Don’t Lose Any More Time / Fernando Damaso

In defense of the current Cuban model and its updating within the straitjacket of the so-called Guidelines, some citizens are frightened by the idea of the possible restoration of capitalism in Cuba, mechanically repeating verbally and in writing all the propaganda that has been overwhelmingly spread by the news media. Nobody stops to point out the negative aspects of the current model (its main critics lie precisely within them), they simply deny the positives of change.

Fifty-six years of capitalism in Cuba, despite its shortcomings, problems, fratricidal conflicts, dictatorships, politics, theft of public funds and other misfortunes, represented development and wealth, unlike fifty-four years of socialism, even with its many misfortunes, which have only represented underdevelopment, involution, lack of productivity, backwardness, poverty and accumulation of problems, both old (lack of housing, unemployment, racial discrimination, etc.) and new (lack of possibilities, exodus, inefficient services, social indiscipline, arbitrariness, bad manners, rudeness, etc.). These realities, however much they try, cannot be hidden: they appear whenever you explore, even superficially, our past and present history.

In recent days, at the current session of the National Assembly, they have repeated the need to perfect the socialist state enterprise, forgetting its failure for seventy years in the former USSR, forty in the former socialist countries, and fifty-four in Cuba. They also have declared that socialism is the compass. Ideological stubbornness has never solved any problem.

To continue parroting these absurdities is to lose resources and time. What’s important is to end the current impasse and join the real world. The work isn’t easy, but it will only get harder if we don’t all join together in our efforts to achieve it.

8 July 2013

Cuban Hospitals Are Falling to Pieces and If They Repair Them, It’s With the Patients Inside / Lilianne Ruiz

Havana, Cuba, July 2, 2013 Lilianne Ruiz/www.cubanet.org —  Ruben Benitez is not his real name. His real name is not used because he is a father and family man and afraid of losing his job. Doctor by profession he remains disconcerted by the death of his father which occurred in the Calixto Garcia hospital.

According to which he himself said, upon arriving at the Intensive Care ward, the words of the nurse who helped him were:

“What’s going on here?  Is it raining?”

The ward was filled with water puddles due to a broken air conditioning pipe.

Dr. Benitez knows the rules especially when it comes to requiring an admittance, and added:

“Me, clearly, and that’s it, because I wanted to solve my problem.”

He assures it was not for lack of medications. “Nor for lack of attention from medical and nursing staff, despite all situations of indolence and some other abuse on finding his too demanding companion uncomfortable. It was because the hospital was so filthy,” he said.

“The medical staff doesn’t say so, apparently, but in a hospital where the same elevator carries the construction workers, the doctors, and even the trash, you can’t carry a seriously ill patient because that’s taking an infection from the mouth right to the lung.”

Doctor Benitez’s father was admitted for chest pain and he developed complications ending up with hypostatic pneumonia, which killed him.

The doctor looked at me with surprise when I asked if he thinks you shouldn’t transport a seriously ill patient in an elevator with other people. On asking him I remember my father being admitted to the hospital and the number of times I went up with him lying on a gurney, trying to protect him from the man who was carrying the trash, in the presence of doctors talking, which forced me to see that situation as “normal.”

“You can’t be doing construction in a hospital with patients inside. The floor is cleaned every day and within the ward (after fixing the air conditioning) apparently it’s cleaner. But outside, it’s not what you see, it’s that you can run a finger over the floor and it’s covered with cement dust, because they’ve been doing construction in the hospital for many years,” the doctor commented.

“It’s very depressing to see a family member in this situation and not be able to do anything,” he said. “He died of hypostatic pneumonia, but it can’t be determined if he contracted it simply by lying flat, or whether it was the result of an infectious environment that should have been avoided.”

He says he rejected the idea of an autopsy because it mean extending the suffering without resolving anything, no power to sue anyone.

According to Dr. Benitez, in his role as a companion, the most shocking was the sum of all these terrible conditions of life there, from the disruption of the builders to the sewage water running in front of the ICU room, when the first downpour of the season.

“When you don’t know the topic it’s very easy to fool you, but when you’re a doctor, not so much…”

In Havana, a few years ago it was said that the director of the Cancer Hospital had forbidden their workers to talk about the relationship to talk about the construction of the hospital and the number of deaths:

“Because it’s logical that there is a greater risk death for patients who are receiving expensive chemotherapy treatment (which normally causes immuno-suppression) and who ingest dust,” the doctor pointed out.

When he was a student, in 2004, in the Fajardo hospital, on a visitor’s pass, it could have been the same builder shouting over a running drill. “Even though it was on another floor, the reverb didn’t let you talk.”

Repairs with intensive care patients

At least ten years ago they started the repair work on the capital’s hospitals. What I could never understand, neither the doctors nor the patients, is why they all have to be restored at the same time.

Some, like the Cardiovascular Institute or the Fajardo Hospital, have been declared “terminal.” Others seem to have stalled, like Calixto Garcia. The Clodimira Acosta obstetric-gynecological appears to be a lost building, despite having started on the reconstruction work.

Statistics reveal that the number of deaths by infections in hospitals being repaired have tripled.

There are no alternatives but to go, when you get sick, to the same dirty and dilapidated hospital we’re talking about.

Only those with a high level of personal relations are allowed to receive medical attention in the elite places like CIMEQ or the Cira Garcia International Clinic.

The experience in the “hospitals for the people,” make Cubans repeat, as a collective consciousness, that “What you can’t do here is go to the hospital.”

Tuesday, 2 July 2013

6 July 2013

“The Lives of Others” Cuban Version / Lilianne Ruiz

Note: This and other photos in this post are of State Security agents.

HAVANA, Cuba, June 2013, Lilianne Ruiz, www.cubanet.org — On every street in Cuba there are so-called “revolutionary vigilantes,” people who work independently for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). They meet periodically with an official from the State Security to inform and report on everything that is happening. But it is not a state governed by the rule of law that protects this complex apparatus of  surveillance and repression. State security in Cuba is a political policy meant to prevent political diversity and to guarantee the stability of the country’s sole political party.

As in the 2006 German film The Lives of Others, which had worldwide impact due to the historical period it portrayed, this secret agency relies on auxiliary divisions which are provided with the technical means “to be able to operate in a personalized way and to maintain effective control,” says Raúl Borges Álvarez, who until 1989 served as a counter-intelligence official.

“Sometimes there are people they cannot penetrate with an agent so they are controlled through technical means. Up until 1989 there were more than thirty departments in the General Counter-Intelligence Agency. One of those departments was the 21st, which is in charge of dealing with counter-revolution.”

As a result of the imprisonment of his son, Ernesto Borges Pérez, on political charges, Raúl Borges Álvarez got involved in protest activities, which gradually led him to become part of the island’s political opposition.

He reports that there is a department of visual surveillance, which in Cuba is referred to as K/J. It is involved in following individuals either by trailing them physically or through the the use of surveillance cameras, which are placed at nearby locations to monitor those who enter or leave a building, often an individual’s residence.

“They can even monitor private activities in order to blackmail someone with information about which he might be embarrassed,” adds the former agent.

Surveillance of correspondence such as mail sent to dissidents, also known as K/C, is handled by employees at 100th Street and Boyeros Avenue. This surveillance center is referred to as International because information from all over the world, as well as from inside the country, is reviewed here. The name of the “person of operative interest” is part of a list and the official to whom “the case” has been assigned is informed of the content of the correspondence, according to Borges Álvarez. “Later, copies are made of these letters and it is decided afterwards whether or not to send them on to the addressee.”

Telephone surveillance, or K/T, is carried out twenty-four hours a day. There they are analyzing everything that happens, and transmitting it. When it is communicated to the operative official “who attends the dissident” depends on how interesting the conversation is.

“This way they can disconnect it to block a telephone interview that might be reporting an incident to the foreign media, something that’s not reported in the national media because it is property of the State; they can frustrate a meeting; they can try to sabotage a political project; they can impede the organization of a protest to demand rights.  But above all,” he says, “they are privately studying the profile of that person, to then see how they can control him.  From trying to recruit him by means of intimidation and blackmail, to taking him out of circulation.”

Political police study individual profiles like a serial killer would

The appearance of State Security in the person of an official operative can signify detention, threats, loss of liberty.  All this complex, repressive apparatus that has as its objective the dismantling of efforts for non-violent change on the Island, tries to make believe in the first instance that rights do not exist.

When that is not possible, given the determination of an opponent, they will try then to destroy him. You have to remember that one of the guarantees of the stability of a totalitarian system is maintaining on an individual basis a crisis of identity where the person decides not to take on initiatives that might contradict the views that originate from the top, in this case the “Revolution.”

As it deals with individual aspects like liberty, identity and the demand for rights, the political police, having studied the phenomenon of repression and submission (which was documented since the times of Lenin and Stalin), directs itself to the destruction of the individual.

The most scandalous thing is that in order to carry out the institutionalized rape of human rights in Cuba, the political police study beforehand the profiles of people, as would a serial killer who studies the routines, strengths, weaknesses, fears and hopes of his victims.

On the payroll of Department 21 are agents with violent behavior who are then recognized by the government with orders of distinguished service, rapid advancement, and perks. All those benefits, which stimulate cruelty, are obtained by carrying out arbitrary arrests, surrounding meeting places, doling out beatings which can leave subsequent complications and consequences, mental and physical torture and intimidation against opponents.

The ideological excuse for these abuses rests on the falsehood that those people who engage in politics far from the Communist party, or defend liberties and human rights, are “mercenaries and agents of imperialism.”

Some independent political and human rights organizations on the Island advocate the creation of new legislation that prevents the system and its agents from enjoying powers to seclude, detain, and punish human beings who persevere in their dignity and inalienable rights.

 Translated by mlk

6 July 2013

The Feet Under the Covers / Miriam Celaya

"The business is to deny visas, not grant visas" Granma newspaper, 28 June 2013

“The business is to deny visas, not grant visas” Granma newspaper, 28 June 2013

There is an old tale about a husband who comes home unexpectedly and finds his wife in bed with a pair of men’s feet sticking out from under the covers. Angered by her infidelity, he challenges: “Slut!, whose feet are those?” To which she, serenely, replies: “Oh, husband, you never ask me where the food you enjoy so much comes from, which we could never afford on your salary, or how I manage to pay all the bills with the meager amount you give me, and how we get to the end of the month without any hardships…” to which the husband, after pondering for a minute, wisely answered: OK, wife, but at least cover those feet”.

Obviously, the husband in this story was not exactly a two-timed husband; he had simply miscalculated. Just like what happened to the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, the Granma Newspaper, when it recently published an accusation, without names, proof, or foundation, against executives of the Interest Section of the United States in Cuba (SINA) for “having accepted bribes from Cuban citizens for granting them visas” and to the US government in Washington for “profiting from applicants who want to travel for family reasons”.

The source Granma echoes, without investigation or process, is an article published on the blog of one of the most perverse Talibans of the regime, which is, so far, just a scam designed to create some new intimation in the regime’s ever-belligerent relations with the U.S. government, who knows with what dark intentions.

But the net they cast is not entirely barren: the use of calculations using the official media is always a good opportunity for reviewing one’s math, which never lies. Managing the numbers involves the possibility of multiple interpretations about the same phenomenon, not necessarily what the sources of the data intended, as in this case.

I would suggest to readers, for their entertainment, a practical exercise: let’s assume for a moment that Granma’s information was completely accurate and that the figures provided by the author of the scam-article are also accurate. That is, in an infinite display of our imagination let’s play at pretending that Granma is a trustworthy newspaper and let’s do the same calculations from the opposite angle.

We would have to assume, then, a scene of 600 Cubans applying for visas every day in the U.S. Interests Office in Havana, each of whom had paid 100 CUC at the offices of the Ministry of the Interior to get their passports, leaving the regime a profit of 60,000 CUC per day, 300,000 weekly and 3,000,000 every ten weeks. All this in a country where 100 CUC is the equivalent of about six or seven times the average monthly salary of ordinary Cubans. And these would be just those Cubans who apply at the USIS and not all those who apply for visas in many other diplomatic offices throughout the capital, who also must have spent staggering amounts to acquire their Cuban passport.

We could add to that the minor detail that most of these Cubans who want to emigrate received the US dollars needed to get their passports from relatives living in the U.S., which turns the ugly little blue book which officially makes you a Cuban traveler –always a potential emigrant and a source of tension at each border where it’s presented- into one of the most lucrative businesses that the government has ever devised at the expense of its peoples. Barely without investing any more than cardboard and ink, with horrible print quality, the emigration industry continues to contribute, directly or indirectly, to the gerontocracy’s juicy dividends, essential principle and reason of the existence of some three million Cubans and their descendants scattered throughout the world.

And let’s not discuss the additional revenues, such as the famous health check to be performed on those wishing to emigrate permanently, at a cost of 400 CUC per adult and 200 per child, which will go directly into the Castro coffers. If the U.S. government approves 20,000 visas per year, and we assume, hypothetically, that half of them are intended for adults and half for minors: the Castro profit would be a total of 4 million CUC for adults and 2 million for children on an annual basis. We would still need to add the title certificates and other documents, with a cost of 200 CUC each in the International Consultancy. Add it up: the result it a not so negligible currency harvest, I’m just saying.

But this is only an imaginary calculation, since we have no official statistics from emigration offices. In fact, statistics in Cuba are like diseases: they make use of them only when they want to realize some advantage.

Now let’s focus on the sociological aspect of the matter. There are no precedents in Cuba’s history of such a huge number of nationals who want to travel, with a large percentage of those eager to emigrate permanently. Without stopping to find out among categories of political or economic émigrés, somewhat absurd in the case of Cuba, where the policy of a dictatorship of more than half a century has devastated the country’s economy, the steady exodus of nationals of all ages and backgrounds has become a plebiscite, especially since, for decades, most of those who leave the country are not the representatives of the clichéd “predatory oligarchies, sellers of the homeland and exploiters of the humble masses,” but the prospects of the New Man, born and raised under the ideological doctrines of the communist party, planted into power, i.e., the peoples; and because even those who only stay away from the country temporarily are part of a family fractured by emigration, a clear demonstration of the political and economic failure of the system.

Granma does itself quite a disservice with the publication of such an unfortunate article. Not only because it is the most eloquent manifestation of the huge levels of shamelessness achieved by the regime, but because it honors that sentence about excessive pride clouding reason.

At this point, I return to the story with which I began this review, where the Cuban government parallels the “cheated on” husband, the people: the wife whose favors ensure prosperity at home, and the “imperialist enemy”: the lover whose feet poke out from under the covers. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate if, instead of accusing someone, the regime took care to cover its own feet?

Translated by Norma Whiting

1 July 2013

From La Finca, the Spy Asks for More / Juan Juan Almeida

Rene Gonzalez, a member of the "Cuban Five" or "Five Heroes" now back in Cuba. From http://lagartoverde.com
Rene Gonzalez, a member of the “Cuban Five” aka the “Five Heroes” now back in Cuba. From http://lagartoverde.com

News on Mondays tends to be unflattering, and that is why, instead of writing a story, I would rather share a gossip, which if it doesn’t get you informed will entertain you. So I risk it.

You may surely remember the spell of that magician who at the Pioneer parties, amid the heat of a bonfire, before reaching into his hat, from which he then would pull out a small replica of the national insignia, would cross himself and say: “What until now was a handkerchief is turned into a flag.”

Well, it turns out that a few days ago–while Havana continues to face its unfortunate struggle of worn out prostitutes, criminals with decorum, the intellectualized poor, deranged leaders, entrepreneurs who have managed to triumph selling stolen little mirrors, and leftists who defend worn out images under the uproar of Chivas Regals–a friend called me to tell me in a conspiratorial tone that René González Sehewert, the well-known ex-convict, member of the gang “The Wasps 5 or 4,” had the indiscretion to express his discomfort, because in his view, he has not been treated in Cuba as he deserves.

What to believe? -I wonder- It is true that, from habitually lying, someone who practices espionage develops a constant conflict with the word loyalty; but it is also true that on December 29, 2001, Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power granted, in a special session, the honorary title of Hero of the Republic of Cuba to Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González.

I listened to the story, and so my friend told me that super-wasp René González, in an act of utter incoherence, because of his known legal status, wrote to General Raúl Castro who in response, instead of sending him to a psychiatrist, sent him an officer (nearsighted, shy and unpopular) as emissary from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a state body known for spending its time and money on Origami, in addition to press releases.

The whistleblower and the envoy, forgetting the old saying: “Anything you try to hide is always visible to others,” went out for dinner and ended up at La Finca (The Ranch), a super exclusive restaurant, located in the old Biltmore neighborhood, today Siboney in the Playa municipality.

As entrée, they ordered avocado cream; and the main course was grilled goose liver in a fig-raspberry sauce.

This gastronomic refuge, certainly very inordinate, does not include in its structure a menu with the prices; I owe you that one. But it is logical to believe that people with foreign–and so un-proletarian–tastes may get their ideals spoiled due to emotional problems.

That said, it seems that, somewhat saturated with the national situation, even the spy wants God to send a beam of light over the island, capable of breaking the spell of the old and monotone cycle: “Wake up, sleep, die”; or in its failure, it could reward the island getting it out of simplicity toward eccentric and palatial luxury. Is it possible that every spy ends up somewhat perturbed?

This is quite a fable, hard to digest, but somebody assured me that through this emissary, René asked the General about the possibility of a job in any of the Cuban embassies in Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela or Ecuador, countries to which he offered to travel incognito, armed with his principles and taking his questionable ethics as luggage.

After the dessert, but before the coffee, making a funny face and showing a very flattering look in his eyes, René alleged that just like astronauts and emergency doctors, “agents” also need decompression time.

I have not been able to confirm yet the veracity of this story, but it reminded me of something that was once written to satirize the manual of the now extinct KGB: “Spies and criminals share that cold principle of being able to sell their mothers just to get rewarded.”

Translated by Chabeli

29 June 2013

Repression of Dissidents Who Return to the Island

Left to right Juan Antonio Madrazo, Manuel Cuesta Morua and Leonardo Calvo Cardenas

Cuban dissidents Leonardo Calvo Cardenas and Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna were detained on the afternoon of Thursday, June 20, on arriving at the Jose Marti International Airport from Havana.

In conversation with Martinoiticias, Madrazo added that they took his tablet, two Nokia brand mobile phones, two flash drives and a sample of a Pittsburgh daily paper where they reported on his visit to the university in that North American city.

Madrazo Luna said that on arriving at the terminal area several officers from State Security cloaked in uniforms of the Customs General of the Republic, conducted him to an interrogation room on the pretext that he had been selected for a routine check.

In the interview at customs they asked Juan Antonio about his contacts on his tour of the United States and the activities he’d participated in. Faced with these questions, Juan Antonio — who is also a member of the Committee for Racial Integration — told the repressors that all this information was public and at their disposal on various media and social media.

Finally, Madrazo said he is aware of the measures related to racial discrimination and apartheid, to which much of the Cuban population is subjected.

Independent journalist Leonardo Calvo Cardenas said when we stepped ashore officials were interested in his belonging, but he stood firm, warning them he would not stand for the humiliation and confiscation of his things. Calvo said the official retired to consult with a superior and on returning let him go freely without seizing any of his belongings.

Even so, Leonardo Calvo says that he is now involved in an official complaint because when he left the country they confiscated a camera, two flash memories and some works by independent artists that he was taking as gifts for colleagues abroad.

Both Madrazo and Calvo Cardenas agree that repressive measures are connected to racial discrimination and are part of what many call “cosmetic changes” in referring to the tepid reforms of General Raul Castro.

Manuel Cuesta Morua, who returned to Cuba several days ago, was also a victim of the seizure of items, in this case a laptop and two cell phones.

Translated by mlk

21 June 2013

The Son that Nobody Wanted / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Angel Santiesteban

From Sampsonia Way Magazine.

Since the end of the 1980s, Ángel Santiesteban has been known as one of the most brilliant writers of his generation. In this position he touches upon subjects that are pretty uncomfortable for Cuban political culture: The island’s military interference in Angola and Ethiopia, the genocide of people fleeing towards liberty on rafts, the barbarity of the local prison system, and the human body as a temple for all demons and desires.

Throughout his career, Santiesteban has had the honor of winning the country’s most prestigious literary prizes: The Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba prize in 1995 (for Sur: Latitud 13, South: Latitude 13), the Alejo Carpentier prize in 2001 (for Los hijos que nadie quiso, The Children Nobody Wanted), and the Casa de las Américas International Prize in 2006 (for Dichosos los que lloran, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn).

Always the nonconformist, Santiesteban joined the booming Cuban alternative blogosphere in 2009 and created an online space for his critical opinion, Los hijos que nadie quiso. A few months later he was attacked in the street—a group of strangers broke his arm and warned him of the risks of being a “counterrevolutionary” in Castroist Cuba.

Finally, four months ago, after a court case based on very shaky evidence, Santiesteban was sentenced to five years in jail for alleged domestic violence against his ex-wife. He has declared his innocence of this crime and maintains that the charges are fabricated and politically motivated. Thanks to loyal supporters, his voice has been kept active on the Internet, and with tweets and posts to his blog that begin “Diario en la cárcel XXXI…” (Journal XXXI in jail…) the Cuban writer has now become a live-chronicler of his own incarceration, life, and literature.

The free world knows of Santiesteban’s case, but doesn’t seem to be paying much heed to the crescendo of harassment that he has been suffering since he opened the Los hijos que nadie quiso blog. Such violations of fundamental rights worry the international intellectuals only when they occur in capitalist democracies, never when they take place in a left-wing dictatorship like Cuba.

8 July 2013

Getting a doctorate: Published while they are celebrating the opening ceremony in Havana of the first course in a Doctorate in Theology in Cuba / Mario Lleonart

When my wife Yoaxis Marcheco and I not did not find our names on the list of those enrolled for the doctorate in theology (PhD) course to be offered for the first time in Cuba, after a strong year in a preparatory course, offered by the FIET Theological Institute (Argentina) in collaboration with the FTS of Londrina; when we discovered that our two names were the only ones absent; when we realized that we were the object of evident political discrimination; it is likely that our first reaction was human, because none of this is foreign. When we discovered ourselves not even among the guests at the opening ceremony this Sunday, June 9 at 7 pm at Los Pinos Nuevos Church in Calle Suárez, Habana Vieja, is likely that we felt excluded.

Now that July 9th has come the situation has changed unimaginably. Originally we thought of going for the occasion to Havana and at least sitting on the pews of the Church in silent protest. But, what is our situation today?

I cannot be in Havana as I thought because I’m in Gdansk, the place of the shipyards in which the Communist regime in Poland saw the birth of its collapse. In the midst of this we never dreamed, nor much less planned to receive so many proposals in order to achieve our doctorates.

Precisely on this same day the 9th, as a sign from heaven, an Argentine friend, Micaela Hierro, has come to Gdansk to greet us from Germany where he did his first year of a doctorate. And he came in a hurry because the following morning he must be present in his classroom. And it has left us very encouraged in this regard.

The question for us today is, where to do it? Of the universities that are offering us options which offer so we accept? South America, Europe, USA or Africa? What programs suit us more, us and Cuba? Frankly we wanted no more than what was offered in Havana, in our own land, in this project of FIET and the FTS, but the possibilities and proposals are more diversified than we ever imagined.

Our year of pre-doctoral studies (nivelación) with Professor Alberto Roldán of Argentina was extremely motivating for us. This excellent teacher, who directs the digital magazine “Teologia and Cultura,” guided us to the reading of authors and sources not common to Cuba. Frankly he planted in us “the bug” of the study of theology as a source of empowerment and we were ready for this doctorate which will take us further along the path of the so-called “political theology.”

The stab made by the dictatorship through its Office of Attention to Religious Matters (Oficina de Atención a los Asuntos Religiosos) of the Committee Central of the Communist Party of Cuba has only resulted in our facing, today, the difficult decision of choosing between various and tempting options. It is not that it has eliminated the only option that was offered to us: it is that they have multiplied them for us. And we are going to do it! For the glory of God and for the benefit of Cuba.

9 June 2013

Accumulation of Power / Fernando Damaso

Photo Peter Deel

When authoritarian, centralized and vertical power has been exercised for such a long time and without any opposing counterpart, where decisions are taking and implemented from above to below, without effective citizen participation, as it is not in their compliance and enforcement, it’s tremendously difficult to set aside these habits and to think and act in a democratic way.

In the case of Cuba, this is what has happened. As a result, institutions and organizations created with the objective of offering the world a “light” image of the Cuban “model,” have not been able to change anything, because they are simple bureaucratic constructs, where everything is determined beforehand, both with regards to its selective composition as well as for the issues authorized to be addressed and the decisions taken.

Neither the National Assembly nor the Central Workers Union of Cuba, nor any of the existing organizations (UNEAC, ANAP, FMC, FEU, FEEM, etc.) respond to the interests of their members; rather they are no more than chains of transmission of government policy, used to control and manipulate the population.

As long as they don’t produce economic, political and real social changes, with laws and regulations that are legally binding on all social subjects and, mainly, on the State and its institutions, everything is simple words that blow away in the wind, whether or not those who utter them are sincere or not.

This country, to save itself, needs a complete turnaround, that doesn’t necessarily have to be violent, but it has to be deep. The patches, re-soles and mends are ineffective, and instead of solving problems, they extend them and in time complicate them. Understanding this is not that hard!

4 July 2013

You can fund “Blue Heart” at Indigogo… GO NOW! / Miguel Coyula



CLICK HERE TO HELP FUND THE MOVIE!!!!!

Cuba’s Blue Heart courts Indiegogo

5 July, 2013 | By Jeremy Kay

The sci-fi thriller has become the first Cuban project to use the crowd-funding platform as the director and producer launch their fundraising campaign.

Director Miguel Coyula, whose credits include Red Cockroaches and Memories Of Overdevelopment, and Claudia Calvino, who previously produced Juan Of The Dead, have so far raised just under $4,000.

The filmmakers behind Blue Heart (Corazon Azul) have another 14 days in which to reach their goal of $30,000.

The project from Producciones De La 5ta Avenida uses a variety of media including anime, documentary footage, commercials, newscasts and original narrative filmmaking.

Blue Heart takes place within an alternative reality as genetically modified humans use terror tactics to reverse the global order.

“Blue Heart is a film about the individual’s inability to escape its environment, as well a discussion about the violent nature of a revolution and its consequences,” Coyula wrote on Indiegogo.com.

“It is also an exploration of the boundaries of human behavior in a dysfunctional family. This is a foray into a dark future from an uncertain present.”

Saving Agent Snowden? / Miguel Iturria Savon

Spies have always existed; what would secret services be without agents within the mafias? The terrorist gangs? The narco-guerrillas? The bank robbers and other groups who violate social norms and impose their interests on people and institutions? Don’t they watch governments and their ministers and generals? Doesn’t espionage exist between political parties? Does anyone believe that governments don’t “leak” and “process” — for their interests — the growing virtual media network used by millions of citizens every day?

The issue has come to the fore in the international press following the revelations of U.S. analyst Edward Snowden, who escaped with thousands of secret documents from New York to Shanghai and then to Russia, from where he tried to get political asylum in Ecuador, Venezuela or any other Latin American country where the transparency of information he requires is a chimera in the face of state authoritarianism and the fragility of the democratic system.

To escape and become a become a media star, the new “avenging hero” chose to create an image crisis for the United States and President Barack Obama. Snowden had a better civic alternative: giving up his job with the cyberpolice and denouncing, to the courts, how an agency of the federal government violates the information privacy of its citizens.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of a 29-year-old boy fascinated by the growing popular revolts shaking the institutional order from North Africa to Brazil. It may be attractive to dynamite the government apparatus instead of fighting to improve it. Are we looking at a civic hero or a traitor in service to countries like Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela? We still don’t know, but however imperfect but American democracy is much more transparent than that trumpeted by those seeking to benefit from computers and briefcases carried by Edward Snowden.

In times of social demands, discredited politicians and ministers, technological advances that position the citizen against the power of the state, the young American becomes the friendly face of challenge. What will happen? Will his revelations benefit the citizens or just pit the United States against the champions of oppression in Russia, China, Cuba or Venezuela?

For now, Edward Snowden, like Sergeant Bradley Manning — who leaked thousands of secret documents to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks leader now finding refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London — is revered as a hero by Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, John Cusak and other Hollywood stars who alternate between artistic creation and defending caudillos such as F. Castro, the late Hugo Chavez and many snipers who despise democracy and deny their people freedom of speech, press and association.

5 July 2013

Things You Cubans Wouldn’t Believe / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Days in Queens

The bang-bang of the trains is permanent on Roosevelt Avenue. Our little house in Queens trembles, refuge of Cuban immigrants, patriot performance of the passports with which Raul Castro has blessed us, with pretensions of State-God.

As there are electric trains, as New York is an electric city, when they pass (and the trains always pass), it sets off the AT&T phones, such that not only for the noise is it impossible to speak. Much less is it conceivable to communicate with Cuba, where I left my elderly mother and my young love.

None of this happens in the United States, of course. Cuba reproduces like a cancer in our heads. Months ago I couldn’t express myself in English, except in some chats I’ve given in universities. The set continues to be Queens and then Brooklyn and then Manhattan, but the United States is what we’ve all left back there: in Cuba, it’s understood, in our enthusiasm to leap over decades of sub-socialism and finally escape.

This little area of Queens is the most atrocious neighborhood of Latin America. Low prices, nocturnal screaming, rude looks, pre-literate Chinese, railway accidents, oily smells, Dominican-New-Yorkers, police who ask for drivers’ licenses (I haven’t seen this done since Cuba), enigmatic medieval little castles, Japanese teenagers with their on-line iPads, wholesale freedom, cats (copulating and fighting off-stage, what a marvel), Old Coronabana bookstores, cold mornings in May, earplugs to avoid nervous breakdowns from the bang-bang, Mexican housewives running errands decked out with rapper jewelry, and keychains that screech louder than the elevated subways of this city.

I’m an absolute witness, I’m happy.

It looks like the United States. Just that: it looks like the United States, but it’s another country that we Cubans of Cuba always imagined. Without us, the North American union would be incomplete. And I say again, it could be at risk of disappearing, among the voracious Latinness and the anonymous candor of DC, city of spies and the pro-Castro lobby.

We Cubans without Cuba are the spontaneous equilibrium. The faithful of a great nation.

I brush my teeth. Here nothing tastes of anything. Not the pasta, not the apples. But I brush my teeth with a spring-like delight, almost for the first time.

I spend the 24 hours of the world hooked to wi-fi, I recover the visibility of the planet with simple click-click (this is the country of onomatopoeia and acronyms), I think of my homeless future, for now I choose a tentative stairway where I sleep without my laptop being stolen. Because I think, also, in the Cuban novel I’m going to exterminate myself here, and in one of these corners, in absolute poverty, surely a little sick, my useless genius despised by the triumphant Cubans (that pragmatic pandemic), spitting and spit up until the for the last of my compatriots, looking over their shoulders for God’s spokesmen on the island (here) as in exile (there), abandoned (as it is only right that they abandon me) by elderly mother and my young love.

I never eat breakfast, I never eat lunch. I wait with more or less luck for your invitation to dinner. I try to save money. I don’t spend anything. It’s entertaining to see how long I will hold out.

The mistakes and the pressures begin. The threads of the labyrinth are cut. Nobody wants me back in Cuba, that foreign country where I wouldn’t have a passport or a penny (now I say “céntimo, not “quilo,” and this relocation is beautiful).

While typing in secret, to the rhythm of the bang-bang, I myself become a train. Meanwhile I tweet my quick blasts and some column or another so it seems I survived. It’s not true. I already took off. The midnight sun waits for me along with that long polar night I dreamed of in my boyhood dreams (I think when I was a boy, I was really a girl). A solitary night of shadows to the horizon, eternal and exceptional, in which I will enter without footsteps because I aspire to never have to return.

I have seen things that you, the Cubans, will never believe. And I am about to enumerate them, with periods and commas (and the occasional parenthesis), in a language that you, the Cubans, will never create.

Things like…

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

5 July 2013

Categories of Human Beings / Rosa Maria Paya

Where are the documentaries about the Bahamian concentration camps where there are school-age children and women with their lips sewn shut?

It has been a few weeks since South Florida’s media and social networks have been denouncing the systematic abuses to which refugees from Cuba and other nations are subjected in the Bahamas. The trigger was a series of clandestinely made cellphone videos that showed officers kicking people and subjecting them to different tortures. Those who made the videos public assure these were taken in the refugee detention camps in Nassau, and even when people have recognized their friends and relatives in the videos, the Bahamian Chancellery has denied that these are authentic.

These detention centers seem to be the scene of systematic human rights violations, but they are not a new phenomenon. The oldest data I know of refers to the New York Times of August, 1963, which discusses the intervention of Cuban air and naval forces in the former British island during which 19 refugees were kidnapped and taken back to Cuba. But even more astonishing is the reaction of the international community before a situation that has been taking place for years, and for which there are not many echoes beyond the modest ones from the voices of Cubans and Cuban Americans.

In the past 20 years, there is no trace of these events in two of the most important American newspapers, even when the Interamerican Human Rights Commission (IACHR) has issued reports thereon from allegations dating from 1998. For its part, the Spanish newspaper El País lists the names of the two Caribbean islands when it comes to hurricanes while other Iberian newspapers only mention them to highlight the progress of the oil drilling carried out in collaboration with Cuba.

The reaction is different when it comes to the equally unjust humiliations suffered by the prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo. The acts of condemnation in this case reach high political dimensions including the Human Rights Commission of the Russian Chancellery, the Swiss President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, the American Catholic Church, some leftist French party and thousands, perhaps millions of people from around the word who are in favor of the closing of this prison in the easternmost end of Cuba.

However, curiously enough, in that very end of my country the Provincial Prison of Guantánamo, run by Cuban authorities, is known for its inhumane treatment, the lack of hygiene, a poor diet and occasional beatings to which the people who are surviving there are subjected to. Most of the country’s prisons are run in similar conditions.

It would seem as if the men in orange uniforms held at the naval base belonged to a different category from that of the non-uniformed emigrants of the Caribbean. One hypothesis could be that the people of the Middle East evoke greater sympathy or compassion than the Caribbean people, but since it is precisely in that region where countless human rights violations have been committed in the past and continue to be committed to this day by the authorities of those countries, and the international condemnation has historically suffered its ups and downs, this argument doesn’t hold water. It would be scandalous if the level of the scandal was related to the category of the oppressors.

It is not the US Marines who are torturing Cubans and Haitians in the Bahamas; it is not “the Yankee empire” against “the oppressed people of the world.” Therefore, the perception is that the abuses committed by the authorities of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas are less attractive to the international community.

I cannot help questioning the motivations of the forces behind these reactions. If it is not compassion for those who are suffering, a sense of justice and respect for international treaties, could it be that the level of solidarity is determined by the unpopularity of the oppressor? Doesn’t the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaim that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights? A world in which lobbies have the last say and pressure groups have more interests than convictions is scary.

Who is lobbying for our brothers whose rights are violated with the same impunity in Havana and Nassau? Where are the documentaries about the Bahamian concentration camps where there are school-age children and women with their lips sewn shut? Where is the absolute condemnation for the humiliations that these people who emigrate suffer from, which are not subjected to any accusations? Why throughout the 20 years this situation has been taking place has it not become popular among youth to favor the closure of the prison camps in the Bahamas?

Apparently, the sense of impunity is contagious, and the Bahamian officials feel they can beat Cubans in the same way in which the repressive bodies of the State Security in the Largest of the Antilles have no mercy toward opposition members. Each of them should know that impunity is not sustainable over time, and that time is running out.

Rosa María Payá

Translated by Chabeli

6 July 2013

An Office that is unnecessary, and that never should have been / Mario Lleonart

The members of our church are victims of a constant process of pressure, intimidation, blackmail, coercion and even recruitments in the midst of a psychological Cold War, whose ultimate goal would be my long-awaited resignation or recall as pastor.

This shows the double standard of this regime, whose agents, in the arbitrary detention that they put me in on Wednesday, October 12, 2011, and in an effort to pressure me so that I would sign an official written warning, to which of course I did not agree, they officially threatened me so that I would focus on my pastoral activity and leave aside my social concerns, as though these were not two sides of the same coin. The sad thing is that, in practice these are the same agents, sheltered by the highly overrated political Office in Havana, who hinder and obstruct everything I try to do in my community, basically.

 But the epitome that, as pastor I find myself in the painful decision to denounce, is that that Office, not satisfied with this dirty policy of constant interference to my pastoral work, which moreover has not yet given the expected result, taking advantage of its power to grant or reject permits, extend or withdraw privileges, in extreme cruelty, and in the unforgivable stance of “making the believers fight,” in order to interfere with our evangelistic mission to the people (John 17, 21), has extended permissions and privileges to another congregation unfortunately fitting, to the honored Evangelical Pentecostal work known as “Good News,” so that, in a first phase, it would prohibit them from any type of relationship, not only with me or my family, but with any member of our church; they were forbidden to invite us to their activities, or to attend those to which we cordially invited them.

After this discriminatory and segregational posture towards the brothers, worthy of the words of the Second Epistle of the apostle John (verses 9-10) concerning the tyrannical leadership of Diotrophes; the sad thing is that this congregation with privileges easy to see for our community and everyone knows at what cost, has passed through a sad phase which consists of putting a first priority on evangelistic work for which there is more than enough land among our people (“the harvest is plentiful but the workers few”), an aggressive proselytism and without dissimulation obviously addressed to the members of our local church in order to grasp whichever of our brothers it can (that in Evangelical Cuban slang is known as “fishing in another’s pond”), without taking into account either the most minimum rule of ethics, and in which sadly they already have reaped some fruits.

Someday the history of this sad period of Christianity in Cuba will be written, in which our case unfortunately does not constitute an exception, and it will be strong enough to discover information and facts that will leave the skeptics astonished. Then perhaps we will know how much damage this Office caused, what excess, and what never should have been, to the church in Cuba, “Although its gates shall not prevail against it.”

In the meantime I have the most precious thing, that God who is my help and strength and who is also my witness of these brief accusations that constitute only a point at the tip of the iceberg that is the violation of religious freedom in Cuba.

20 May 2013