Translating Cuba

Called “Richard” from the time he was young, he was known as a devout Catholic bordering on fanaticism; later he decided to be called “Ricardo” because a Revolutionary shouldn’t use an English name; from 1961-62 he headed up the Federation of University Students (FEU). That year he was appointed director of the American Department in the Ministry of Foreign Relations (MINREX).

Using shameless old tricks like a cane, and with the clear intention of becoming a capital in this incredibly profitable company called “Revolution,” he achieved the needed confidence and with that was named Cuba’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations, traveling with his wife Margarita Perea (now deceased) and his daughter Margarita (“Maggichu”) Alarcón Perea.

In New York he chaired the board of the United Nations Program for Development (UNDP), and was second chair of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Rights of the Palestinian people.

From this time many remember his phrase “Macy’s is paradise.” And of his rapid ascent an ugly reference is still hear, which they say came to Havana by Don Javier Perez de Cuellar (UN Secretary General 1982-1991).

With shameless deceit and sending expensive gifts to senior leaders (the fundamental objective of the Cuban lobby and diplomacy), Alarcón de Quesada managed to get himself named Foreign Minister of the Republic of Cuba. In 1993 he assumed the presidency of the National Assembly of People’s Power. Despite his deplorable management has been re-elected; his work, in addition to being ridiculous, is reduced to the demand for the return of those Cubans who, for some, are spies, and for others are five heroes.

Murder — to my knowledge — he has not killed anyone; but faced with a just demand he always looks away. The prize for loyalty he achieved with his terrible “special action” toward his own sister when she tried to leave the country. Faced with such complicity, he chose to continue committing crimes without a trace of remorse. And so he shows his “loyalty.”

Today, along with General Raúl Castro, Alarcón is a co-protagonist in the game towards an unfavorable transition for the Cuban nation. The clever ruse creates worldwide expectations, trying to make us forget an unnamed holocaust.

A repulsive character, creator of absurd actions, whiner, he has no higher purpose, no sense of honor. Dignity is not his strong suit.

January 26 2013

So, he was successively accused of running over a child and absconding, rape, armed robbery, attempted murder and injuries, charges that later were not sustained. The writer says that the with regards to the two offenses for which he was finally prosecuted, seven people testified that he was not at the scene of the event in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado, but in the distant town of Diez de Octubre, studying with a lodge brother who had an exam for Master Mason.

I believe what Santiesteban says, not what a dictatorship says or might say, a dictatorship that maintains silence on this sentence before the residents in Cuba. I also believe in what he says because the offender has proven to be a brave man, who had earlier said that he would not pay even “a fine of five dollars,” but that in this case he would go to jail because he is innocent.

On November 8 Santiesteban was severely beaten by the Castro hordes when he and a small group of activists went to inquire about the situation of the regime opponent Antonio G. Rodiles, at the police station where he had been arrested in Havana. As a result of the beatings, the writer was left with damaged ribs and a considerable wound in his head, among other injuries. Subsequently he was locked in a cell from which he was released days later, interestingly, when a photograph of the shirt — now bloodied — that he had been wearing when attacked began to circulate through social networks. While in the brig, Santiesteban had declared a hunger strike.

I think to remove certain mystery that covers why the accusation, Ángel Santiesteban, who still has time to do so before going to serve the sentence (which is being appealed), should tell the story a little more about the facts alleged against him and which led to the penalty. Although, as I said before, I, and many others, believe in his innocence. And we believe that the dictatorship is trying to silence in this way a voice that has made them uncomfortable in recent times.

In these cases, one thinks we should ask the writers living in Cuba for solidarity for an honest, brave, selfless compatriot. But the writers on the island who could be in solidarity with their colleague do not have access to this information, since it does not suit the dictatorship for them to know it and they do not have Internet access.

Moreover, it makes no sense to ask for solidarity from is other colleagues, that minority who do have Internet access. Because of this minority, most of them have sold out to the Castro regime so long as they publish their books, they get to travel, they get medals and diplomas; that is, they enjoy the high privileges that make them say, as the great vassal Miguel Barnet said recently, “It is a privilege to live in Cuba.”

To Ángel Santiesteban who has been tried for crimes of a “housebreaking and injury.” However, to those who brutally beat him, who locked him in a cell for several days, where he was humiliated with gestures and words, they will not be held accountable, although they live under the same Penal Code.

What happened with this Cuban writer could be the start of an escalation of the dictatorship, as happened in 2003, when 75 dissident journalists were sentenced to long prison terms and three men who did not deserve death were sentenced to it. I only say this to give an example.

cubaencuentro.com

January 27 2013

He said then: “All the roads, as a certain phrase said, lead to the Cuban Revolution (and in the area of its influence in the process of this metamorphosis we could talk about the step from worm to butterfly, or vice versa, it will depend on how the little creature behaves with respect to this supposedly most significant environment in human history which is a Revolution).

Under this influence, in recent decades, we witnessed a group of metamorphoses, each more astonishing than the last: the butterfly Raúl Rivero turned into a drunk worm who couldn’t write “even a single line of good poetry” according to the Minister’s words.

The worm Lino Novás Calvo went back to being a brilliant butterfly (someone who returned to the island dried out and pinned to a board after his death). The butterfly Jesus Diaz transformed into the most horrible worm Cuban eyes had ever seen, before whose death the joy shattered (again, according to the Minister, I’m a witness).

The worm Edmundo Desnoes was deranged into a butterfly who wanted to nostalgically pose his colorful old skeleton in the rickety skeleton of the Revolution.

The butter Manuel Díaz Martínez turned into a caterpillar “full of anger and frustration,” according to a writer and ex-president of the Cuban Book Institute. “The detestable worm” Virgilio Piñera reemerged as graceful moth that can be exposed internationally, and proudly (!) mind you (!) among the laurels of revolutionary literature.

The list is rather long. So complex, it would break the head of the most enlightened experts on metamorphosis. And curiously (something that would give many scientists a lot to think about) where usually the conversion of worms to butterflies is increasingly rare and the transformation of butterflies to worms is ever more common.”

Right now, what they call “government” in Havana has decided to convert, again, a famous writer into a “vile worm working in service to the Empire.”

Ángel Santiesteban, a writer who was cited by the officialdom of Cuban culture as “one of the great storytellers who emerged in the Revolutionary period,” is now the latest victim of this Kafkaesque metamorphosis (as we know, typical in the socialist regimes which have hitherto existed in this Blue Planet) that tries to forget his intellectual trajectory, unjustly accusing him of invented crimes so as to sentence him to 15 years in prison and attempt to silence his voice.

A voice is heard with great interest in much of the world since he decided to assume the act of writing freely and began to publish in his blog, The Children Nobody Wanted, a very critical view of the national disaster to which our politicians have condemned our island.

The prosecutor called in his lawyer and told him the request for sentence: 54 years to be reduced to a term of 15 years served concurrently. And they used a spiteful ex-wife, a witness with mental disorders, who even confessed on a video recorded by the writer that the government had bribed her to testify.

The greatest “sin” of Ángel Santiesteban, it’s obvious, is not having said what he thinks about the disaster invented by Fidel Castro and now prolonged by his brother Raul. The “sin” is to have launched himself against the institution that keeps Cuban dictators in power: State Security.

Others have taken on the same cross, but only when they have left behind the bars of the island prison that is Cuba today. But Ángel Santiesteban has done it from within the Island, face to face, and has started by something many of us Cuban writers experienced first hand: how police tried to convert us into political informers on our own colleagues, brothers and comrades of letters and culture.

So we decided to bring this denunciation to these pages, which has been published by various media recently, especially thanking the contributions of Isbel Alba, Rodrigo Kuang, Cubancuentro, Café Fuerte and Diario de Cuba.

It is one of the most direct ways we have found to bring the truth to our readers: intellectuals, academics, writers, journalists and researchers of culture.

Published by Otro Lunes

January 27 2013

Given the number of inhabitants on the island there is a disproportionate number of prisoners. Each month arbitrary arrests increase although the Constitution provides, in Article 58. “The freedom and inviolability of the person is guaranteed for all those residing in the country. No one may be arrested except in the cases, in the manner and with the guarantees prescribed by law.”

And strict compliance with the Constitution and laws is inexcusable duty of all as provided in Article 66.

Also growing is the number of those imprisoned for political reasons, as compared with other nations like the United States, Latin America and some European countries.

The Cuban authorities, for the sake of convenience, speak well of the UN. Especially if it comes to condemning the economic, commercial and financial embargo against the people of Cuba. The newspaper Granma calls this “a flagrant violation of international law, the rules of peaceful coexistence and human rights.”

After more than 50 years of embargo, the Cuban suffocated the freedom of Cubans. The government blames the United States for all the scarcities.

What’s more, a statement from Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses the United States Interests Section of promoting courses for subversion in Cuba. Paradoxically paraplegic (!), this statement is nothing more than a reflection of the faltering “Revolution” and the violation of the fundamental rights of Cuban citizens.

As practice has shown, the “blockade,” like the aggressive and genocidal policies are not those of the exterior, but those within. We can only count on the will of the Cuban people to demand that they firmly comply with justice.

And… that the covenants will be ratified!

December 24 2012

In the period between the end of the War of Independence of 1895 and the great expansion of the sugar industry between 1918 and 1924, agricultural property in Cuba suffered a considerable shift to the detriment of small and medium producers with tens of thousands of evictions.

The result of this process is reflected the 1946 census: of the 142,385 farmers who were in the country with 165 or fewer acres (equivalent to the Cuban land measure of 5 caballerías), which represented 24% of the arable land, only 48,000 were homeowners, while the remaining 76% of the land was concentrated in the hands of large national landowners and foreign companies.

With this distribution big landowners were not interested in intensive use of the land, while nearly a hundred thousand tenants, subtenants, sharecroppers and squatters,were unwilling to efficiently produce on land they did not own.

With the Revolution of 1959 the socialist State monopolized land ownership and introduced central planning. These two factors, property and planning, explained that half a century later, despite the various measures, more than one-third of the land concentrated in the large State-owned estates, remained and/or became idle.

After multiple failures in the attempt to make State-owned land produce, in the year of 2008 Decree-Law 259 was enacted, which delivered 3.7 million acres of the land to leaseholders (a large part of which remains unproductive). However, this legal judgement ignored the main causes of inefficiency and therefore failed to increase agricultural production.

Despite this experience, the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy, adopted by the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party in 2011, re-instituted central planning to the detriment of the market and refused to deliver land ownership. That is, it insists on the implementation of an economic, political and social model that has never worked anywhere.

It must be said that, although the Decree-Law 259 lacked the basic elements to produce the required shift to agriculture, its importance was the recognition that something had to change. However, that something, to circumvent farmers actually holding title to property made the economy subject to ideology, and so could not fulfill the stated purpose.

The recent Decree-Law 300 is a step forward in some respects:

1 – Before, the area could be offered in lease could be from given from 33-100 acres of land and now is extendable up to 165 acres, but only for those who already possess land and are linked to a legally established State Farm, a Basic Unit of Cooperative Production (UBPC). or Agricultural Production Cooperative (CPA).

2 – Housing, warehouses and other facilities, previously banned, are now permitted.

3 – It provides certain facilities for the hiring of a workforce through family support, temporary agricultural workers and permanent workers.

However, access to inputs and services depends on those leasing the land being linked to legally established agricultural entities; there is a manifest disadvantage to individuals in the duration of the contract and that they are also responsible as part of the lease for fulfilling State plans for livestock and unproductive trade. Such limitations are moving towards an insurmountable contradiction: make the land produce while avoiding the formation of a national business.

In turn, Decree-Law 300 does not hide the decision to maintain monopoly control over the property of the State. In Article 11 it states that the lessees can be integrated with workers on a legally established state farm, or as cooperative members with a UBPC or CPA. In such cases, “the lessee cedes lease rights over the land and additions to the entity to which he is a member, which evaluates whether or not he may continue to work the land.”

Most significant is that the lease, understood as the right to enjoy a good of others, does not get to the root of the problem. It holds great contradiction: the land in State hands becomes idle, but whomever makes it produce is unable to access it as his property.

The subordination of economic laws to the ideology of power, explains both previous failures as well as the attempt to repair previous decisions with recent measurements. These changes inform preserve the essential factors that have conditioned the backwardness in agriculture.

Its positive aspect is that, despite government intentions, in a slow and tortuous process against all odds, many farm workers are training themselves as future agents of a national business.

Ultimately the new measures lacking the necessary depth, with occasional modification, will repeat previous failures. These facts allow us to assume the Decree-Law 300 will not make the land produce and until that changes, Cuba will have to continue acquiring, at high prices on the international market, products that could perfectly well be produced in the country.

Dimas Castellanos

Published inDiario de Cuba

December 17 2012

The issue I address today is the customary institutional secrecy that exists in the island regarding the actual numbers of the disease. When colleagues from the official press talk about the topic they only cite as examples the uncertain achievements of Cuban health system; and as the government provides free anti-retroviral treatment to more than 3,000 AIDS patients, they always make mention of figures released in 2009 – 2010.

The Cuban health system is aware that the actual numbers of the disease exceeds 18,500 people to date. If we consult the data issued by the island to international organizations we would not notice much change. The numbers rarely alter referring to other countries in the region, but what is really happening is something else.

The health system and the emerging plans of vice ministry of hygiene and epidemiology have not proven effective in preventing this and other sexually transmitted diseases. At this time we have the largest number of diagnosed since the beginning of the disease.

To speak of this openly would raise questions about the uncertain educational programs that only appear in the media as something new; and really, as one of the people who has actually made a tour through the island, I can assure you that what is said is far from reality. These programs are just a justification for the funds allocated to the island to stop the disease and to support those who live with it.

The mismanagement of funds is always justified; the Cuban leaders and representatives in the base of the Party are the only ones who get the benefits from these projects: modern cars, computers, electric bicycles, air conditioners and allowances for travel and lodging in the country and abroad, just to cite some examples.

But have you asked yourself if these benefits reach the sick? I assure you, they do not. People diagnosed — despite the fact that anti-retroviral drugs are regularly delivered to the country free — are forced to suspend their treatments more than three times a year because of the absence of one or two of their drugs or components. These treatments are carried to the mouth of the sick the vast majority of times accompanied by a glass of water, milk and juice not being available.

When discussing the issue of AIDS in Cuba I can not fail to mention the number of sick people serving sentences for common crimes such as the theft and slaughter of stolen cattle to improve their diet. Some have had to go to state offices to demand the government improve their homes, others have had to steal in recent times because of the termination of social assistance. With my note I do not want to exonerate anyone from their crimes, but I do want to call attention and ask the international agencies who help to look at the Cuban nation and issues like these.

Cuba is the country that proclaims itself a medical power and a bulwark of the fundamental rights of man, which prior to the year 1998 opened a total of six prisons solely for people with HIV/AIDS with a prison population of over 500 men and women. The figures of the disease in prisons are beyond the knowledge of any entity and no international body can imagine one of these places. Many of these people who are in prison with the disease were not diagnosed when they were free, the vast majority contracted the disease in prison through purposefully inoculating themselves to try to avoid long prison sentences or to try to qualify for parole release.

These are some of the things that we need to address in 2013, calling things as they should be called and putting in the dock in the courtroom not only the Cuban government but all the international organizations based in Cuba who know the situation and who exchange diplomatic passports and a life of luxury for the silent Cuban reality. Becoming lackeys and accomplices of a government that does not respect in the least the international covenants on human rights.

If we speak in this same language all we can say is that today we did indeed speak of AIDS in Cuba.

Note: Within Cuba is headquartered an office of the United Nations HIV/ AIDS Organization (UNAIDS) and the United Nations Global Fund (UNDP) and other support projects and diplomatic sites.

Ignacio Estrada
January 24 2013