers. They threw him into the ring of the World Youth and Student Festival in Quito to look horns with all who approach him with purposes other than the Cuban governments. Asked to comment on what happens, as if the fact of having survived his ordeal has immortalized him and turned him into an extraordinary being; because as far as studying goes, he shows no effort nor results. Fidel Castro shouldn’t have been allowed to do it so early, he should have demanded better preparation, and he should have send advisors and a personal guard to prevent access to his crazy views and his Tweets with serious spelling errors, that can’t be justified simply by the fashion of abbreviating or changing letters with similar sounds.

In the end, life has proved his mother right: the child would have no future here. The best thing they could do is hide him away again, and so save themselves from the ridicule and bad image, or return him to Miami to be educated.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Prison Settlement of Lawton. December 2013.

24 December 2013

Downpours Emphasize the Chaos / Martha Beatriz Roque

HAVANA, Cuba, December 2013,  www.cubanet.org.- . It’s frightening the number of housing collapses that have occurred in Havana, up to the end of November and in the first days of December. Officially, there have been 227 collapses, including 26 which were total and the rest partial. 627 individual families have been affected. They haven’t listed the localities where they occurred, to enable one to check the accuracy of the figures, and whether those identified by human rights organisations are included in the official government report.

In most of the neighbourhoods of the capital, including Miramar, which is crossed by 5th Avenue, the sewage system doesn’t work. When there is a downpour, the streets flood and the traffic is affected. But the drains appear so clogged as if they were cemented up, and some houses at a higher level also flood, because the gutters in the roofs have no way to run out onto the streets.

There are streets which remain full of mud and debris. That makes getting about difficult, including on the pavements, which are already affected by trees, whose roots break the concrete and form potholes which make it difficult to pass. In some municipalities like Centro Habana, Habana Vieja and Diez de Octubre it is dangerous to pass down the streets because the balconies are at risk of collapse, and the buildings too.

Given such government apathy, most of the streets have dumpsters crammed full and overflowing, with great mountains of solid rubbish. The divers, which is what they calll the people who rummage in the dustbins, spill the rubbish and the surroundings are converted into focal points for possible disease. And when it rains, like in recent days, this trash flows down the streets with the water.

Although you don’t see cats in public spaces, because they end up as the main course on the dining table of the Cuban poor, the dogs are all over the place, covered in scabies, near food shops. They also enter into some shops and annoy the customers.

The bicycle taxis go the wrong way along the streets, especially in Central Havana, endangering the lives of passers-by. The mobile salespeople also, in accordance with their custom, move their carts along different streets, and park them on any corner, dumping the waste from their sales. Both situations produce problems when it rains.

It’s very hard to find a public toilet in the city. If there is one, there is someone there who charges for its use, and because of that many people have used rubbish bins on the corners, out-of-the way columns, and other uninhabited places, as toilets. Even worse, those that have some sort of shelter, because they have walls, have been converted into accommodation for sexual acts.

The water falling washes away substantial quantities of urine and excrement from those sites.

The list of problems is endless, but the most unbearable is that there won’t be a solution, not even with the 10 million guidelines of the Cuban communist party, because solving the problems requires financial resources and political will, and both things are absent in the government’s programmes.

18 December 2013

Translated by GH

Neither Fresh Milk Nor Diet Milk / Osmar Laffita Rojas

Havana, Cuba, December, www.cubanet.org – Last year 2012, the Ministry of Agriculture reported the production of fresh milk at a level of 516,246,500 litres nationally. Out of this total, the province of Camagüey occupied the first position with 96,299,600 litres. Followed, at a distance, by Villa Clara with 51,794,100 litres; Sancti Spíritus with 49,923,100 and Matanzas with 44,352,800 litres.

As part of a long list of inefficiencies and unfulfilled commitments, the state was not able to fulfill its commitment dated July 26th 2007 to guarantee a daily litre of fresh milk to every child under 7 years.

With a few days to go to the end of 2013, this year’s milk production is not known. That silence is a sign that things aren’t going well.

In most of the provinces, they are continuing with the standard sale of 3 kilos a  month of powdered milk, at the subsidised price of 10 cents a kilo. Every 10 days, children under 7 have the right to a kilo of this miik.

Not being able to guarantee the supply of fresh milk and in order to ensure the children get the diet they need, the state had no choice but to import thousands of tons of powdered milk whose price in the international market was over $4,000 dollars a ton.

That imported powdered milk is also for pregnant women and those diagnosed with chronic illness like diabetes, who get a voucher for a kilo of powdered milk a month, whose price is similar to that sold for children.

It seems like the milk production in the past year has not been what was hoped.

Last August 5th, the weekly Trabajadores, official publication of the Cuba Workers Centre (CTC) , announced the construction of a powdered milk factory in the province of Camagüey with capacity to produce 100,000 litres of milk a day, using milk from the dairies in the Camagüey area.

Production testing of the factory in question will be started at the end of September.

They are putting up the new factory in the place where the old factory was to have been in the 90’s, which would have been the first powdered milk factory in Cuba. Construction was held up for lack of funding. Since then, the state has kept on importing powdered milk, thousands of tons, paying tens of millions of dollars.

The powdered milk factory which they are putting up in Camagüey is fitted with Chinese and Italian technology and its cost has reached 528,000 dollars. It should produced 2,350 tons of powdered whole and low-fat milk a year and 1,100 tons of butter.

The newspaper Granma, on 31st August, announced that work on the project was over 70% advanced  and that at the end of September they will start assembly of the machinery and, if there are no holdups, they forecast completion for the end of December. But, up to now, they haven’t given any more information on this.

At the beginning of December, they announced that pregnant women and the chronically sick in the provinces of Mayabeque, La Habana, Artemisa and Santa Clara, who received powdered milk for their diet, by way of an experiment, will, from January, instead of that, receive a new dairy formula made up of casein, lacto-whey, water, and animal or vegetable fat with different levels of protein.

On this point, the Vice Minister of Internal Trade, Bárbara Acosta, said that this measure was taken because of the over-consumption of powdered milk and assured the deputies that it would not be extended past the date indicated

It seems like there was a setback in the production of milk in the second half of this year.

In the Foreign Currency Recovery Stores* (TRD, from its Spanish initials) they have not offered butter or condensed and evaporated milk produced locally for months.

You only find cheese in certain supermarkets, and not always. The price is about $15 a kilo, which is in fact prohibitive for most Cubans, whose salary doesn’t exceed $20 a month.

The official press keeps completely silent about the crisis in the production of fresh milk. It seems like the government has ordered that they don’t touch on such a sensitive topic.

ramsetgandhi@yahoo.com

Translated by GH

*Translators note: This interesting name makes clear the government’s interest in operating stores that sell products only in hard currency; their purpose is to “recover” the remittances sent to Cubans from family and friends abroad. Products in these stores are generally sold at significant markups.

23 December 2013 / Cubanet

Marina Ochoa’s Messages / POLEMICA: The 2007 Intellectual Debate

Before anything else, please forgive me for entering so late into the discussion. My life is very complicated precisely because of the climate of indifference, incapacity and/or corruption that I see confirmed in all the applications to the housing “machine”. I am appalled! I mention it because in my opinion what brought an end to socialism in the countries in the East was the unpunished mixing up of interests on the part of those who became millionaires during the socialism, opportunism, corruption and repression. Criminals who went unpunished because of the absence of opportunity for criticism, debate and for a culture of criticism of course. Gorbachev and Yeltsin only delivered the coup de grace ... we should all think about that and those involved should take appropriate action.

I am not a theorist and am speaking to you on the basis of my principles and experiences.

I think it’s the moment to get to the essence, or rather, to other essences. First I want to talk about the demoralising effect of repression. And the confusion and paralysis it produces. That would partly explain why the response from the culture, on many occasions, did not display the necessary consistency. I know a lot about that. The assemblies for purging the School of Architecture (in the second half of the 60’s), in the middle of my adolescence, truly terrified and confused me. The lack of correspondence between the political debate, full of high-sounding ideas, and the meanness in practice bewildered me. I didn’t understand anything, I couldn’t articulate anything. I tasted the flavour of impotence. Many of the members of the “purification” tribunals are in exile. “Purification”, for God’s sake, seems like something imported from fascism!

Later, in the 70’s, it happened in the School of Journalism. I was a student of Eduardo Heras [Ed. note: Cuban short story writer] and the same thing happened again. In both places the devaluing of the human essence was part of the strategy. Then came a period in which it seemed we had suffered some kind of collective amnesia, from which we didn’t want to awake to avoid going through the story of our weakness? And then, a new low hit with Alicia … frustrated because she was responded to by the film producers and the members of the culture which supported us with principles, unity, coherence and firmness. We manage to sort out the differences between us, which exist, as they do everywhere and we declare a truce in the fighting in order to safeguard our cultural project, which we are still getting on with.

Now I ask those who cite our intellectuals for not answering forcefully at the given moment, is it better to march off into exile, which is anyone’s right, which I don’t question, rather than collect the fragments of our beings, feelings, hopes, and also our revolutionary existence and remain here, fighting in our own way, as best we can, to rescue a cultural project we believe in? We must respect the way each one of us fights, because we are all products of traumatic events which have overwhelmed us. I believe we have to express clearly and coherently what kind of country we want to have and what kind of culture. Therefore I propose we take up again the concepts which were current in the foundation period of the Revolution, later distorted by interpretations which were circumstantial, obtuse, opportunist and convenient for the Palabras a los Intelectuales [Ed. note: Words to the Intellectuals – famous speech of Fidel Castro’s in 1961, setting out his views on freedom of cultural expression] which unfortunately they use because of the lack of conceptual definitions.

Take up again “the inclination of the avant-guard, the freedom of expression, the independence of individual evolutions, the search for the roots of creative feeling and the attempt to make clear the spiritual values of man”, to be found in Origenes [Ed. note: Origins, a Cuban literary cultural magazine] and what Carlos Rafael Rodriguez (Hey! called “the prince of Cuban Marxism”) expressed on March 23, 1982 on the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Nuestro Tiempo society [Ed. note: Cuban cultural institution in the ’50’s].

I think we have to get the bogeyman of openness away from our cultural and political life.  The permanence of the Cuban Revolution is a symptom of the fact that our “specificities” are stronger than our “regularities”. We can’t delay any longer the culture of exercising opinion and debate, or we will pay dearly, even more so than up to now. Our people are the most defenceless in the world against the avalanche of neoliberal culture. We painstakingly modelled ourselves as passive recipients. As consumers, in all senses of the word of what they give us.

The battle of ideas should be this: a battle and I think this debate illustrates how it never should have been.

I hope I have contributed something to this debate. Big hug.

Marina Ochoa

Another message from Marina Ochoa to Gustavo Arcos Fernández-Brito.

 Dear Gustavo (Arcos Fernández-Brito):

I’ve been filming and I am getting prepared to start editing, and therefore although I have wanted to get in touch I haven’t had the time or the energy, so I end up with dispersed neurons.

The creation of a wailing wall for artists is bad news. They don’t understand anything. We say tweet tweet and they answer quack quack.

The 47 years in which the “vanguard of the proletariat” has been translated as the right to think for us, deciding for us whatever does or doesn’t suit us as individuals, family, nation, has corroded the capacity to use our judgement and has put us in the rearguard, while the thinking of our people has become more complicated, growing, and overflowing the society “designed” from above, which functions less each day; (the other, the underground, parallel or floating society which functions as a diversion, gives the lie to it every minute) but on the screens of our television, which often seems to be directed by Walt Disney, it appears as ideal.

The son of one of my nieces, 9-years-old, sighed while he was watching the national TV news, “I would like to live there!” Childish wisdom … and I swear to you I didn’t make this up.

I was very grateful to receive the intervention of the wonderful Colina and that of Belkis Vega [Ed. note: Cuban film producer]. Indispensable. I think that Criterios [Ed. note: Desiderio Navarro’s magazine, produced by the Centro Teorico Cultural] should collect everything they have expressed and bring out a number of the magazine and include what the 30 will produce. Certainly, knowing professionals of Belkis’ stature, in all senses of the word, professional, moral, humane, revolutionary, I can’t understand how it’s possible that her name does not position her to occupy roles such as the presidency of UNEAC [Cuban Writers and Artists Union], the presidency of ICAIC [Cuban Film Institute], as they are looking at the names of possible substitutes, all machos, men, masculine.

Colina refers to the responsibilities of Torquesada [Ed. note: Armando Quesada, member of the Stalinist National Council of Culture in the 70’s] in the ICRT [Cuban Institute of Radio & Television].

I also know that they made Torquesada adviser to the programme “Open Dialogue” following a negative report about the programme put out by this man, with a recommendation to take it off the air, which shows a very interesting practice: I put you in as adviser to someone you want to destroy and explain the drop in the quality of the debate in the said programme.

I won’t take any more of your time and congratulate you on your honesty and integrity

A hug

Marina Ochoa

Translated by GH

December Again / Yoani Sanchez

Twelve months and here we are again. Days to weigh our accomplishments and to postpone to the new year everything we failed to finish. What has changed in Cuba — and in each one of us — since December 2012 which we also put on the scales? Very little and so much. In the small space of my personal live, it seems that everything has moved at an unprecedented pace; in the life of a nation, however, it is barely a tremor, the blink of an eye. January started with the Immigration and Travel Reform, and in the following months there were many times we said goodbye; now without that sense of no return we had before, of final departure and exile for life, it’s true, but we continue to remove names from the telephone book at a worrying speed. Our condition of an “island in flight” grew, this time within a legal framework that allows and increases it.

Social differences were sharpened. The number of beggars and dumpster divers grew. However, many modern cars began rolling down our deteriorated streets and more than one nouveau riche spent their vacations on the other side of the Atlantic. If anything characterized 2013, it was the polarized stories about it that we hear. Anecdotes of families who opened luxury restaurants in the heart of Havana and of others who can no longer drink coffee because they can’t afford the unrationed price. Of some waiting outside a boutique to buy Adidas sneakers and others waiting outside a dining room to be given the leftovers to take home. We live in a time of high contrasts, days of photos discolored by the laboratory of life. A year, also, in which the ideological discourse distanced itself even further from reality.

Repression, for its part, increased. To the same extent that civil society grew and began to take certain spaces. The battle for the monopoly on information was lost by the government in 2013 and won by clandestine networks of audiovisuals, news and digital libraries. We were better able to learn what was happening, but, with that as a starting point, the power to convene ourselves and come together is still lacking by a long stretch. Life is more expensive for everyone, privileges and perks are concentrated in an elevated elite and the fight against corruption reached some but avoided others. Remittances from family and friends abroad, plus the subsidies from Venezuela, allowed us to avoid collapse, but the red ink proves that the economic reforms have failed. At the very least they have been unable to offer Cubans a better life, a motive for staying here.

The world offered us some lessons, among them the images from Kiev where so many have lost their fear. Fidel Castro faded a little more in his long living-death that has already lasted seven years. And freedom? This, this we are going to see if we win and achieve it in 2014.

24 December 2013

Dear Readers / Regina Coyula

I intend to take a vacation from the until the second week of January. If circumstances permit as everything indicates they will, I will devote myself to putting my house in order, an enormous task for me under the mountain of fabric that has accumulated on the sewing machine, and at night, like grandmothers of old, I will knit while watching television, an almost useless labor in the winter (?!) that we experience.

You can always find me on Twitter (@lamalaletra), reporting whatever happens to me in 140 characters.

I’ve told this anecdote many times, but I don’t remember if I’ve told it here. Just before the start of the Panamerican Games in Havana in 1991, my husband turned on the TV waiting for the news that the government, as we knew it, had fallen. In the face of that obsession, without giving it much thought, I said one day that it wouldn’t happen until 2013. He started laughing at me like a crazy person, he’d look at me, point his finger, and go off into more fits of laughter. When he calmed down he said to me, “You’re crazy.”

Well readers, not even a prediction as conservative as mine has come true. Or perhaps it has, and with that unnatural bureaucracy and the usual secrecy, we’re still doing the paperwork.

I have no plans, so I will enjoy the lovely parties to come.

May 2014 be a better year for everyone.

22 December 2013

Government Orders Added Buildings Demolished / Reinaldo Emilio Cosano

HAVANA, Cuba, December, www.cubanet.org – Many Havanans are confused and outraged that the government is eliminating constructions added without permits from the Institute of Physical Planning. After allowing them for decades, the withdrawal of authorization of thise privately-constructed buildings now is creating a very serious conflict, one more in the severe housing crisis in the capital.

Felix Mengana Franco, 34, an electrician living on the capital neighborhood of San Agustin, where multi-family five-story buildings predominate, states:

“They have demolished buildings and are continuing to do so. It’s unreasonable to dismantle the improvised garages. Neighbors in my building and others in the area are going crazy trying to think about how to protect their cars. They don’t have any other place. Do they take them up to their apartments on the third, fourth or fifth floors? Its absurd that so many buildings have been built in 50 years but they don’t build garages to protect vehicles from the risks of weather and theft.”

Garages, workshops for the repair of cars and motorcycles or the repair of home appliances, shacks for water pumps, bike repairs, living quarters… There is a huge need and lack of renovations of buildings ruined or destroyed, and now, to make it all worse, this plan aggravates the situation.

“I know of a case of a married couple with two children, six and seven, and two grandparents, who live crammed into a little shack,” added Mengana Franco.

Parking outdoors is exposed to the weather and to the plague of thieves. They steal parts off of cars and motorcycles, especially tires and batteries, scarce and expensive. The vehicles they steal from are dismantled piece by piece and sold, taking advantage of the lack of parts of state-run establishments, the only ones, or their astronomical prices.

Rodolfo, a resident of Alamar to the east of Havana, expressed his disagreement:

“Before demolition, the state should adequately resolve the problem created. I sacrificed myself in numerous sugar harvests. I earned the distinctions of “national vanguard” and “millionaire harvester” for the millions of arrobas of cane I harvested, and for this I got the right to buy a Russian Lada car. Now I have no way to protect it if they tear down my garage. I live on the fifth floor.”

Felix Mengana concludes, “If it’s prohibited, why does the government allow people to fool themselves, having their space, their privacy, to late tear down their huts and their dreams?”

cosanoalen@yahoo.com

23 December 2013 / Cubanet

Another Sad Anniversary / Fernando Damaso

Photo: Peter Deel

A few days hence will mark fifty-five years of a political, economic and social phenomenon that in January 1959 completely disrupted the fate of the Cuban nation. The so-called revolution became a devolution.

The results, as seen over time, are not too flattering. As well as the divisions and fractures caused to the Cuban family and its dispersal throughout the world, the loss of values — acknowledged by the current president — represents an account balance of which no one can be proud.

If we add an unproductive and inefficient agricultural system, an outdated and primitive industrial base, lack of transport and poor quality of services, including health and education, building collapses or buildings miraculously still standing, the decline in sports, the lack of environmental cleanliness, repression, lack of individual freedoms and many other evils, on balance the results have been negative.

Nor can we forget the thousands of people who have disappeared — eaten by sharks while attempting to flee across the Florida Straits — or those who have been executed, or those who have been killed and wounded in the overseas conflicts.

All these absurdities can be summed up in ten words written by José Martí — a man who lived nineteen of the most fruitful years of his life in the United States, writing hundreds of unforgettable pages about that country, which he admired and respected — hours before his death in combat: “I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails.”

These words have been manipulated and used as an anti-imperialist banner. The most hare-brained schemes have been hatched and executed in his name, dragging along a fanaticized people.

Rather than the words of Martí, everything has really been based on the writings of the leader of the insurrection* during its final days when he said, “My true destiny is to fight against the United States.” This highly personal and rather egocentric criteria was the basis for everything that came thereafter, everything for which the entire nation was sacrificed.

Today, fifty-five years after this event, we have in many ways regressed, much has been lost, pain and death have been left in its wake, as though this is something to be celebrated, despite the official slogan “Cuban Festivities.”

The lack of a coherent economic policy and other shortcomings, as well as more instability resulting from decisions that have been made, promise to make every day in the future even more dark and gloomy.

Aware of this reality and trying to fight peacefully for change, I wish my readers a very merry Christmas, a happy New Year and a healthy 2014 in which their dreams and wishes might be fulfilled.

*Translator’s note: I.e. the 1959 Revolution and its leader Fidel Castro

23 December 2013