Call made for suspension of Cuban eye care programme
Call made for suspension of Cuban eye care programme
A call is being made for an immediate suspension of the Cuban assistance programme which provides free surgery to Jamaicans suffering from serious eye problems.It comes in the wake of reports that a large number of post-operation patients have been suffering complications including loss of vision.
The call has come from Head of the Department of Opthalmology, at the Kingston Public Hospital Dr. Albert Lue.
Dr. Lue, who brought the matter to public attention last week, has made a recommendation to the Health Ministry that the Cuban programme be put on hold until a detailed assessment is carried out.
He says this is needed to determine whether proper surgical procedures are being carried out.
Speaking Monday on Beyond the Headlines, Dr. Lue said the number of cases of post-operation complications is alarming.
It’s reported that in a survey of 60 patients who recently returned to Jamaica, three persons are now visually impaired, while 14 are suffering serious corneal damage.
Dr. Lue is urging the Health Ministry to take steps to prevent more persons from losing their sight.
Director of Policy Analysis in the Ministry of Health Dr. Eva Lewis Fuller who also appeared on Beyond the Headlines Monday said the Ministry has not yet decided whether to put the Cuban programme on hold.
More than 2,000 Jamaicans have received free eye surgery since the programme started.
http://www.radiojamaica.com/news/story.php?category=2&story=25057
Reporter jailed in Cuba after covering government evictions
Reporter jailed in Cuba after covering government evictions
New York, May 30, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the detention of independent Cuban journalist Armando Betancourt who was arrested a week ago while covering the evictions of dozens of families from their homes in the central city of Camagüey, sources told CPJ.
On May 23, authorities forcefully evicted families allegedly occupying homes illegally, according to local sources. Betancourt, a reporter for the news agency Nueva Prensa Cubana in Camagüey, was arrested along with several people who were protesting the evictions, a relative told CPJ. The journalist did not participate in the protests, according to several sources.
At the time of the arrest, Betancourt identified himself as a journalist, sources told CPJ. The journalist handed over his notes before he was pushed into a truck and taken into custody, they said
The journalist is being held at a local police station on the outskirts of Camagüey, CPJ sources said. Authorities confirmed the detention to a family member on May 24, but relatives have not been allowed to visit him, a relative said. Police told Betancourt’s family that the journalist would be charged with aggravated public disturbance and could be sentenced to prison.
“We are outraged by the arrest of our colleague who was arbitrarily detained solely for doing his job,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “We call on Cuban authorities to immediately release Betancourt and the other 24 journalists who are currently imprisoned.”
More information on Cuba’s imprisoned journalists.http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2005/cuba_crackdown_05/cuba_crackdown_main.html
http://www.cpj.org/news/2006/americas/cuba30may06na.html
Law bans travel to terrorist states
Posted on Wed, May. 31, 2006
LEGISLATURELaw bans travel to `terrorist states’A new state law will crack down on educational trips to Cuba and the use of state money to travel to any of the other four states designated as `terrorist.’BY MARC CAPUTO AND OSCAR CORRALmcaputo@MiamiHerald.com
TALLAHASSEE – Colleges and universities in Florida now are banned from using state money to travel to such countries as Cuba under a law Gov. Jeb Bush signed Tuesday.
The Travel to Terrorist States Act also prohibits spending state money on any aspect of organizing a trip to any of the five nations listed by the U.S. State Department as a state sponsor of terror.
Miami Republican Rep. David Rivera, who has sponsored a number of Cuba-crackdown bills, said the law was designed to stop his constituents’ tax money from underwriting Fidel Castro’s regime.
Castro ”took a lot of people’s land and freedom, and a lot of Cuban Americans feel there’s an abuse of the travel laws,” Rivera said. “We don’t think any legitimate education work can be done in a totalitarian state.”
Though the bill sailed unanimously out of the Legislature, some academics opposed it, saying it ultimately will lead to closed minds, as well as closed borders. Florida International University Professor Lisandro Perez said the law reflects ”all-around demagoguery” and would be challenged in court.
”The public opinion battle is over,” he said. ‘The `I’ll see you in court’ round has just begun.”
Rivera said the idea for the law was inspired by the arrests earlier this year of FIU Professor Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa Alvarez, an FIU counselor, on charges of being Cuban government agents. Carlos Alvarez had traveled to Cuba several times.
FIU Professor Uva de Aragon said the United States should be encouraging research on Cuba, not preventing it. For example, she said, if the United States had more information on Iraq beforehand, it could have avoided many mistakes.
”I don’t think it’s a wise policy,” she said. “It’s important for the United States to have people who study Cuba in order for them to be informed of what happens in the country.”
De Aragon, associate director of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute, said she does not see a way around the law, since its scope is wide.
The travel ban takes advantage of President Bush’s 2004 decision to tighten travel restrictions to Cuba. Bush required that the U.S. Treasury Department grant a travel license to an institution of higher learning only if it held courses in Cuba that lasted at least 10 weeks.
Previously, trips were shorter and therefore less expensive.
Now, with the state law, a college or university would have to use private money to underwrite the trips. State money, including salaries, cannot be used ”to implement, organize, direct, coordinate or administer, or to support the implementation, organization, direction, coordination or administration of” such a trip.
Such private institutions as the University of Miami could still organize Cuba trips if they don’t directly use state money for the travel or the planning. But Rivera said he may consider legislation next year that would prohibit them from receiving any state money at all if any of their departments sponsor trips to the five states considered to be terrorist.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/14704515.htm?source=rss&channel=miamiherald_state
Guerrilla’s death still shrouded in mystery
Posted on Mon, May. 29, 2006
CUBAGuerrilla’s death still shrouded in mysteryMore than 40 years later, the seldom-discussed death of Nilsa Espín Guillois, the sister of Raúl Castro’s wife, remains a well-kept secret.BY PABLO ALFONSOEl Nuevo Herald
Behind the name of the youngest daughter of Cuban Defense Minister Raúl Castro lies one of the most mysterious incidents — and one of the best-guarded secrets — in the history of the Cuban revolution.
The daughter, Nilsa Castro Espín, now just over 30, is named after her aunt, Nilsa Espín Guillois — the sister of Raúl Castro’s wife, Vilma Espín.
The few unconfirmed accounts that have circulated since Nilsa Espín Guillois’ death sometime in 1965 maintain that she shot herself in the head in Raúl’s office, either with a pistol or a submachine gun.
According to those accounts, Nilsa and her husband, Rafael Rivero, an army captain who worked at the National Institute for Agrarian Reform in Pinar del Río province, had made a suicide pact. Rivero is said to have died one day earlier or the same day at a military base in Pinar del Río.
”There was talk of a suicide pact they had made years earlier,” Carlos Franqui, author of several books on the Cuban revolution, told El Nuevo Herald. He described the pair as “very independent spirits [who] had fallen into disfavor because of their Maoist leanings.”
One account has Rivero dying in an incident while training in a camp for foreign guerrillas backed by Cuban leader Fidel Castro, brother of Raúl. Franqui said one of the accounts he has heard was that when Raúl summoned Nilsa to his office to tell her about Rivero’s death, she took a submachine gun in the room and killed herself.
”That’s a version I don’t believe. On the other hand, an official explanation was never given,” Franqui said.
Four decades after the events, Dariel Alarcón Ramírez, the Cuban guerrilla better known as ”Benigno” who accompanied Ernesto ”Che” Guevara in Bolivia, later defected and now lives in Paris, has told El Nuevo Herald that he knows something about the case.
Nilsa died in a confused incident in an office in Raúl’s private Havana home, Alarcón said.
SECOND IN COMMAND
”At the time, I was second in command of the Escort and Security Battalion” for Raúl Castro, Alarcón said, ”and that day I was on guard duty” at the home. Alarcón said he did not witness what happened but was told about it by one of the guards inside the house, a man whose name he recalled only as Idalberto.
Alarcón said Idalberto told him that Nilsa burst into Raúl’s office looking very upset. The bodyguards then heard an agitated dispute that rose alarmingly in tone. When the bodyguards opened the door, they saw Nilsa holding a Stechkin, a Russian full-automatic fire pistol.
”Shots were fired, and she died. The official explanation — very secret — was that she committed suicide,” Alarcón said, adding that it was unclear who fired the fatal shots. “Later I learned that her husband, Rafael Rivero, had died the day before in Pinar del Río, apparently a suicide, and she went to ask Raúl for an explanation. Nobody spoke about it anymore.”
The Cuban media never reported the deaths of Nilsa and her husband. And with the exception of Franqui, it seems that none of the authors who have written about the Cuban revolution have made any reference to the case.
At the time, Nilsa and Rivero were far from unknown.
Both began their revolutionary activities in 1952 as students at the Institute of Secondary Education in Santiago de Cuba and remained active when they attended the University of Oriente in the late 1950s.
DYNAMITE SEIZED
”Nilsa and Rivero had their own little group early on and began to raid police stations to seize dynamite, rifles and such,” Vilma Espín — who has been head of the Cuban Federation of Women since shortly after the 1959 victory of the Castro revolution — told Franqui in 1960, when he was writing Diary of the Revolution.
The Espín family was part of Santiago de Cuba’s upper class. Vilma and Nilsa’s father, José, was an executive at the Bacardi rum distillery. Vilma graduated as a chemical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/americas/14694111.htm
Europa no esta haciendo lo suficiente
Posted on Wed, May. 31, 2006
“Europa no está haciendo lo suficiente”EFEBRUSELAS
El ex presidente de la República Checa Vaclav Havel consideró ayer que la Unión Europea ”podría hacer más de lo que está haciendo” para propiciar la transición hacia la democracia en Cuba.
En una conferencia de la organización Comité Internacional para la Democracia en Cuba (ICDC, en sus siglas en inglés), Havel comparó la actual situación en la isla con la de los años previos al derrumbe del bloque soviético en la Europa del Este.
”Creo, en este sentido, que la UE podría hacer más de lo que está haciendo en Cuba y, no sólo allí, también en relación a otras dictaduras del mundo”, dijo el ex presidente checo.
”Por mi experiencia sé que es necesario enfrentar cara a cara y con contundencia a los regímenes totalitarios”, añadió Havel.
En enero del 2005, la UE levantó, a propuesta de España, las sanciones diplomáticas contra el régimen cubano con que había respondido al encarcelamiento de 75 disidentes.
El próximo junio, los ministros de Asuntos Exteriores europeos deben revisar su política común hacia la isla, aunque el alto representante de la UE para la Política Exterior, Javier Solana, dijo ayer ante el Parlamento Europeo que no prevé “cambios drásticos”
En la conferencia del ICDC, celebrada en Bruselas, disidentes en el exilio abogaron en cambio por que se restablezcan las sanciones, que incluían la restricción de las visitas oficiales a la isla o la invitación a los opositores a las fiestas en las embajadas.
”El régimen percibe que puede acentuar la represión contra los demócratas porque no paga por ello”, dijo el presidente de la Unión Liberal Cubana, Carlos Alberto Montaner, quien señaló que, tras el fin de las sanciones, el número de presos políticos ha crecido hasta 330.
Montaner, afincado en Madrid, censuró en particular al Gobierno español, porque, en su opinión, al promover la suspensión de las sanciones, hizo que “se debilitaran las firmes medidas de apoyo (de la UE) a la oposición democrática”.
Por su parte, el democristiano alemán Arnold Vaatz consideró que los “tecnócratas occidentales están a punto de cometer el mismo error que antes del fin del bloque soviético, cuando resultaba imposible no hablar amistosamente de los países comunistas”.
Vaatz, uno de los dos diputados alemanes expulsados por el régimen cubano cuando pretendían asistir a una asamblea de disidentes en La Habana, en mayo del 2005, alertó de que el paso a la democracia tras la muerte de Fidel Castro no puede darse por descontado.
”El rendimiento de la democracia en Latinoamérica no es tan atractivo para los cubanos, como la democracia europea lo fue para Alemania de Este”, razonó Vaatz, que abogó a favor de que la UE brinde ya ”un apoyo claro a la oposición democrática” para fortalecerla con vistas a la fase posterior a la desaparición del líder cubano.
En la conferencia intervino también Blanca Reyes, esposa del disidente Raúl Rivero y representante del colectivo de familiares de presos políticos Damas de Blanco, que pidió también que la UE vuelva a imponer las sanciones.
”La UE debe reconocer que su política hacia Cuba ha fracasado y que ese fracaso lo pagan con su libertad miles de cubanos”, dijo, por su parte, el ex presidente uruguayo Luis Alberto Lacalle.
http://www.miami.com/mld/elnuevo/news/world/cuba/14702095.htm
Cuba-UE crece exportacion de carbon vegetal a Europa
UE – Mercosur – 30/5/2006 17:58GMTCuba-UE: crece exportación de carbón vegetal a Europa
LA HABANA, 30 MAY (ANSA) – Cuba exportó más de 3.200 toneladas de carbón vegetal a países de Europa, en especial Italia, a partir de una experiencia que desarrolla desde mayo de 2005 en la provincia de Ciego de Avila, centro-este de la isla.
La iniciativa, según medios locales, es impulsada por la Empresa Provincial de Cítricos, que comercializa el producto elaborado por leñadores locales con marabú de primera calidad.
Para la obtención del tradicional combustible los carboneros emplean únicamente ese tipo de madera, que procesan en áreas de los territorios de Ciego de Avila, Sancti Spíritus y Camagüey.
El impulso en la venta de carbón vegetal cubano se sustenta en el interés de empresarios italianos de utilizar el carbón de marabú en hornos pizzeros, ya que con este tipo de energía el alimento aumenta sus propiedades, porque su cocción es más lenta.
El propósito de la entidad es completar al cierre de este año unos 300 contenedores de 20 toneladas cada uno, de los cuales enviaron hasta hoy 163 a Italia.(ANSA)
http://www.ansa.com.br/html/e_materia.asp?id_editoria=33&materia=32618
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