We Are Fewer But With More Problems / Jorge Olivera Castillo

HAVANA, Cuba , September, www.cubanet.org – Raul Castro and those accompanying him in the exercise of power don’t give a damn about the unstoppable population decrease in Cuba. Faced with this unfortunate prediction, revealed by National Bureau of Statistics and Information (ONEI), we confirm once again that the government has no sense of the nation which, without a hint of modesty, it continues to call revolutionary.

The reluctance of the women to bring children into the world, clear from the high rate of abortions, has its foundation in the socio-economic problems. In addition to the depressed wages we have rising unemployment and the inability to choose a house or apartment with the minimum standards of livability. Currently, the deficit amounts to more than a million homes.

The current environment favors  alienation and marginalization, especially among young people, who tend to see their future away from the land of their birth. The preference for emigrating abroad is also another cause underlying the predictions of a marked decline in the population.

According to the government agency that brought to light details of the issues, By 2030 Cuba will have 10,904,985 inhabitants. Comparing this number to the current population, the decrease exceeds a quarter million people since the most recent census conducted last year, which counted 11,163,934 Cubans.

The consequences of such a reduction in a depopulated country, given that Cuba has a land area of 42,400 square miles, will be unpredictable. Extreme poverty , increase in prostitution and trafficking of drugs, decay of social services, among other high-impact phenomena in the lives of the majority of the people. Of course the heaviest part of the burden will fall on the shoulders of Cuba’s elderly. Many will not be able to endure the stifling conditions.

The symptoms of Social Darwinism are accelerated to the extent that the foundations of real socialism are dismantled. The extreme nationalization, characterized by arbitrary prohibitions, voluntarism and enlarging the bureaucracy to a scale never before seen, have been the main triggers for a series of anomalies that have ruined the economy and social fabric.

The worst news is the fact that there are no reasonable methods to reverse the situation. The circle of power is still committed to delaying a transition to facilitate the rearrangements necessary so that the country will not to fall into chaos. The economic changes implemented lack vision that is viable and pragmatic rather than obstructionist.

While the end for Raul Castro and his entourage is their conservation as a political class, nothing can be expected beyond the news compels them to take refuge in the most remote areas of pessimism.

In 2030 we will be fewer people with many more dilemmas to solve. The culprits of the disaster set back the clock of history at their convenience. So far, unfortunately, they have been lucky in their maneuvers.

Jorge Olivera Castillo – oliverajorge75@yahoo.com

From Cubanet

9 September 2013

Quote Unquote / Regina Coyula

I have the impression (subjective in the end and even mistaken) that the only “Battle of Ideas” has its place in virtual sites and in mass broadcasting media.  On the street, people can’t be more aligned.   Any group starts talking about soccer, or the start of school, and they end up talking about “the thing;” and if they talk about money or food, the temperature rises a few degrees more.  There are some — in general the private workers and those who protect their employee “benefits” with the State — who tend to be more discreet, but end up like “those people” or “that gentleman,” which are understood by any Cuban to be the polite version but full of disdain towards our leaders.

Saturday on the P-3 bus detained at the stop at the zoo, a young person behind me signaled to his companion with certainty to the building ahead and said, “Aldo the Aldeano lives there.  Talking about the hip hop of Los Aldeanos was like a sign to start a somewhat disjointed, but absolutely critical, conversation of the situation of the country. Soon the whole back of the bus exchanged frustrations and found catharsis, and not a single passenger, not one, articulated a timid defense of the government in general or the reforms in particular.  I got off in La Vibora leaving that spontaneous tribune in full swing.

I don’t know if there remains an appointed branch of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Party; Opinion of the People, which as it name clarifies, compiles the popular sentiment with diverse intentions.  But if the trimmings of the Raulist updating happen to close the aforementioned branch, our president, or his son, or his grandson, should imitate this modern version of Harun Al-Rashid, of whom it is said that she went out to traverse his capital on a motorcycle camouflaged in her helmet.  Maybe in this way those in leadership could find out first hand and without adornment how “the thing” goes, since they won’t dare to ride a bus.

9 September 2013

Who Are You, Little Virgin? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Poor little doll made of tinsel and wood, so battered across the long and narrow stretch of thousands and thousands of kilometers.

Last night, I saw her in Lawton, and it was daunting.

Because of her, and because of the bleak surroundings.  A neighborhood polluted from the disposition of its inhabitants to the sky that hangs above, propped up by the electric poles that shine a poor pasty yellow light. Houses like caves. Light and faces like grimaces. Light and the feeling that none of these collective biographies should be called human, let alone “from God” (amorphous animalia, ignorant by way of amnesia).

Light that only shines from the “Made in China”[1] patrol cars and in the sequins of the motorized traffic brigade.  The light that has an edge, but no faith in the insolent and proactive eyes of State.

At around 7:00 p.m., in winter time midnight begins in Cuba. It seemed like people were willing to shout anyone down, entertainment hysteria to welcome the weekend in style, as if it were a reggaeton concert (the style of clothing of the young people present proved it).

The motorcade barely slowed down under the traffic light although the corner of 16th and Dolores was a sea of bodies. I heard women curse the mothers of the drivers. I saw people hit the hood of the cars (in a remake of the movie Midnight Cowboy). The smell of conflict in the air did not abate, but added a patriotic spiciness to our pedestrian concept of devotion.

We remember the Virgin when she arrives, that is once during each Revolution.

And indeed, in her glass or acrylic shrine, carrying the pillar of our national coat of arms, and between the Vatican flag and our nation’s heroic rag (without Byrne-style[2] romanticisms in the 21st century: our flag represents barbarity, and I do not love it even if they force me to, mostly because it is the source of demagoguery uniting dictators and democrats).

The anonymous insular Mary finally descended on her rented automobile from the chapel kept by the nuns of Concepción Street, far beyond the Lawton bus depot, the now useless railroad lines and the already putrid River Pastrana; in that stretch of sub-industrial forest that invades the capital from the Cordón de La Habana[3].

Mambí Virgin[4].  The crowd running, cars honking, chants, clapping, prayers from the loudspeakers, a rope to keep the faithful in line. Human circles trained in the parishes, aging and semi-alienated men with their particular quasi-military but Christian-inspired speak plus 1970s fashions that include a dress belt up to their belly buttons. How uncool is Cuba!

Raw collage: Help out the Cuban faithful! It is a masquerade in which Cardinal Ortega comes out from under his own sleeves, and walks up B street to Porvenir Avenue, turns right on 10th Street, then speaks. continue reading

Our prelate looks exhausted behind the microphone. The Cardinal knows that Cuba does not love him any longer, first for being a coward and also an accomplice (among other closet secrets handled only by the Office of Religious Affairs of the Central Committee of a godless party).  No one pays attention to Jaime, “no thistle and no caterpillar”[5] he plants.  A drunkard kisses his hand, and the boys of State Security send the sudden devotee flying back to his non-place on the sidewalk.

And it makes sense that the words of an elderly man do not engage (nor fool) Cuba on this night: the superstar tonight is Cachita[6]. Besides, Ortega, since he first appeared on Cuban television without promotion or credits, keeps talking about Antonio de la Caridad Maceo y Grajales, a 19th century Cuban general who, before going out to kill his fellow men (or be killed by them), checked to make sure that he had, in his breast of starched mulatto, a little medal of the Virgin made of noble metal.

Then, the head of the Catholic Church in Cuba stops speaking, and finally is our turn alone with the headless incivility of the island.  And, we shower ourselves in vandalism: against the temple’s iron gates and up the steps, a movie scene not silent but screeching. Hundreds, thousands. Girls, old men. A man whose mother assured me that he had had a heart attack very recently. A lady whom I lifted from the sea of legs that would have crushed her (she was bleeding from her calves). And again expletives, holy debauchery.

The clerics and seminarians screaming with diction too correct to be violent, almost excommunicating their fellow congregants with primary school teacher admonitions like “if you don’t behave, there will be no virgin for anyone in this neighborhood.” We witness an avalanche of soccer finale proportions, or, of course, a concert in CUCs[7] for thugs who understand nothing.

This is our undeniable raw material (you cannot perpetually impose a myth from the minority, be it the Gospels or History Will Absolve Me[8]).  But, this stage set is missing the elite police brigade: the Special Forces units that perpetrate peace in a Special Period[9].

It is obvious that the Cuban state is interested in making the Catholic Church aware that so many processions a year will create a tragedy for them (I saw several women, all of them black, semi-unconscious being carried to different destinations). Let them buffet each other for a bit amid polyphony of laments and curses. But, it is obvious that some other worse curse words cannot be heard here:  “Liberty,” for example.

Right at that moment, some guys chide me because all of my pictures are focused on the people’s fisticuffs. We then argue over the possession of the truth.  I show them my white t-shirt that says “Laura Pollán Lives”[10].  They swirl around me and surround me while a woman loudly asks me from a distance for whom I work (they all have the language of the counter-intelligence TV series “Las Razones de Cuba”[11] and that of the official blogosphere), but I am already inside the temple, and I seek refuge by the main altar to capture the faces blessed by an Italian priests whose smile I cannot call divine, but democratic.

No wonder I have a work credential to shutterclick away without having my camera stolen or shredded “by mistake” or “by chance.”  And the Virgin that mother of all Cubans who precedes even the motherland, what is the Virgin doing here in her own procession?

Each prayer and each tear is accompanied by a picture taken with a cell phone. Our Lady of Charity is therefore a little bit of pop icon amidst so much media fruition (Nokiarity Syndrome). Her disposition seems a bit timid despite her olive skin, so clean and congenial, Cecilially she is a Valdés[12].  And, with a certain wooden modesty, it could be said that our virgin hides in Islamic fashion under her cloak of sorceress queen. Perhaps, it will be difficult for her to discern whether she is worshiped by subjects of God or Nothingness.  Perhaps She knows more than a few things about tomorrow (with that sad grimace of hers). Perhaps she feels very lonely, condemned to carry that baby who does not grow for eternity.

Poor little Cuban virgin, so fragile, surrounded by a flower holocaust, petals with that smell so peremptorily funerary.

Poor little virgin surrounded by the medieval Cuban populace, forced to the insomnia of the donated electric fans, walled behind that music so falsely happy for when death comes to us, egged on like a fugitive by the brown-out looming over the convent confiscated and turned into a school (this is precisely how the totalitarian state imposes its narrative: turning on and off the central switch).

Poor, oh poor, our Cachita, so invisible under the greedy gaze of the mob, willing to be Maceos in exchange for a quality miracle.

Poor, oh poor, my darling, so Cuban and yet no one in Cuba knows it because they are content with lighting some candles to you and asking you for a visa to the United States. No one spoke of love, my darling. No one in this island or in the Exile ever knew who you were. Now, for example, they will charge against me, but you and I secretly know very well that you and I recognized each other at least this once.

Little Virgin without name or history.  Little ephemeral Virgin of my soul that fades already. Little Virgin of Truth.

[1] In English in the original text.

[2] Refers to Bonifacio Byrne, a Cuban poet who wrote a famous poem to the Cuban national flag from the ship that brought him back to the island in 1899.

[3] El Cordón de La Habana (Havana Cordon) was a plan created by Fidel Castro to plant Caturra coffee beans (a Cuban native variety) around the Cuban capital in 1971-73.  Predictably, the plan failed because of soil incompatibility and administrative blunders.  It did manage, however, to successfully eliminate most of the little individual vegetable gardens in the area.

[4] Mambí were the Cuban rebels who opposed and rose against Spanish rule in the 19th century.  Many were devotees of the virgin, and carried her image into battle.  Virgen Mambisa is also the title of a 20th century hymn to the Our Lady that can be heard here:  http://youtu.be/cq9kGJ44ecw

[5] This is a play on words from Ortega and a verse in José Martí’s poem “Cultivo Una Rosa Blanca” that is in turn part of “Versos Sencillos,” a compilation of poems. The verse reads “cardo ni oruga cultivo/cultivo una rosa blanca”: “neither thistle nor worm I grow/I grow a white rose” roughly.

[6] Cachita or Cacha is a nickname given to women named Caridad (Charity) in Cuba.  The ever cheeky Cubans have given it to Our Lady of Charity as well.

[7] CUC is Cuba’s “convertible” peso, one of the two currencies in use in the island.  It is artificially paired to the U.S. dollar.

[8] History Will Absolve Me was Fidel Castro’s defense speech at his trial for the assault of the Moncada Army Barracks in 1953 in Santiago de Cuba. It was later made into a book, a sort of tropical Mein Kempf (from which it borrowed heavily, including the phrase used as its title).

[9] The Special Period (Período Especial) was the name given by the regime to the period of extreme economic straits following the collapse of the Soviet Union (Cuba’s main political and economic ally and subsidizer) in 1991.  Its end is not very well defined, but seems to have been around the time when the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez started to send oil and money to the island.

[10] Laura Pollán was the leader and founder of the Ladies in White, a group of Cuban women whose husbands and/or relatives were imprisoned during the purge known as the Black Spring of 2003.  They have marched, and still march peacefully every Sunday after Mass carrying gladioli and dressed in white asking, initially, for the release of their loved ones, and, now, that the regime respects the human rights of all Cubans.  They have been subjected to extreme abuse by the regime and its goons.  Laura Pollán died under mysterious circumstances in 2011.

[11] “Las Razones de Cuba” was multi-part a documentary produced by the counter-intelligence services of the Ministry of Interior in Cuba that supposedly unmasked covert operations of “enemies of the people” and revealed how the government has infiltrated the opposition movements.

[12] Another play on words: it refers to Cecilia Valdés the main character in the 19th century novel of the same name written by Cirilo Villaverde.

Translated by: Ernesto Ariel Suarez

8 September 2013

Cuba Wants No More Private Stores / Ivan Garcia

29-moda-3-389x330Going shopping or simply browsing through Havana’s large stores is a popular hobby for many of the capital’s residents. But few of them can afford to buy anything without first looking at the scandalous prices of the merchandise, which is levied with taxes ranging from 240% to 300%.

Most buy just the essentials: a liter of cooking oil, two bars of bath soap, a box of tomato puree or a 250 gram bag of detergent. Others visit the stores to look at the display window mannequins dressed in brand-name clothes or the widescreen TVs they can never afford.

Since 2006, when General Raúl Castro took up the presidential baton after being hand-picked by his brother Fidel, the military regime has eliminated ridiculous regulations and autocratic prohibitions which had reduced average Cubans to the status of fourth-class citizens in their own country.

Property rights in Cuba were merely a semantic nicety. Legally, people could not sell houses, works of art or cars obtained after 1959 (though they were sold anyway on the very efficient black market). In 2011 Castro II legalized what for a long had been taking place under the table.

After the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism, blank checks, canned fruit and petroleum from the Caucuses stopped arriving in Cuba.

Fidel Castro encouraged a do-or-die resistance. When he proposed at a women’s conference in 1991 that the attendees hold onto their clothes because they would be in short supply for the foreseeable future, some thought he was joking.

The man was not kidding. The ration book for manufactured goods vanished, leaving only the one for food. The island reverted to a state of destitution, devastated by hunger, exotic illnesses and run-away inflation.

After dollars were allowed to circulate legally in 1993, the gaps and differences in a society designed to make everyone on the low-end equal became apparent.

Those who had dollars lived better than state workers, who earned poverty-level wages. Getting dressed meant spending the equivalent of six-months’ salary. continue reading

In a nation where advertising barely existed and the state’s hard-currency monopoly was fierce, shirts, blouses, pants, shoes and other goods had to be purchased in a chain of stores operated by military businessmen.

And the prices! Clothes of the poorest quality bought in bulk from China, from small-scale suppliers in the Panama Canal zone or from Brazilian wholesale markets were sold in Cuban stores. Jeans with a counterfeit label, mediocre quality footwear and a Brazilian shirt could well cost a hundred dollars. Few could afford it.

Getting dressed in Cuba is an odyssey. Rather than money, those who have relatives overseas prefer they send clothing and footwear. Cubans who work with foreigners routinely ask that they leave behind their clothes when they return home.

Since late 1980s, at least in Havana, there have been people who make their living selling clothing, footwear and costume jewelry surreptitiously. They would acquire large amounts of dollars when it was still illegal and, through contacts with young foreigners studying in Cuba or tourists on vacation, would make large purchases of cheap merchandise in stores reserved for diplomats and foreign technical workers. They would later resell the items on the underground market.

Formal wear has always been a profitable business in Cuba. With the legalization of the dollar and the opening of thousands of state-run stores selling it for hard currency, vendors had to make business adjustments.

They began offering it at prices lower than at state-run stores. In 2010 dressmakers and tailors were authorized to sell their wares legally. Thousands of casas-shoppings (home markets) or trapi-shoppings (“rag” markets) opened throughout the country.

The items for sale came from the other side of the Florida Straits, from Cubans working in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, or from illegal transactions by employees working in the big consumer goods stores.

Right alongside the Carlos III shopping mall in Central Havana is a thriving private market. Alica, a professor, often frequents these types of private stores.

“The prices are much lower than in the official stores,” she says, “which are not only very expensive but also sell a lot of very unfashionable junk.

Last weekend the authorities gave the new private stores a deadline. The regime’s ultimatum was highlighted in a newspaper article from Sancti Spiritus province.

“The deadline is intended to restore of the function of self-employed dressmakers and tailors to the function originally intended. By September 1 there should be not a single casa-shopping operating in either Sancti Spiritus or in Cuba,” reports Escambray, a Villa Clara newspaper.

Diario de Las Américas interviewed an inspector from the national tax office who said, “It has been shown that a significant amount of merchandise in these private stores enters Cuba surreptitiously, including some things that are known to have been stolen.”

This tightening of the screws on private stores is nothing new. In 2012 the Customs Service of the Republic restricted inexpensive merchandise entering the island. In the aftermath of this offensive, owners of private stores said that the government had used a slew of restrictions in order to raise sales in their own stores, which had suffered a decline of almost 30%.

“It’s a treacherous form of competition. They use repressive laws to try to recapture their lost clientele,” says one disgruntled private vendor.

The owner of a store in the Tenth of October neighborhood believes that, “even if they prohibit them, one way or another people will still buy clothing under the table because of the poor quality and high prices at the state stores.”

“We only have to change the way we operate. If we can no longer sell things legally in the entryways of our houses,” she says, “we will just go back to doing things the way we did in the 1980s.”

We Cubans are used to the black market. It is our normal way of operating.

Iván García

Photo from Redada contra las trapishoppings

8 September 2013

Eliecer Avila Defends His Right To Be Politically Active / Lilianne Ruiz

Moderator Gustavo Pérez (left), Eliecer Ávila (center). Photo by Lilianne Ruiz.

HAVANA, Cuba, September 6, 2013, Lilianne Ruiz / www.cubanet.org. – Recently, the Patmos Forum held its third conference. This time the topic of discussion was The Quality of Life, in connection with politics.

The meeting was attended by about 30 people, gathered in the courtyard at the home of independent journalist Yoel Espinosa Medrano, located in the center of a Santa Clara favela (squatter settlement), a few meters from the most important political plaza of the province.

The moderator was Gustavo Pérez Silverio, the historian and researcher on racial matters, who maintains a working connection with the regime.

The special guest was Eliezer Ávila, who is slowly ceasing to be identified only as the young University of Information Science student who got into trouble with the former President of the National Assembly, and is becoming known as a political leader who could have some role in the future of the island.

Ávila began his talk by defining himself as “a Cuban citizen who wants to exercise his right to engage in politics in Cuba.”

The lack of civic culture was addressed as the key to the whole question, recognizing that in the lack of civic responsibility lies the problem of freedom for Cubans. “A citizen is a person who has power, not someone who has to sacrifice themselves for a project in which they are not involved in the decision-making process, “said Avila.

After his speech of over an hour, the floor was opened to audience questions. Librado Linares, the former political prisoner from the Cause of 75 (from the Black Spring of 2003), began by recognizing the invited guest as a man with political talent, motivation, and strength. But he said he was unable to discern in Avila’s “We Are More” movement a concrete strategy for enlisting citizens, overcome by terror and apathy, or for dealing with the pattern of repression by the political police against the Movement.

The We Are More Political Movement would bring together people of different political persuasions, united by the common interest of presenting concrete demands to the Castro government. It would not be limited to Cubans living on the island, but would also welcome Cubans from the diaspora.

“This is a project that I want to build with the views of as many people as possible, because I do not want the people to serve one point of view, but for the point of view to serve the people,” he said.

The bloggers from La Joven Cuba (Young Cuba), labeled by the regime as the “loyal opposition,” had been invited to the Patmos meeting.

Regarding the absence of La Joven Cuba bloggers, Ávila told Cubanet:

“I don’t believe that any political distance is healthy. I had hoped this dialogue would occur, but at the last minute I was told that they had no interest in participating and invited me to dialogue on their blog. It is ridiculous for one Cuban to invite another to a discussion on the Internet, knowing that we don’t have that possibility.”

The Patmos Forum, created in February 2013 by a group of activists led by Baptist pastor Mario Félix Lleonart, was conceived as a space for the discussion of various topics in which different schools of thought are represented.

Previous events were devoted to the Origin of Life and the Right to Life, consecutively.

On this occasion, Lleonart announced the adoption and adaptation by “Patmos” of the Manual of Political Advocacy of the organization Christian Solidarity Worldwide, with the intention of providing workshops that equip Cuban believers with the power to influence the country’s politics, and end the myth that Christians are alienated from partisan politics that affect their quality of life and respect for human rights.

By Lilianne Ruiz, From Cubanet

Translated by Tomás A.

6 September 2013

Actress Ana Luisa Rubio, Savagely Beaten by Alleged Neighbors

Photo by Ailer Gonzalez
Photo by Ailer Gonzalez

“Violence has reached critical levels in Cuba,” says activist Antonio Rodiles, and actress Ana Luisa Rubio, 62, just experienced it. The photo above is her face after a severe beating given to her by a group of supposed neighbors last Friday.

“I am very sore, but mostly I’m very scared,” Rubio told Diario de Cuba from her home in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado. “They will not stop.”

Rubio spent a night in Manuel Fajardo Hospital because of the beating.  Rodiles, director of the independent State of Sats project, accompanied her to the police the following day to file a complaint, the twelfth by the actress. The previous were for assault, threats, defamation, home invasion, property damage and coercion.

“The police do not do anything,” said Rubio. The result is that the attackers “feel impunity before the law.”

The actress said that on the day of the incident she went outside after a group of children knocked insistently on her door in what was supposedly part of a game.

“I went to demand some peace,” she said. “That was all, and right there a woman lunged at me, someone I have already reported on other occasions for insults and threats, but nothing ever happened… I didn’t have time to defend myself or to seek shelter, because it was one thing after another; instantly I started feeling the kicks, punches,  and blows from many people.”

She only recognized three of the participants in the beating: two neighbors and the area coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). The rest were unknown.

In total, there were ten men and women who left her lying on the floor, alone, after the attack, according to her version.

“She called us very nervous, saying she was bloodied and needed help,” Ailer Gonzalez, artistic director of State of Sats, told DiariodeCuba.com, and along with Rodiles and activist Juan Antonio Madrazo, she accompanied Rubio to the hospital.

“They have given her a tremendous beating … they beat her badly,” she said.

Opposite the house of Rubio is a Communist Party office and in the same block an office of the CDR.

Madrazo said that when they got to the home of the actress, on Friday, responding to her request for help, they heard the coordinator of the CDR, surnamed Duran, say to a person he was talking to on the phone, “She was given a good beating, but if she comes down again, we will fuck her up.”

Police were at Rubio’s home on Saturday and she pointed to the two women and Duran among her assailants. None was arrested, Madrazo confirmed.

From television to the dungeons

Ana Luisa "then and now"
Ana Luisa “then and now”

Ana Luisa Rubio was a popular television actress on the island until the last decade when she began to engage in internal dissent.

In recent years she has been arrested several times, most recently on August 24, when she stood in the Plaza of the Revolution “to shout for justice, for freedom, for human rights,” as she said.

After the arrests, “They always take me to the psych ward” of a hospital in Havana. “The doctors have already told them not to take me there any more, that there is nothing wrong with me,” said the actress.

“They are trying to show that I’m crazy so that there is no validity to what I say,” she said. “For me this is not even just a dictatorship, this is fascism.”

Rubio has also belonged to the Ladies in White and writes the blog Aramusa28, from which she denounced the aggressions she has suffered and called for the resignation of Raul Castro.

In her view, the beating on Friday, “was arranged by State Security.”

The harassment and attacks started “long ago already, I would say years, but they have escalated,” she said. She added that in 2004 she spent nine months in a wheelchair due to an attack.

“I can’t do anything; I don’t know where to turn. My comrades do their best, but we ‘re totally defenseless” complained the actress.

The Government no longer allows her to work in state television.

“They don’t even let me breathe, I have no income at all … they censored me as an actress in 2011 for being in the Ladies in White,” she said.

Currently, Rubio rents a room in her home as a form of self-employment. But “they don’t even let, my guests are intercepted,” she said. “They’re suffocating me in a way in which have no way to eat, or breath, or even laugh.

From DiariodeCuba.com

9 September 2013

Creole Block / Yoani Sanchez

Beto was one of those who handed out beatings in August of 1994. With his helmet, his mortar-splattered pants and an iron bar in his hand, he lashed out at some of the protestors during the Maleconazo. At that time he was working on a construction team and felt like part of an elite. He had milk at breakfast, a room he shared with other colleagues, and a salary higher than any doctor’s. He spent the years of his youth building hotels, but a decade ago, when his brigade was demobilized, he became unemployed. He didn’t want to return to the village of Banes where he was born, not him, nor many others of that troop ready to build a wall or break heads.

Several of these construction workers were allowed to settle in a makeshift neighborhood in the Havana suburbs. The received the benefit of permission to build a “llega y pon*” — a shantytown — near Calle 100 and Avenida Rancho Boyeros. A crumb, after so much ideological loyalty. Without the perks and high wages, many of these bricklayers had to survive on what they could find. Beto set up a workshop for fabricating “creole bricks.” Other neighbors in his makeshift neighborhood also dedicate themselves to building materials: sand, stone powder… bricks. With the new relaxations giving permission for the repair and building by one’s own efforts, the business of “aggregates” prospers, involving more people every day. The producers, transporters, brigade leaders, and finally the men who load the sacks on the trucks. A chain of work — parallel to the State’s — more efficient, but also at higher prices.

Beto doesn’t like talking about the past. In his shirt full of holes he walks between the stacks of Creole blocks coming out of his little factory. When he sees one that has cracked or that has a broken corner, he shouts at one of his employees who mixes the mortar for casting the molds. He carries an iron rod in his hand, as he did on 5 August 1994, but this time it’s for knocking against the blocks, checking the strength of his product. He frequently glances over to the little house he is building at the end of this unpaved street with no drains. For the first time he has something of his own, something no one has given him. He is a man with neither privilege nor obedience.

*Translator’s note: “llega y pon” is literally “arrive and put.”

First Woman Born With HIV in Cuba Lives in Misery / Veizant Boloy

IMG_1246-300x200
Yudelsy García O’Connor

HAVANA, Cuba, September 2013 , www.cubanet.org.- Yudelsy García O’Connor was officially the first child born HIV-positive in the island. Today, and now a grown woman, she blames the Cuban government for the situation in which she lives. “They always showed me off to the world as an achievement of socialist health care,” she told this reporter.

According to the carrier of the virus, not having a legal address where she lives, they will not give her the special diet required for her health, because she has no ration card. She has tried in vain to persuade the [governmental] institutions to give her the adequate monitoring her condition warrants. “Stress is terrible for HIV patients, according to the doctors we quite often get depressed,” she said.

IMG_1488
“Profoundly Impressed”

“On several occasions I have complained to all the state institutions in Mayabeque province, I have sent letters to the Council of State, directly to President Raul Castro and the Ministry of Public Health. The answer is always the same: We cannot help you,” said Garcia O`Connor.

Yudelsy was born in the province of Guantanamo in eastern Cuba. At age 5 she was transferred to the [HIV/AIDS] sanatorium in Santiago de las Vegas, in the municipality of Boyeros in the capital. Her father, Salvador García López, who was sent to war Angola where he contracted the dreaded disease died when his daughter was just seven years old.

IMG_1491-300x224In 2002, former Unites States president James Carter visited the sanatorium, and met her in person. She was 15 years old. She later told the official Juventud Rebelde newspaper how grateful she was to the Cuban doctors and the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro.

“I decided to leave the sanatorium, at age 19, when my mother, Adoracelis O’Connor Figueredo, lost her battle with AIDS. I married another HIV patient. I wanted to start a normal life. Then the authorities abandoned me,” she added.

Today she is 27 and lives in Mayabeque province with her husband, in a house with wooden walls, damp with termites and a dirt floor, located in a rural area. “We eat what we can find in the day.”

By Veizant Boloy — veizant@gmail.com

From Cubanet

9 September 2013

Orlando Luis Pardo : “I was afraid when I had no voice, when I started talking, I lost the fear.”

int-552362Interview by Emilio Sanchez Cartas – from Los Andes Internacionales

The restless, multifaceted Pardo Lazo graduated in biochemistry from the University of Havana, but left the field after 10 years. Since then he has been working as a photographer and writer.

Pardo, who published several books in Cuba, is currently one of the leading independent bloggers. He maintains two blogs (Post Revolution Mondays and Boring Home Utopics) and founded the magazine “Voices,” the first digital publication on the island. The magazine, devoted to literature and opinion, is printed in very small quantities, and is posted on-line as a PDF and distributed throughout the island via CD and flash drive.

Emilio Sanchez Cartas: The United States presents you as a dissident blogger. Interestingly , years ago you said you said you didn’t feel yourself to be a journalist, “neither by vocation nor spirit.” So perhaps you started out hating to be a journalist and ended up being one…

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo: I greatly respect the profession of journalist. When I say I want to have a column, I’m referring to having a space of freedom where I can exercise my opinion, with certain editorial standards, but without the hard or scientific data, statistical.

I wouldn’t work in favor of consensus: it would always be  a journalist of provocation, seeking to navigate upstream. It would be a more creative column, but grounded in reality, because I believe in the transformative power of writing. I like to exploit the social impact of writing from a position of provocation, always trying to pluralize thought.

ESC: How do you evaluate the impact of digital technology in the social and cultural life of Cuba?

OLPL: The Cuban government has just opened a hundred Internet access points, but with extreme vigilance, no guarantees. They are trying to portray an image of openings, but the truth is that a citizen can not go to a public company and contract for an internet account.

Therefore, there is no internet access in Cuba, although there are officials who do have this privilege; there are certain tourist hotels that offer the service in dollars and also a black market in the Internet. With all these limitations, the Cuban blogosphere still has a good number of blogs.

They began as a form of personal expression, perhaps as catharsis, but now I think there is a civic impact. Recently, many of us have been able to travel, to join the United Nations Correspondents Association, to appear in U.S. newspapers. We have talked and they have recognized us as interlocutors, active and thoughtful voices of Cuban civil society.

In addition to “Voices,” there is a photojournalism contest; spaces of debate like “Citizens’ Reasons” and “State of Sats” [Estado de Sats],which are filmed and posted on the web; projects of street artists, graffiti artists, independent audio visuals; the Rotilla Festival, dedicated to music, organized by the Matraka Group for ten years on a beach, until the Cuban government intervened and hijacked it; the Endless Poetry Festival, of the Group Omni Zona Franca, all month in December, house by house in eastern Havana. All these projects are outside the Ministry of Culture and will survive, because they don’t depend on the State.

ESC: At this level of writing, what are the most interesting and challenging blogs?

OLPL: I recommend reviewing three portals. HavanaTimes.org, where a score of people post, some of them from exile; Bloggerscuba.com, although it disappeared as a portal, you can find individual blogs: Paquito el de Cuba, by Francisco Rodriguez; Negra tenía que ser, by Sandra Alvarez; and La Polémica Digital, by Elaine Diaz.

And, my website, where the blogs are more controversial, Vocescubanas.com. There are the three visions. In the case of Vocescubanas, there collaborators who from anywhere in the world would opinion columns in newspapers or television programs, or be political.

ESC: Ten years ago there was the view that Cuba’s independent press, although very critical of the regime, was not known for quality journalism. Have you evolved? Where is the product of journalism on the island? Where is the questioning of the Cuban reality?

OLPL: There is no journalism. It could be erased at the stroke of a pen by the Faculty of Communication and its journalism courses, because in practice the product doesn’t exist, except outside of Cuba. We have occupied that space; some bring better tools, with skill in argument. Others do it almost without tool, but always reporting, from the news, what foreign news agencies do not want to cover.

That has a tremendous merit and a huge recognition. We have the experience of the Blogger Academy. In 2010 for almost half a year we met twice a week to talk about programs, journalistic and photographic techniques, issues of civil society and the law, anthropology. We have made an effort, because where we can’t go is to the University of Havana, as the government has set up a kind of “cultural apartheid,” where we have no room for those who disagree.

ESC: And the independent press, including bloggers and traditional journalists, is it in good condition today?

OLPL: It is in good condition, but in a committed way. Today there is an explosion because certain areas abroad welcome our reports. We lack a press that is edited and published with local efforts. We lack a newspaper — the dream of Yoani Sanchez — which can’t be legal, because the government does not support it; we lack also a radio station.

For now, some of us bloggers are covering this absence, but that could change any day with the absence of some; if some die and others are exiled, and then it would be the end. So it is a movement that needs to be supported, strengthened, empowered, from the outside. We need international solidarity.

ESC: In Cuba, to be a journalist or independent blogger involves risks. You yourself have been imprisoned. What has been your experience of fear?

OLPL: I was afraid when I had no voice; I had published several books of fiction, I was a member of the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) and yet I was very afraid. As I began to speak, I lost the fear. Now I have no fear. Fear of what ? The only thing that can happen is death.

When Pope Benedict XVI visited Cuba in 2012, I was put in jail, it can be repeated at any time. The official journalists are very frightened perhaps, as are the ministers. Me, no; for me they will come once. Is that when you cross a line, and you are free. And self-censorship? Not at all. There are people who self-censor.

I worked the issue of marijuana, the Cuban Rastafarian community’s use of grass, and about the imprisonment of a Rastafarian priest, who is still in prison, Hector Riscart, the Ñaño, director of the musical group Herencia (Heritage). I investigated, did interviews. Someone advised me to stop. I did not, because I considered it a matter of civil law. Many people get panicky over the  issues of the subculture issues, pornography, racism. I ‘m willing to talk about everything, and I think I ‘m going to be very alone.

8 September 2013

National Prison Hospital Has 15 Cholera Patients / Dania Virgen Garcia

HAVANA, Cuba, September 6, 2013, Dania Virgen García / www.cubanet.org.- In the National Prison Hospital (HNR) of Combined del Este prison in Havana, there are 15 confirmed cases of cholera, according to the inmate Daniel Perez Diaz, who is admitted there.

According to Perez Diaz, on 2 September there were 15 confirmed cases receiving hospital care in the HNR. In the intensive care ward there are twelve inmates in serious condition

Patients with different pathologies admitted to the intensive care ward of HNR, were transferred to open rooms without considering the risks of contagion that this could bring. The responsibility for this was the decision of the Ministry of Interior major Dr. Alexis.

On day 2, while Dr. Alexis visited, he stopped at the bed of inmate Daniel Perez Diaz and told him he was not interested in his cure, he announced he would not give permission for any other facility to treat him, calling him “counterrevolutionary” and threatening him with beatings for furnishing information to those he called “cheap journalists.”

By Dania Virgen Garcia — dania.zuzy@gmail.com

From Cubanet

6 September 2013

Christian Liberation Movement: 25 years on the Path of the People

25-años-207x300… We must announce to Cubans that their lives, their dignity and their freedom belong to them and that no one, not Caesar, can take these things from them if they don’t give in because of fear or other reasons.

Oswaldo Paya Sardinas

Inspired by these ideas, our Christian Liberation Movement was founded 25 years ago. Born to defend the rights of all Cubans and to promote the full liberation of the person leading to the development of society.

We want to serve, we are convinced that in Cuba the changes that the people want will only occur if the majority of Cubans, freeing themselves from the culture of fear, take a liberating step to reclaim their lives. The law should guarantee the right to do away with the simulation generated by an oppressive system, like the totalitarian regime that prevails in our country. We are part of the same people, those who live inside and outside the archipelago;we are not trying to speak for a people, we are working for citizens to have a voice.

Liberation demands its right and the right of Cubans to know the truth; an independent investigation is required to make public the circumstances under which died our leaders Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero died, after an attack on 22 July 2012.

The dialogue that we are proposing is inclusive, where we are all represented, and in an atmosphere of trust that only respect for the law and the practice of fundamental rights can guarantee. We condemn the “Fraud Change” and the false dialogue that excludes and discriminates against those who do not submit, tools that the regime seeks to impose to preserve absolute power and control of the resources belonging to all Cubans. We demand transparency for Cuba and call on Cubans one and all to claim and build this path of changes.

Liberation with the opposition diverse and united in the Camino del Pueblo (the Way of the People), promotes a plebiscite for the sovereign people to decide the changes. Only when citizens can choose their government in free and multiparty elections, can we talk about Cuba having inexorably begun real democratic changes. So today we demand, within the history of thousands of Cubans who propose legal initiatives through a referendum, a referendum to restore the sovereignty of the people

All Cubans, all brothers, and now freedom.

Coordinating Council, Christian Liberation Movement

September 8, 2013

Unfinished Business / Erick Mota

Artwork by El Sexto

Artwork by El Sexto

Nights in Old Havana are always loud. Each carrier rocket shakes the old rocks of the almost sunken buildings. The canals with black waters, which run across the archaic streets, light up with the gleam of oxygen and hydrogen in combustion. The water, mixed with petroleum from the old Soviet cargo boats, vibrates and flutters with every take-off. Like gigantic flares, the Protons-II rockets light up the old parts of the city with every departure. They bruise the sky of Autonomous Havana and disappear into the cosmos monopolized by the Russians.

Up there they have the space stations, the satellites with nuclear warheads, the servers for the Global Neural Network, the whole Russian way of life, as those balseros(i) in Florida say. Down here illegal immigrants sleep in the corridors at Almejeira hospital and work on the platforms in Underguater for four kopeks. All of them with the hope of getting into one of those rockets that will take them to the Romanenko station. Or any other. An entire life of sacrifice just to be like one of the Russians. Another tovarish.

But you know very well that that, more than a dream, is a fantasy. That the Russians never treat anyone like an equal. That you end up being another immigrant in another place. Another foreigner in a strange land.

You, too, became a victim of that fantasy. You lived in a city in chaos, after a hurricane sank everything and forced everybody to start shooting each other. You went up there and you never looked back.

Now the chaos is organized. There are abakuas(ii) pacifying Old Alamar, Santeros(iii) in Downtown, and Babalawos(iv) in Vedado. Investors of religious corporations in Miramar, and the FULHA that watches over the old fortress in La Cabaña. FULHA: The emergent force that tried to make use of the army, police, and government, but in the end it just ended up becoming another force fighting in the midst of anarchy. Nobody rules over Havana. There is no order in this city. But, at least, there’s less chaos.

And you came back. Not looking for order or chaos. You came back because you had no choice. Because there is no better place to be than home. And Havana, even if it’s Hell, is your home.

You came down in one of the last landing capsules left. You fell in Puertohabana Bay thanks to the good aim of your Russians tovarish. You were rescued by the Marine Cost Guard. Last time you heard anything about them, they were a FULHA special unit. Now, who knows.

The FMC speedboat zigzagged through the street of Old Sunken Havana until it arrived at the Cathedral. There, in the space station pier, they left you in the hands of some guys from Russian customs. They finished the papers and offered a boat to Underguater or Vedado. You said no.

You are now legal in Autonomous Havana. When you left, you were a mere Cuban citizen. Now, you have a Russian passport that allows you to enter and leave this city-State that you barely recognize anymore.

You look at the ocean, the sunken buildings, the layer of petroleum that moves in unison with the water.

‒Should I call you a cab, comrade?

‒A boatman that will take me to Sunken Cayo Hueso will be enough ‒you say while you give a ruble to the employee of the space station that rests over the old Cathedral‒, and don’t call me comrade. Please.

READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN SAMPSONIA WAY MAGAZINE, HERE.

Translated by Karen González

The publication of this story is part of Sampsonia Way Magazine’s “CUBAN NEWRRATIVE: e-MERGING LITERATURE FROM GENERATION ZERO” project, in collaboration with Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a collection of authors writing from Cuba. You can read this story in Spanish here, and other stories from the project, here.