Attention, Cubans! They’re Making USB Flash Drives From Paper! / Luis Felipe Rojas

Through the work of my friend Falco, this wondrous technology comes to us, I reproduce it as I found it, if I dare to comment on it, there is only this to say:

The American technology company IntelliPaper® based in Spokane, Washington, has created and offered for sale USB flash drives made out of paper.

These devices, in addition to being disposable, cheap and ecological, have the advantage of weighing very little and the ability to be sent through regular mail like you would send an ordinary plain paper letter. The technology allows any paper product, for example business cards and fliers, to include a disposable digital flash memory.

For now, the main application is in the greeting card industry, but as soon as the capacity is increased (currently from 18-32 megabytes) and they become more common, they could become one of the most useful, cheap and creative ways to share information.

The nightmare of totalitarian dictators.

USB flash memories have become a nightmare for totalitarian dictators who depend on total control to survive. Distributing information impossible to censor through these drives will be easy for the masses do to their small size and their prices affordable even in the poorest countries. Through them, for example, Web Packages can be distributed very effectively, safely and cheaply, so that we can make available to our readers, weekly, books, manuals and audiovisual materials.

This new technology fills a cup that is about to overflow. The Uniqueness of Totalitarianism is closer every day!

4 April 2013

Everyone / Regina Coyula

Times are changing in Cuba.  A simple comparison to five years ago will sustain this statement. One of the expressions of this change is the proposal brought forth by a heterogeneous group of citizens (I have grown fond of the term) at Laboratorio Casa Cuba* to discuss a topic of interest to all of us, including those who do not know about the existence of such proposal.

It should not surprise me, but it does surprise me, to see how from the fringes of the political spectrum, Cuba Soñada** (Cuba Dreams)…receives arrows; from each one according to their position and comprehension: each one of them absolute owners of the truth, each one from the meta-reading, each one disqualifying*** (surreptitiously or not) the project.

Now that is fashionable to defend homosexuals, blacks, women, the disabled and any other socially excluded group, a little bit of respect for politically different ways of thinking would not be bad; and, in this, Laboratorio Casa Cuba is ahead of everyone else: laypersons, Catholics, anarchists and communists have taken equal places around the same table. The document may seem scandalous to many –better controversial than anodyne- but they will not be able to attack it for being offensive toward other schools of thought. Cuba Soñada…gives us the opportunity to discuss.  And, I say this to the orthodox within the one (legally allowed) political party and to those who plan agendas for the transition, in and outside of Cuba, and of course, to everyone else.

Translator’s notes:

*Laboratorio Casa Cuba is an initiative born from the Cuban Catholic publication Espacio Laical that has stated its mission as “to study the Cuban institutional framework” and to promote “research, suggestions for change, reflection and respectful dialog.”  It is integrated so far by communists, democratic socialists, anarchists and Catholics.

**The full title of this document, from the Archdiocese of Havana, is “Cuba dreams – Cuba possible – Cuba future: proposals for our immediate future.”

***”Disqualify” is a term used by the regime towards any expression of dissent as a way of dismissing the source. That is, the speaker/actor is told, essentially, “You are not qualified to speak or act because we — the powers-that-be — say so.” Yoani Sanchez described this in a blog post about a meeting with State Security.

Translated by: Ernesto Ariel Suarez

3 April 2013

The Oldest Profession / Ignacio Estrada

by Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba. The oldest profession has returned to Cuban streets and provides a stable source of income for a vast number of mostly young Cubans.

Regardless of time or weather, there are no shortages of sex workers in Havana to satisfy a sexual appetite. The revolution of 1959 promised equality for all but the largest share of its benefits went to those in positions of power, their cronies or closest relatives. In its wake and in spite of shutting down the old nightclubs and brothels, prostitution has returned as one of the best paid professions today.

The trade is practiced by those we least suspect — coworkers, neighbors or even classmates. Large numbers of people in recent years have changed their morals like chameleons change colors and lead double lives.

I have nothing against those who choose to become prostitutes. Quite the opposite. I believe that it’s time that the Cuban government legalize the practice, unionize the workers and allow them, as is done in other countries, to be licensed as legitimate Sex Workers.

Male and female prostitution is not only practiced in the Capital but it extends to every territory. There are known brothels, escort services and red zones, the last which are prone to violence and crime. Charges are different for citizens and  foreigners and are even higher when part of the profits go to a broker or a pimp.

Without sanitary practices and health screenings, prostitution has caused an increase in the spread of veneral diseases. The rate of HIV/STDs is now higher than it has ever been in the nation’s history.

There needs to be a call to action to demand that all who provide or use these services follow safe sexual practices.

While some parents are proud because their children bring home new clothes, perfumes, gifts or other items, others mourn the loss of a son or daughter to violence, to abuse or to illnesses such as HIV. There are also those who are happy that their children have managed to leave Cuba to live elsewhere and can return to visit them carrying gifts.

As a nation, we need to put an end to injustice and legitimize this line of work so it’s treated the same way as any other profession. Legalization would provide protection under the law as well as protection from officers of the law who abuse their power to extort and harass the sex workers.

It is important that parents, family and citizens safeguard children, supervise their activities, know where they are at all times and ensure that they are not exploited or misled, especially for sexual purposes.

While I have nothing against prostitution, I condemn those who take advantage of minors for sexual favors in exchange for gifts or money. The foreign press and other outlets report that child prostitution exists. I am unaware of any such case as a reporter but if I learned of one I would have no problem denouncing it in an article.

Legalization of sex workers does not condone civil disobedience. We need to find a way to keep our streets and neighborhoods clean and safe, to protect the workers and the customers from disease and to regulate and legitimize a commonly practiced trade.

Translated by: Vivian S. Bedoya

25 March 2013

A Hug in Miami / Pablo Pacheco

abrazo
Pablo Pacheco, prisoner of the 2003 Black Spring now in exile, meets Yoani Sanchez for the first time. Yoani and friends in Cuba and abroad managed to publish a blog for Pablo and other Black Spring prisoners, “From Behind the Bars,” while they were still in prison in Cuba.

I remember one of my last telephone calls from the National Hospital for prisoners in the Cuban capital when I was about to head to Spain. I spoke on the phone with Yoani Sanchez two hours before my exile to Spain. She was at Jose Marti airport to meet me in person and say goodbye, but she wasn’t allowed to do it: in the capital of hatred and intolerance this hug was postponed.

Yesterday the Radio Marti reporter Jose Luis Ramos asked me to call him early in the morning: he knew of the missed meeting. “If you come right now to the station you will see Yoani,” he told me. I left immediately. While the blogger gave an interview, I greeted several friends at the station.

Half an hour after my arrival at Radio Marti, Yoani appeared, accompanied by reporters and Jose Luis himself, who introduced me. The hug was like a tattoo in the mind, repeated over and over. We recalled our work together; she and her husband were always ready to record every one of my articles, which I read over the phone from prison. They made it a priority and other colleagues also helped me.

riendoYoani at first glance isn’t impressive, but two minutes of conversation are enough to see the intelligence and bravery of this girl. She offers arguments, not attacks on others, and does not vary her discourse in an attempt to please. We planned a later meeting, more private and working.

I think Yoani Sanchez still doesn’t understand the weight that destiny has put in her path and it’s better this way, it helps her not to waver. I was happy and excited, we shared that embrace that was delayed for so many years by bars and distance; a distance that hurts more if you are an exile.

microfono

3 April 2013

Permanence, Legitimacy and the Future in Havana / Juan Juan Almeida

If there is one thing I learned from being close to power, it was not to focus on explicit actions but rather on non-verbal messages that go unstated. It is precisely for this reason that today, while many are captivated by dreamy visions and hopeful about evolutionary developments that to me still seem embryonic, the Cuban government is approving and reaffirming steps towards a greater permanence, legitimacy and future for itself.

I have 103 reasons — three of them personal — for being opposed to what is called Revolution. But that does not mean that I cannot see the growing empowerment of an administration that on the one hand combines investments in key areas such as tourism, technology and education while at the same time guarantees the sustainability of the system by increasing the number and size of certain personal bank accounts and overseas investments. I will comment more on this at another time.

It is clear that the abuses, apathy, incessant propaganda, a surfeit of rhetoric and ongoing requests for martyrology-worthy sacrifice have caused the majority of the population to distance itself not only from the government, but from the opposition as well.

The housewife, the farmer, the worker, the doctor, the thief and the student are neither political nor apolitical, but rather anti-political. The government is aware of this and has taken concrete steps, pretending to bridge this gap between the leaders and the led by appointing executives who are younger… sorry, I meant to say less elderly, less corrupt and more in touch with the people, although in practice none of them have real freedom or executive power.

Last year there was an unusual freeze on the military budget. Several days earlier the General asked the armed forces community for its trust. Political ploy or not, it is one more thing to round out an image of a pragmatic leader aware of administrative and financial limitations.

The eyes of foreign investors, however, see a slow but recovering economy, open to foreign investment and eager for free trade. Since it is almost a rule that capital is unconcerned with ideology but worships opportunity, the swift negotiator quickly falls into the mix and ends up being fodder for the government, which uses him to advance its interests and pressure governments, states and monarchies. They learn too late that recouping investments is not a function of production levels or the labor market, but rather of avoiding the leaks in the very dilapidated state plumbing system.

Fluent in diplomacy and official propaganda, they know that today’s world is not about militant leftists or well-to-do rightists, but about people who lean towards one side or the other based on their own overall interests. Therefore, many agreements are facilitated, giving teeth to those who cannot smile and colors who those who cannot see. From an endless number of patients they humanely raise armies of the grateful.

The Cuban government is preparing itself by forced march to confront the future, which I can see upon crossing the street. I do not want to appear negative, because I am not, but I cannot help thinking of my astute grandmother, who possessed a wisdom without equal, when she used to tell me, “There are two kinds of people in this world — those who have power, and those referred to as ’the nobody bosses of nothing.’”

Juan Juan Almeida

28 March 2013

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo in the New York Times Lens Blog

Screen shot 2013-04-03 at 5.11.09 AMBlogging a Bridge From Havana
The New York Times

Havana is a city of flags, says Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, a Cuban blogger whose photographs show them dangling from telephone wires, draped over headstones and reflected in windows and puddles. The tricolor standard is everywhere.

So, too, is Cuban state security.

They hauled him in one day in 2009 for questioning over a flag photo he never even published. Somehow, he said, they got their hands on a composition of his in which a nude appeared in the same frame as the remnants of a flag. They put him on warning, he said, saying he was at grave risk of committing a crime.

“They said I could get as much as four years for desecrating a national symbol,” he recalled. “I was being incriminated for a photograph that I hadn’t even circulated. I thought what I did in my own house was mine, but he was telling me it was defamatory. He said ‘If they found out in Miami, they’ll stone you. They’re counterrevolutionaries, but they love the flag.’ It was strange.”

He can relate to strange: he is a writer who relishes wordplay and a photographer who captures everyday abstractions and details along Havana’s streets. He is among the island’s small group of independent bloggers who have used the Internet to express themselves and confound both authorities and outsiders.

“He is giving us the poetics of the city that is not touristy, nostalgic or exotic,” said Ana M. Dopico, a professor at New York University who recently participated in a New York conference with Mr. Pardo Lazo and Yoani Sanchez, the island’s best-known blogger. “He is giving people a way to read the politics of daily occurrences, like he does in a picture of a man being arrested on the Malecón. He juxtaposes the eternal beauty of the city and the real political urgencies of the moment.”

Read the rest of the article and see the photos in the New York Times, here.

3 April 2013

Citizen Helplessness / Fernando Damaso

The Electric Utility, it seems, opens a hole in what’s left of the sidewalk to replace a pole, does its work, and leaves as a souvenir the broken sidewalk, a pile of dirt of prevent or hinder the passage of pedestrians and places, barely, a piece of a piece of wood from a cable spool, and eyes that saw them go.

The Havana Water Department opens a trench in some street, even if it’s newly paves, puts in its pipes, fills it with dirt and, barely, covers it with a thin layer of cement. In a few days the stretch becomes a pothole that prevents or hinders the passage of vehicles and eyes that saw them go.

You arrive at the door of a neighborhood store that sells in freely convertible currency (CUC) and, when you tries to enter, the guard tells you  to wait, that the entry is two by two. You look inward, through the glass, and observe there are only three customers and you ask, “Why two by two?” Finally you go and buy your products. The cashier is next to the guard at the door. He looks at your products, and the cashier collects you money and when you are going out you have to show your purchases and proof you paid for them, as he rummages through your plastic bag.

The kiosk, also selling in CUC, where there offer a few dairy products and open and there’s an employee inside, watching the pedestrians pass. You greet him the clerk, without returning the greeting, says they’re not selling anything because there’s no electricity. You are stunned and ask: “Is it because you don’t know how to add with pen and paper?”

These are a few examples of what constitutes an infinitely small part of civic helplessness. Someone may say: protest, do not accept it, demand your rights. You can, but it’s like plowing the desert, and you only risk a rude or violent response, depending on the mood of the person you demand them from, who enjoys impunity. What about the authorities? Fine, thank you. They are concerned with other things, preferably politics.

This is the result of living in a country where, for more than fifty years, the exercise of citizens’ rights and respect for them has been a pending matter.

2 April 2013

The Best Site in Pinar del Rio / Henry Constantin

1363755818_teatro-milanesWhat makes a city is its people. The Capitol is not the most important thing in Havana, nor are the abundance of churches and alleys what is most striking of Camagüey, nor is the Moncada Barracks the greatest thing in Santiago, nor are their seawall walks the most pleasant parts of Caibarién, Cienfuegos, Gibara and Puerto Padre. It is the people who live or have lived there, their work, their faith, their worth or their dreams, who give meaning to those places.

And Pinar del Rio is a city that — forgive me for all the other valuable things that don’t appear in this blog — makes more sense because in many of its houses, ever stronger, grows the magazine Coexistence.

Occasionally Dagoberto Valdés, friend and editor of the magazine Coexistence, sends me a text message, a text that is not like the others, although it is also news: there is an Editorial Board. And I must be, and the finicky editor of texts that he lets loose in his alert counsels, and I’m glad because I cam going to see a ton of friends and good people, “good for me and good for this island bathes in waves of despair,” all at once.

So once more I pack my backpack, and correct the commas in an article I’m sure I haven’t sent them yet, and get a ticket or hang around the waiting lists at the bus stations. And begin the trip to Pinar del Río.

I’ve traveled a lot to the city that seemed a remote land before: since that first trip of curious journalist, when with my beard and covered in road dust I arrived at the home of Dagoberto Valdés, a few months from the end of the magazine Vitral, to help put out the first issue of White Rose. And instead of people consumed by sadness or resentment against the deserters, and the every-man-for-himself in which so many Cubans sail today, I found a team focused on their work, optimistic and affable, wonderfully resilient.

(That was my first trip to Pinar del Rio and the Magazine, in a very journalistic and traveling summer, when I still hadn’t been out of the University of Santa Clara did two months later, which I was two months later, by chance. And I joined the Editorial Board in February 2011, my own birthday present, four months before I was kicked out of the ISA. Obviously, my relationship with the magazine had a strong impact on me).

The red signs announces the closing of the workshop (also a museum), and the blue sign said "Strictly Forbidden to Stop Dreaming"

The red signs announces the closing of the workshop (also a museum) after 13 years, and the blue sign says “Strictly Forbidden to Stop Dreaming”*

Coexistence brought me to the home-based museum of Pedro Pablo Oliva*, and The Great Blackout epic my Cuban favorite. Coexistence gave me the chance to film, which I still owe them for, when a phenomenal jury gave Henry Constantin its audiovisual prize. Coexistence, that had managed to weave together a ton of friends in Pinar del Rio and outside the city, which they shared with me.

And Coexistence included me in its Editorial Board, and that night of the first meeting my modesty about being an upstart, for being the last to arrive and from the farthest away, they treated me almost equal to the founders, freely and without hesitation, with the right to edit and critique every new issue of the magazine.

A building in ruins in the center of the city.

A building in ruins in the center of the city.

Usually the traveler goes to see Soroa and Las Terrazas, climbs the hills of Vinales or goes down in the caves of Santo Tomas, spends an afternoon at Guyabita or breathig in the best tobacco brangs, bathing in Maria La Gorda, taking the waters of Los Portales and looking how it flows to the Gulf of Mexico from Cano de San Antonio or enjoying the clouds from Pan do Guajaibon.

All that is good, if one wants to know only the superficial. But if you want to know something of the best of humanity reborn in Pinar, and you left without a greeting to the people of Coexistence, without the magazine, a photo or a conversation, the traveler, possibly, would have missed everything.

Henry Constantín

*Translator’s note: Pedro Pablo Oliva is a painter in Pinar del Rio who fell on the wrong side of the government. The associated events are detailed here by: Yoani Sanchez, Dagoberto Valdes, Miriam Celaya and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.

20 March 2013

If They’re Serious About Saving / Fernando Damaso

Photo: Peter Deel

The country’s leading authorities continually talk about the need to save resources and use the limited ones that are available for important issues, to support development and help in solving the many existing problems and overcoming the shortages. Undoubtedly, it is a fair demand, but it would be even more so, if they looked within themselves, and decided to save on those government activities that represent large expenditures and provide no wealth.

I am referring to the high subsidies enjoyed by the so-called mass organizations (CDR, FMC, CTC, ANAP, FEU, FEEM and others)*, institutions that present themselves as NGOs, but are, in fact, far from it; they are organized, directed and primarily funded by the State and solidarity groups abroad and while visiting Cuba; in addition there are some political campaigns, including that for “The Five**” (with the current adaptation of a mansion in El Vedado*** for its headquarters), payment of attorneys and multiple trips around the world for their families.

If they reduced the inflated payrolls of professional staff of these organizations, groups and campaigns, we would see a substantial savings in salaries, travel and maintenance, along with the great amount of free transport, housing and locales (usually the best), in municipalities as well as and in the provinces, helping to increase the housing stock to the public.

These measures don’t need commissions nor long studies and experiments for their implementation, as the sad reality already one of general control. If these savings also include major political organizations and some super-ministries, which enjoy carte blanche to own vehicles of all types, buildings, homes and locales (often underutilized), the results would be even greater and would be approved by the majority of citizens.

That is, if you really want to save, there is enough fabric available to cut within the State, without trying to apply them only to ordinary Cubans, demanding greater sacrifices.

Translator’s notes:
*All of these organizations are arms of the government: CDR =Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (the block watch groups); FMC = Federation of Cuban Women; CTC = Cuban Workers Union; ANAP = National Association of Small Farmers  ; FEU = Federation of University Students; FEEM = Federation of High School Students.

**”The Five” refers to five Cubans found guilty of spying in the United States.  Four of the five remain in prison. The Cuban government presents them as national heroes unjustly convicted.

***El Vedado is one of the nicer neighborhoods in Havana.

30 March 2013

Two Part Interview of Reinaldo Escobar From Havana Times / Reinaldo Escobar

Macho-2By Yusimi Rodriguez (Translation from Havana Times)

HAVANA TIMES — For months I had wanted to interview Reinaldo Escobar – the blogger and moderator of an audiovisual panel discussion project called Razones Ciudadanas. He’s also the husband of blogger Yoani Sanchez, who is currently on an international tour.

We met up at a cafe in the upscale Miramar district and before I could pose the first question, he summarized his life.

Reinaldo Escobar: I was born in Camaguey in 1947, I graduated in journalism and I took five post-graduate courses in Marxism.

HT: Marxist?

RE: Marxologist.

At the end of my studies they wanted to kick me out of school for being smug, hyper-critical, immature, and having literary tendencies. The punishment was to send me to the Centennial Youth Column in Camagüey – not as a cane cutter though, but as a journalist. I stayed there for eighteen months.

Later I worked for the magazine Cuba Internacional, and afterwards at the Juventud Rebelde newspaper. After a year and a half, on December 18, 1988, I was told in a meeting that I couldn’t continue there or work in the field of journalism any more in Cuba. I was transferred to the National Library, where, along with others, I requested a meeting to discuss the agreements of the Fourth Party Congress. We were met with a “repudiation meeting” and I decided to leave.

Then I was an elevator mechanic and a librarian at a technological institute until 1994. That was my last government job. Then I taught Spanish to foreigners. In 2004, I founded, with other friends, the magazine Consenso, which evolved into the digital portal Desdecuba. There I learned digital journalism with Yoani, and I started my blog.

Read the rest of Part 1 here.

Part 2

Photo from Tracey Eaton
Photo from Tracey Eaton

By Yusimi Rodriguez

HAVANA TIMES – Journalist Reinaldo Escobar was booted from the official Cuban media back in 1988 but he has continued writing his critical commentaries most recently on his blog desdeaquí.

The husband of blogger Yoani Sanchez, one of the 100 most influential persons in the world according to Time magazine for 2008, is currently minding the fort while Yoani is off on a worldwide tour. The following is part two of our interview with Escobar. See part one.

HT: Why remain a Marxologist?

Reinaldo Escobar: I think that Marxism is subversive in Cuba today. The official Party policy on economics is anything but Marxist.

HT: However aren’t the economic changes taking place in the country are going in the right direction?

Reinaldo: Yes, but they are not Marxist.

HT: So Marx was wrong?

Reinaldo: At that moment in time, no, but his theories are no longer applicable. Marx said practice is criterion for evaluating truth. Practice shows these ideas do not work. My friend Victor Fowler says you have to start thinking about infeasibility being a constant feature of the socialist system.

Read the rest of Part 2 here.

February 2013