Pekín promete mantener su cooperación con La Habana
Pekín promete mantener su cooperación con La HabanaSábado 31 de Julio de 2010 21:02 Agencias
Pekín se compromete a continuar su cooperación con La Habana, dijo sábado el canciller chino Yang Jiechi, tras encabezar la ceremonia de firma de un convenio bilateral de asistencia económica, en momentos en que la Isla atraviesa por una severa crisis de liquidez, informó Reuters.
China es el segundo socio comercial de Cuba después de Venezuela, aunque su intercambio bilateral, de alrededor de 1.820 millones de dólares en 2009, cayó en más de un 30 por ciento con respecto a 2008, cuando alcanzó unos 2.329 millones, según datos de la estatal Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas citados por EFE.
"Este convenio afianza aún más la cooperación bilateral, pues China va a seguir ofreciendo ayuda a Cuba en su desarrollo económico y social en la medida de sus posibilidades", dijo el Yang Jiechi, quien está de visita en la Isla.
No se ofrecieron más detalles del acuerdo, pero ambos aliados socialistas revelaron en junio que tienen en marcha actualmente 13 negocios mixtos, siete de ellos en la Isla, en los sectores de las industrias mecánica y ligera, comunicaciones, producción agrícola y turismo.
Como parte de los fuertes nexos entre los dos países, en febrero se inauguró en Pekín el hotel Gran Meliá Shangai, fruto de un acuerdo entre sus constructoras: el grupo estatal chino Xintian (Suntime) y el cubano Cubanacán.
Pekín y La Habana tienen previsto también construir un hotel de lujo en Cuba con una inversión cercana a los 117 millones de dólares, que contará con 650 habitaciones en un espacio de 7,5 hectáreas, en el centro turístico Marina Hemingway, al oeste de la capital.
Esta semana trascendió que una plataforma de perforación de petróleo construida en China llegará a Cuba a inicios del 2011, abriendo el camino para la exploración a gran escala de los yacimientos de crudo en el mar.
"El Gobierno chino da una atención muy priorizada para impulsar las relaciones de cooperación, amistosas y de beneficios mutuos con Cuba", dijo Yang Jiechi tras una reunión en la mañana del sábado con el canciller cubano, Bruno Rodríguez.
La visita oficial del ministro chino de Relaciones Exteriores forma parte de una gira por varios países de Latinoamérica. Este domingo viajará a Costa Rica.
Cuba: Yes That IS Your Great Grampa’s Chevrolet
Yoani SanchezAward-Winning Cuban BloggerPosted: July 31, 2010 01:06 PM
Cuba: Yes That IS Your Great Grampa's Chevrolet
There is a detail of our reality that fascinates tourists and surprises collectors around the world: the number of old cars still running on the streets of the country. Right now, on some Havana street, a 1952 Chevrolet purrs along, and a Cadillac, older than the Minister of Transportation himself, is in use as a shared taxi. They pass by us, rusting out or newly painted, on the point of collapse or winning a contest for their excellent state of repair. These rolling miracles make up a part of our country, just like the long lines, the crowded buses, and the political billboards.
At first, visitors show surprise and pleasure on seeing the theme park created by these vehicles. They take pictures and pay up to three times as much to sit in their roomy interiors. After asking the driver, the astonished foreigners discover that the body of that Ford from the early 20th century hides an engine that's just a decade old, and tires adapted from a Russian Lada. As they earn the trust of the owner, he tells them that the brake system was a gift from a European friend, and that the headlights are originally from an ambulance.
Summer people marvel at the taste of Cubans in conserving such relics from the past, but few know that this is more by necessity than choice. You can't go to a dealership and buy a new car, even if you have the money to pay for it, so we are forced to maintain the old. Without these artifacts of the last century, our city would be less picturesque and more immobile every day.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/cuba-yes-that-is-your-gre_b_666236.html
U.S. urges Cuba to free unwell detained contractor
U.S. urges Cuba to free unwell detained contractorPosted Friday July 30, 2010 1 day agoBy Linda Hutchinson
PORT OF SPAIN (Reuters) – The United States urged Cuba on Friday to free a U.S. contractor held in Havana for nearly eight months on suspicion of espionage and subversion, saying he was unwell and had still not been formally charged.
The arrest of Alan Gross, 60, at Havana's airport in December has added another bone of contention between the U.S. government and communist-ruled Cuba, obstructing moves to thaw half a century of confrontation and hostility.
Havana says Gross, who worked for a Washington-area company contracted under a U.S.-funded program to promote democracy in Cuba, committed "serious crimes" in aiding U.S. efforts to destabilize the Cuban government.
Cuban officials said Gross gave restricted satellite communications equipment to local dissidents. U.S. officials say he was providing Internet access to Jewish groups after entering Cuba on a tourist visa.
"We consider the arrest of Alan Gross … to be an unacceptable act. He was not violating any laws and has not been charged as far as I know," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, Arturo Valenzuela, told a news conference in Trinidad and Tobago, where he was visiting.
"He is not well, he has lost 80 pounds (36 kg), it's been more than six months (since his arrest) and we're encouraging the Cuban government to release him," he said.
Gross has been held at Villa Marista state security headquarters in Havana. Cuban officials say he has been assured defense counsel, has received consular assistance from U.S. diplomats and has been able to communicate with his family.
Cuban President Raul Castro's government has started releasing the first of 52 Cuban political prisoners to be freed under a recent deal struck with the Roman Catholic Church.
The United States, along with many other foreign governments, has cautiously welcomed this move, but has demanded the release of all political detainees.
President Barack Obama's administration has made clear that its modest efforts so far to improve U.S.-Cuban ties will be put on hold as long as Gross remains detained.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this month that Washington was working "every single day through every channel" to obtain Gross' release and safe return home.
Some analysts have speculated that Cuba may want to use the detained U.S. contractor as a bargaining chip to try to secure release of five convicted Cuban intelligence agents serving long U.S. sentences for espionage.
The U.S. government linked the five to Havana's 1996 shoot-down of private planes piloted by Cuban exiles near Cuba.
http://www.whtc.com/news/articles/2010/jul/30/us-urges-cuba-to-free-unwell-detained-contractor/
Havana remains entrenched in Cold War, push for change must come from the outside
Havana remains entrenched in Cold War, push for change must come from the outsideStory posted 2010.07.31 at 03:02 AM EDT
Yes, by all means, take your time. What's the hurry? After 50 years, why should Cuba rush to make any reforms?
The economic situation in Cuba remains desperate. Popular sentiment for reform is widespread. And the world has spent the past few months condemning the regime's callous treatment of political prisoners.
In his July 26 speech, however, Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura made clear neither he nor the Cuban leadership are in any hurry to make any cambios . "We will proceed, step by step, at the rhythm we determine, without improvisations or haste so as not to make mistakes," said Machado Ventura, 79, echoing what we've repeatedly heard from the other septugenarians and octogenarians running Cuba.
One wonders whether the Cuban Revolution would have been victorious if it had been fought with the same stale, risk-aversive and uninspired way the revolutionaries govern today. It wouldn't have, but then again, the Castro-led regime isn't interested in governing, just holding their grip on power.
So don't look for any meaningful changes from Havana, other than "freeing" political prisoners by jettisoning them to other countries. Mind you, these are individuals that should never have been jailed in the first place.
Faced with such intransigence, it's clear to anyone no longer living in the mid-20th century that a break in the Cuba logjam must come from the outside. Fortunately, some U.S. lawmakers in Congress are pushing to end the counterproductive ban on travel to Cuba. Lifting the prohibition on travel to the island would do much to promote democratic efforts in Cuba.
Why? For starters, it would put more dollars directly into the hands of the Cuban population, making them less dependent on the state. And it would allow a much broader spectrum of people to go to Cuba, and not just those who are generally sympathetic to the regime — and apologetic about its dismal human rights record.
Those who oppose lifting the travel ban say it will provide resources to the Castro government, and effectively toss the regime a lifeboat. What they don't understand is that the Titanic that is the Cuban economy sank decades ago and no lifeboat can spare the regime the judgment of history.
BOTTOM LINE: Cuban regime promises more same-old — really old.
The hardest life: surviving Cuban jail
Posted on Friday, 07.30.10RELEASE OF THE POLITICAL PRISONERS | STORIES OF ABUSE
The hardest life: surviving Cuban jail
During their seven years in Cuban prisons, former prisoners say they were confined to tiny windowless cells, fed inedible food and abused psychologically.BY FABIOLA SANTIAGOfsantiago@MiamiHerald.com
MADRID — Boiled plantain-flavored water as soup. A greasy scoop of bland, yellowing beef fat as a side dish. A stew dubbed “the giraffe'' because “you had to stretch your neck to find something in it.'' A hairy heap of ground pig eyes, cheek, ears, and other unidentifiable parts served as a main course.
The meal, nicknamed patipanza, is one of the typical dishes served in Cuban prisons, according to political prisoners freed and expatriated to the Spanish capital under an agreement negotiated by the Roman Catholic Church and the Spanish government.
“They didn't even bother to take the hairs off the animal's skin and it stank,'' says Mijail Bárzaga, 43, who spent seven years in four Cuban prisons.
In the Havana prison El Pitirre, where he spent two years, the food was more edible than in the others, Bárzaga said, but the portions of rice, watery picadillo and pea stew served to the prisoners kept getting smaller and smaller.
“The guards would steal from our portions, they would steal from the prison ministry to feed their families and to sell in the black market,'' Bárzaga said. “To steal from a man in prison who can't do anything about getting himself nourishment is denigrating — the lowest point of humanity.''
Often there was dirt at the bottom of the boiled concoctions. Other times, worms and bugs in the food.
“Kafka couldn't have written it worse,'' said Ricardo González Alfonso, an independent journalist sentenced to 20 years after his arrest in the Black Spring of 2003.
Two of the released prisoners in Spain — José Luis García Paneque and Normando Hernández — suffer from life-threatening illnesses due to malnutrition and confinement. So does Ariel Sigler Amaya, a healthy athlete when he was imprisoned in 2003 and now in a wheelchair, his body decimated. Flown from Havana to Miami this week for medical treatment, Sigler is being treated at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
In Madrid, all of the ex-prisoners interviewed by The Miami Herald said they suffer from some type of severe digestive disorder. One is under psychiatric care because he suffered a severe post-traumatic stress episode at the hostel where some of the Cubans are being temporarily housed in an industrial suburb of Madrid.
According to human rights organizations — among them Amnesty International and the United Nations, which have monitored Cuban prisons for decades — conditions have been harsh and inhumane throughout the 51-year-old regime of the Castro brothers.
The Cuban government, however, denies allegations of widespread abuses and in 2004 sponsored an unprecedented media tour through selected areas of the Combinado del Este prison. Photos distributed by Getty Images show well-fed and dressed inmates (white polos and royal blue sports pants) wearing matching new sneakers, taking classes on computers, partaking in outside activities and being housed in ventilated cells.
But the newly freed prisoners — most of them independent journalists who went to prison for gathering facts about life in Cuba and publishing and broadcasting their stories abroad — paint a far different picture. Their detailed, first-hand accounts support the charges of abuse, corruption and unsanitary facilities.
The ex-prisoners, accused of plotting against state security because they reported on events in Cuba and sentenced from 15 to 27 years after summary trials, were kept in maximum security facilities alongside hardened criminals.
Rounded up on March 18 and 19, 2003, in a massive crackdown across the island, the men went to prison under Law 88, known as la ley mordaza or the muzzle law, which allows the government to jail anyone suspected of engaging in an activity that authorities perceive to affect Cuba's sovereignty.
The men were shipped to prisons hundreds of miles away from their hometowns and families in a country where most people don't have cars and public transportation is overcrowded — and nonexistent in rural towns.
Small prison cells became filthy with overflowing feces. Rats, cockroaches and scorpions shared their jail cells, Julio César Gálvez said.
Just when the prisoners and their families adjusted to a prison, they were transferred.
“I was constantly moved from prison to prison and my family couldn't visit me,'' said José Luis García Paneque, a plastic surgeon who was a burly, 190-pound man when he was sent to prison and now weighs 101 pounds.
Paneque takes a reporter's notebook and drew a sketch of one of his prison cells — a hole on the floor that served as toilet and shower, a sink with a spigot turned on only a few minutes a day, a metal bed with a thin foam mattress.
“The cells are all the same — tiny, windowless,'' he said.
The solitary cells, used for punishment, were even worse.
Being among criminals posed a threat, but the political prisoners said they earned their respect by explaining to them why they were in prison.
“We gave them a political education and they were helpful to us,'' Bárzaga said.
When he first arrived in a Villa Clara prison, he added, there were no utensils available. The presos comunes — those in prison for common, rather, than political, crimes — made him a spoon from a can and a cup from a cut-up water bottle.
Some of the common prisoners helped the political ones smuggle out letters and documents denouncing conditions.
The political prisoners also witnessed how common prisoners resorted to drastic measures, making themselves ill — setting fires to their mattresses and wrapping themselves in them, cutting their eyeballs — to get a guard's attention to be sent to the infirmary.
“I saw a prisoner inject excrement in his veins. Nobody told me this, I saw it with my own eyes,'' said Omar M. Ruiz Hernández. “They sewed their mouths with wire. They do all this to protest the conditions, to get something they've been denied.''
Despite the unsanitary conditions and the bad food, the hardest part of prison life were the psychological effects of confinement.
Family visits and phone calls were scarce and suspended arbitrarily. Letters were delivered to the prisoners three to four months after they were written. Several went on hunger strikes to protest the mistreatment.
Two of the ex-prisoners, Léster González, 33, and Pablo Pacheco, 40, said they smuggled out prison diaries that they've brought to Spain and hope to publish.
With the help of outsiders, Pacheco published the blog “Voices Behind the Bars.''
In standard journalistic fashion, he attributed his information to “this reporter'' — meaning himself — or “prisoners who were witnesses'' on posts about overcrowding at Canaletas, a case of tuberculosis, a prisoner who cut himself after he was denied medical attention and almost bled to death in his cell. He also wrote of how authorities quickly confiscated a player with music and family pictures his wife had brought him, and how he was not allowed to attend a concert trovadour Silvio Rodríguez gave at the prison.
HUMAN MISERY
For some, the prison sentence meant the end of love affairs and friendships.
“The mother of my daughter came to see me and said our relationship was over,'' Léster González said. “I felt defeated, my whole life had been ruined. I wanted to die.''
That night, he said, a guard was posted in front of his cell. He was on suicide watch for a long while.
Omar Rodríguez, a graphic journalist whose photographs depict a Havana in ruins and its people living in stark poverty, used his street savvy to survive in prison. He was serving a 27-year sentence for launching a news agency from Havana.
Survival, he said, entailed relating to the prison guards “with dignity.''
“I treated them as members of a people who are suffering,'' Rodríguez said. “I never directed toward them what they directed toward me — hate.''
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/30/v-fullstory/1754665/the-hardest-life-surviving-cuban.html
Expand the modern tools of liberation
Posted on Saturday, 07.31.10Expand the modern tools of liberationBY CARLOS SALADRIGASwww.cubastudygroup.org
Information has always been a liberating force, and throughout history, authoritarian regimes have always attempted to control it — Cuba is no exception.
Still, Cuba's recent liberalization of communication and technology has had a great impact.
In March, the mothers, daughters and wives of Cuban prisoners of conscience — known as the “Ladies in White'' — marched in Havana and were beaten by State Security in broad daylight.
Camera phones, illegal up until 2008, captured many of the images that mobilized the outside world in solidarity within a scant matter of minutes.
Later, news that Cuban dissident Guillermo Fariñas had agreed to abandon his hunger strike following news that the Cuban government had agreed to release 52 political prisoners was first announced by Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez via Twitter, where she later posted the first photo of “El Coco'' drinking his first sip of water in 135 days.
Traditionally, these regimes have resorted to isolation and the outright banning of information media to achieve their goals.
Yet these closed societies have often faced a different kind of dilemma: the positive impact of technology on economic activity versus its liberalizing powers.
Attempting to deal with this dilemma, modern dictatorships have opted instead for controlling information media rather than banning it.
However, modern information and communications technology has presented two serious and fundamental challenges to dictatorial regimes.
• It has democratized information in an unprecedented manner by empowering every citizen to be a producer, rather than a simple consumer, of information.
• For those regimes that seek to prioritize economic growth, they are forced to balance the politically liberating forces of technology with the need to be competitive in an increasingly global marketplace.
Cuba is not exempt from these challenges; rather, it is attempting to balance these challenges.
The Cuban government needs to fundamentally reform the island's economy but deeply fears the political impact of widespread access to communication and technology tools.
How it pursues that balance can be greatly facilitated or hindered by U.S. policy toward Cuba.
As little as five years ago, there were just a few thousand mobile phones in Cuba, almost all of them in the hands of government officials, foreigners and members of the elite.
Since Raúl Castro's announcement lifting the ban on cellphones, the number of cellphones is rapidly approaching one million by the end of 2010.
The reason is simple: the economic benefits outweighed political concerns.
It is unreasonable to expect the development of other forms of communication tools and technology in Cuba, such as the Internet and social media, without economic models to make them work.
Current U.S. regulations restrict the access necessary to make this happen. In fact, the restrictions on Cuba are significantly more onerous and tough than those applied to countries like Iran, North Korea, Syria and Burma.
Expanding the opportunities for U.S. telecom companies to provide cellphone and Internet service to the island will help ensure that Cuban citizens possess the tools they need in order to become agents of change.
To say this does not deny or minimize the real controls that the Cuban government places on its own citizens' access to the Internet.
But expanding citizens' access to even the most rudimentary technology in Cuba would be a giant step forward in empowering a new, independent generation of Cuban citizens.
The Cuba Study Group in collaboration with the Brookings Institution and the Americas Society/Council of the Americas recently released a white paper, Empowering the Cuban People Through Technology: Recommendations for Private and Public Sector Leaders, which outlines specific steps the American government and private sector actors can take to facilitate Cuban's access to technology.
The report is the result of work of the Group's Cuba IT & Social Media Initiative, which brought together more than 50 IT and telecommunications experts in an effort to identify ways to ensure that Cubans on the island have access to the technology they need to acquire and share information and communicate with each other and the outside world. The report is available at www.CubaITinitiative.org.
Carlos Saladrigas is co-chairman of the Cuba Study Group.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/31/1754671/expand-the-modern-tools-of-liberation.html
Expecting little, Cubans got nothing
Posted on Saturday, 07.31.10VERBATIMExpecting little, Cubans got nothingBy XXXXXX
Below are excerpts from Yoani Sánchez's Generation Y blog.
The July 26 event started early, in fear of the evening rains and to avoid the sun that makes the neck itch and annoys the audience. It had the solemnity that is already inherent in the Cuban system: heavy, outdated and at times dusty. Nothing seemed to jump out of the script; Raúl Castro didn't take the podium, nor was the speech addressed to a nation waiting for a program of changes. His absence at the microphone should not be read as an intention to decentralize responsibility and allow someone else to speak at such a commemoration. The general did not speak because he had nothing to say.
In previous speeches, on this same date, the phrases of the Cuban Communist Party's second secretary have created more confusion than certainty, so this time he avoided analysts reinterpreting them. Enough doubts have already been created with his 2007 predictions of mass access to milk, his unfulfilled forecast of having Santiago de Cuba's aqueduct completed and the unfortunate phrase “I'm just a shadow,'' with which he began his speech last year. Perhaps because of this he preferred to remain silent and leave the address to the most unyielding man of his government: José Ramón Machado Ventura.
What we saw today is pure State secretiveness. To make no public commitments to change, no visible implications of transformation, can be a way of warning us that these do not respond to [Raúl's] political will, but rather to a momentary despair that — he thinks — will eventually pass. By saying nothing, he has sent us his fullest message: “I owe you no explanations, no promises, no results.''
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/31/1754673/expecting-little-cubans-got-nothing.html
La sequía sigue afectando a Cuba a pesar de las lluvias de julio
La sequía sigue afectando a Cuba a pesar de las lluvias de julioEFE
La Habana, 30 jul (EFE).- La aguda sequía que afecta a Cuba desde hace más de un año mantiene al país en una situación crítica, con recursos acumulados inferiores al 50 por ciento en sus embalses, a pesar del aumento de las lluvias en el mes de julio, informó hoy el diario oficial Granma.
Según ese rotativo, las precipitaciones en julio no han compensado el déficit acumulado en las reservas acuíferas del país y la sequía continúa afectando a numerosos sectores económicos y sociales.
El director de Cuencas Hidrográficas del Instituto Nacional de Recursos Hidráulicos (INRH), Jorge García, dijo a Granma que "es prematuro confirmar el inicio de la recuperación definitiva de los embalses y fuentes subterráneas de abastecimiento de agua" teniendo en cuenta los acumulados del mes.
En mayo y junio solo se registró el 57 por ciento de la media histórica de precipitaciones para ese periodo, y al cierre de junio los embalses acumulaban el 43 por ciento de su capacidad total.
Según estudios del INRH, las precipitaciones ocurridas hasta el pasado 28 de julio elevaron el agua de los embalses al 44,6 por ciento de su capacidad, con 131 millones de metros cúbicos más que en junio.
No obstante, Granma resalta que, tanto en términos nacionales como territoriales, el comportamiento de las lluvias en julio "no compensa el déficit acumulado" y "sería apresurado aseverar que se inicia una recuperación de los embalses y fuentes subterráneas de abastecimiento".
Actualmente las provincias de Sancti Spíritus y Ciudad de La Habana, donde se ubica la capital de la isla con más de dos millones de los 11,2 habitantes que tiene el país, presentan la situación más crítica, con reservas que no llegan al 25 por ciento de la capacidad de embalse total.
"La actual situación exige el refuerzo de las medidas de control para contribuir al uso racional y eficiente del agua, lo mismo por parte de empresas agropecuarias como por entidades industriales y la población de forma general, para afrontar cualquier contingencia adversa de continuar la situación actual", resalta Granma.
Según datos oficiales, la actual sequía comenzó en noviembre de 2008 y se intensificó en el transcurso de 2009, clasificado como el cuarto de menos lluvia en los últimos 109 años.
Las afectaciones principales se encuentran en la agricultura de varias zonas del país y en el abastecimiento de agua a las provincias orientales.
http://es.noticias.yahoo.com/9/20100730/tsc-la-sequia-sigue-afectando-a-cuba-a-p-23e7ce8.html
Cuba: electrocución entre los accidentes mortales más comunes
sábado, 31 julio | 1:04 PM
Cuba: electrocución entre los accidentes mortales más comunes
La electrocución por los rayos que producen las tormentas de verano y también por la corriente eléctrica se encuentran entre las causas de los accidentes mortales más comunes en Cuba, según informó hoy el diario oficial Granma.
El rotativo cita a la jefa del Programa Nacional de Prevención de Accidentes del Ministerio de Salud, Milagros Santacruz, quien hizo un llamado "a la autoresponsabilidad para evitar los accidentes por electrocución".
Esos sucesos ocuparon en 2009 el quinto lugar en la lista de accidentes más frecuentes en la isla, sólo precedidos por los del "tránsito, ahogamiento y sumersión, cuerpos extraños y las caídas".
El año pasado fallecieron en Cuba 142 personas electrocutadas, de ellas 46 a causa de los rayos y 96 por accidentes con la corriente eléctrica.
Santacruz recabó "la mayor previsión de cada ciudadano" ante esos peligros, y recomendó medidas como abandonar las playas, ríos y piscinas durante las descargas eléctricas, así como no utilizar teléfonos y evitar permanecer en azoteas y lugares con arboles y tendidos eléctricos.
Además, se recomienda a los cubanos que protejan sus conexiones eléctricas, no colocar calentadores eléctricos manuales en los baños, y evitar el contacto con cables "desprendidos" en calles y aceras.
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