Aging with Cuba and the Misery Markets
Aging with Cuba and the Misery Markets May 24, 2012 Daisy Valera
HAVANA TIMES — I'm terrified of old age. It's not exactly because of the portending future of sagging breasts, back pains or wrinkles resulting from overly repeated gestures.
I'm afraid of aging, especially, because I'm afraid of Cuba.
Havana is a city for young people, those capable of chasing down a bus, enduring endless waits in lines, and eating lots of carbohydrates and few vitamins.
While Cuba needs youth doped up on caffeine, the main actors in this city and across the country are the elderly.
Emigration and the low birth rate make my walks constant encounters with grandparents, and even great-grandparents.
They're everywhere, and I can't stop looking at them and almost feeling chills.
There aren't too many with faces evidencing the marks of repeated smiles in the corners of their mouths.
What are constantly repeated are the faces of bitterness and fatigue.
The elderly are faced with having to struggle at the same pace as the young since retirement here is in no way synonymous with an extended vacation or playing in the yard with the grandkids.
Instead, it's the pronouncement that one's future labor will be even that much more precarious.
Seniors are the principal sellers of products that only cost a peso (about 4 cents USD). These items include paper cones of peanuts, a shot of coffee and long pieces of candy whose taste reminds you so much of toothpaste.
They are become hawkers, newspaper vendors and sellers of plastic bags at the entrances of vegetable markets.
They were also the ones who died of cold at the psychiatric hospital and are the ones who continue to beg to tourists in the streets of Old Havana.
Finally, to my horror, they've become clerks at the only inexpensive markets of the capital. These are places — which while lacking state-given names (though the government requires them to pay taxes) — have wound up being dubbed "misery markets."
The main markets of this type located at the corners of Belascoain and Monte, Infanta and Carlos III, and Zulueta and Apodaca.
At those sites, the elderly, the mentally ill and alcoholics offer us what they've salvaged from the trash.
These might be things like a blouse that can be used ten times more, a beat-up alarm clock, a comb with missing teeth, or shoes still having soles but also a few holes.
All of these items are sold in regular pesos.
I look at these individuals and feel sad. Their pensions aren't enough to live on.
In the end, they benefited little from so many long hours of volunteer labor, doing night-time block watch duty, or for punctually attending all of the neighborhood meetings of their CDRs (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution).
For them, the bright future they were promised will never come.
They don't have any options, and they (like me) know how difficult it is to protest.
Where are the social workers when they're needed?
What's happening with those nursing homes vitally needed by our seniors?
Where is adequate food going to be found for the many diabetic and hypertensive elderly patients here?
In any case, I'm scared to death.
Resellers Lying in Wait
Resellers Lying in Wait May 24, 2012 Yanelys Nuñez Leyva
HAVANA TIMES — The area in Old Havana on and around Monte Street is where the resellers concentrate.
Many of them come from the more economically depressed eastern Cuba and have settled in Havana in whatever way they could.
In search of a better life, we can see them there all day long on the sidewalks ecstatically touting their wares.
Or you can find them in long lines buying food that they'll later resell to those who are unable to obtain such items because these are on sale during their work hours or because of the resellers hoarding all those products.
The method of the resellers is simple:
If a product comes on market at a relatively affordable price, they'll monopolize the purchases at any cost – even violating the law.
This is because sometimes, to prevent such speculation, restrictions are placed on selling more than a certain amount of a product to any one person. However the corruption that exists in the businesses themselves put the brakes on any type of state control or regulations.
This short writing isn't an attack on anyone for trying to eke out a living, but is a call to focus attention on these practices, which aren't recent inventions or anything unique to Cuba, but they do noticeably affect the daily life of ordinary people today.
What steps are taken with respect to these people? I don't know.
All we know is that more and more of these resellers are lying in wait, and like a religious sect they help and protect each other.
The solution isn't to put them all in prison, because others will simply replace them.
Nor is the solution to fire clerks and salespeople who provide them with exorbitant amounts of products.
The solution must involve a change in the infrastructure and thinking, one that benefits the people who actually produce goods in this country to satisfy the millions of needs and wants of the nation's consumers.
Would that be some kind of utopia?
Human rights report highlights regional violence, abuse
Posted on Thursday, 05.24.12
Human rights report highlights regional violence, abuse
The U.S. State Department released its 2011 human rights report highlighting violence in Honduras and Mexico, and civil rights abuses in Cuba and Venezuela BY JIM WYSS jwyss@MiamiHerald.com
Drug fueled violence in Mexico and Honduras, mass detentions in Cuba and an executive power grab in Venezuela were highlighted in the U.S. State Department's 2011 human rights report released Thursday.
The annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices often ruffles feathers in the region where the U.S. is accused of using the study as a foreign policy bludgeon even as it ignores its own problems at home.
In Cuba, the study found that the island continued its systemic repression of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedoms of speech, assembly, and association. The report also accused the government of organizing mobs to intimidate opposition groups and resorting to arbitrary detentions to muzzle activists. Short-term detentions doubled from 2010 to 2011. In December, those detentions hit a 30-year high when almost 800 people were detained to keep them from marking Human Rights Day, the report found.
In Honduras, most of the human rights abuses were connected to the nation's gang and drug-cartel violence, which have made it the most dangerous country on the planet. However, "deep-seated and unaddressed corruption" in the police force was also leading to rights abuses. On Dec. 7, gunmen killed Alfredo Landaverde, a former senior government advisor on security, after he accused police leadership of being linked to organized crime.
In Mexico, the most serious human rights challenges in 2011 emanated from the country's fight against organized crime and the ongoing gang battles over drug trafficking routes. "They engaged in human trafficking and used brutal tactics against citizens, including inhumane treatment, murder, and widespread intimidation," the report found. Gangs have also had a chilling effect on the media, executing bloggers who reported on their activities and threatening journalists who criticized them, the study said.
In Venezuela, the report found that the "concentration of power in the executive branch continued to increase significantly," as President Hugo Chávez used special decree powers granted to him by the outgoing legislature. Using that authority, Chávez had passed 26 laws, "including a number of provisions restricting fundamental economic and property rights," the report found. The government also failed to respect judicial independence and had turned a blind eye to "corruption at all levels of government," the report found.
The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices were started more than three decades ago to help guide U.S. lawmakers' decisions, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in the preface to the study. "Today, governments, intergovernmental organizations, scholars, journalists, activists, and others around the world rely on these reports."
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/24/2816050/human-rights-report-highlights.html
Havana hookers rob US chef in art show
Posted on Friday, 05.25.12
Havana hookers rob US chef in art show Not funny, says critic of trips to Cuba By Juan O. Tamayo jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio jokingly tweeted, "I was no where near Cuba."
So who was the New York chef, or assistant chef, who went to Cuba for a bit of food diplomacy and wound up being robbed by the two hookers he took back to his hotel room?
It seems like nobody is willing to tell, although reports on the misadventure have been making the rounds of foodie blogs and websites and drawing jokes, insider jabs between chefs and at least one serious reproach of the trip to Havana.
Ten prominent New York chefs flew to Cuba earlier this month for the 11th annual Habana Bienal modern art show, to put on a piece of performance art with 10 Cuban counterparts — cooking in a kitchen built into a cargo container.
But New York chef Sara Jenkins on Wednesday cast a different light on the visit when she tweeted, "So one of the American chefs in Cuba took two whores home with him and then got robbed of all his money #butofcourse #icantsaywho!"
The restaurant, bar and nightlife blog Easter National swiftly published the tweet and began speculating on exactly which chef had been robbed, because some on the list of 10 never made it to Cuba and were replaced by others. Some also took assistants to Havana.
Among the names mentioned were the chefs of famed New York restaurants like Hearth, Terroir, Sueños and Sunday Night Dinner and Alma de Cuba in Philadelphia, Eater National reported.
Colicchio, a long-time judge on the reality TV show Top Chef, was not on any of the lists and his tweet was clearly a "not me" joke.
After the brouhaha erupted, Jenkins, the chef at Porchetta in New York, sent a tweet apologizing "to all the chefs and colleagues who helped put together this amazing cultural exchange for indiscreetly calling out the behavior of one member."
"What was meant to be some collegial ribbing in fact has instead reflected poorly on all the chefs who donated their time and energy to this project," she added. "And while I don't condone the individual's behavior, I do regret airing it publicly on Twitter. Social media lesson learned."
One reader's comment posted on the Easter National site said, "If it's good enough for the Secret Service and the DEA…" referring to the recent scandal involving the agencies and prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia.
The kitchen performance, named "Project Paladar" after Cuba's family-owned restaurants, was part of a program designed to use food, cooking and eating to improve relations between the people of Cuba and the United States.
Elizabeth M. Grady, an adjunct professor of art history at the State University of New York, managed the project for smARTpower, described on its web site as a U.S. State Department-funded initiative to use visual arts to bring people together.
But the program drew fire from Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee, which favors strong U.S. sanctions on the island's communist government.
The chefs flew to Cuba under a new category of U.S. Treasury Department license approved by the Obama administration to promote so-called "people-to-people" contacts between Cubans and Americans.
Too many U.S. visitors on those licenses are in fact engaging in pure tourism, which is illegal, and sometimes hiring Cuba's famously cheap hookers, Claver-Carone has complained.
"As if serving gourmet meals while regular Cubans struggle to serve themselves any meal wasn't insulting enough, at least one of the chefs took the 'people-to-people' definition too literally," he complained Thursday in his blog, Capitol Hill Cubans.
"Boy, these "people-to-people" programs are really winning the hearts and minds of the Cuban people," he joked. More seriously, he added, "Could this new policy be any more insulting and counter-productive?
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/25/2816014/havana-hookers-rob-us-chef-in.html
Venezuela: Fiber-optic cable to Cuba is working
Posted on Thursday, 05.24.12
Venezuela: Fiber-optic cable to Cuba is working The Associated Press
CARACAS, Venezuela — An undersea fiber-optic cable that was laid last year between Venezuela and Cuba is working, a Venezuelan government official said Thursday.
The cable was rolled out starting in Venezuela and reached eastern Cuba in February 2011. But 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, Cuba's government has not recently mentioned the cable, and the Internet on the island remains the slowest in the Western Hemisphere. The link had been expected to promptly improve the speed of the Internet in Cuba.
Jorge Arreaza, Venezuela's science and technology minister, said that "a few months ago we signed all the remaining protocols, all the necessary security measures with the Cuban government."
"It's absolutely operational. It will depend on the Cuban government what it uses it for. Of course that's their sovereign matter, but we know that the undersea cable is in full operation," Arreaza told reporters.
The project was carried out last year by the company Alcatel-Lucent SA of France for the state telecommunication companies of Venezuela and Cuba. The cable stretches about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from Venezuela across the Caribbean Sea to Siboney in eastern Cuba. From Cuba, an extension of about 150 miles (240 kilometers) was also laid from Cuba to Jamaica.
Arreaza said officials are considering the possibility of another branch stretching to the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
He said Venezuela's telecommunications system benefits from the new link to Jamaica because it offers additional connections to other undersea cable systems running toward the United States and Europe.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/24/2816168/venezuela-fiber-optic-cable-to.html
Cuba crackdown sees foreign companies exit
May 21, 2012 5:29 pm
Cuba crackdown sees foreign companies exit By Marc Frank in Havana
Tighter restrictions following President Raúl Castro's crackdown on state corruption and inefficiency is leading foreign businesses to leave Cuba, jeopardising the investment that his reform programme needs if it is to succeed.
The number of foreign joint ventures in Cuba has now fallen to no more than 240, according to government insiders, versus 258 in 2009, the last official figures available, and more joint ventures have closed than opened since the reform package was approved last April.
One of the latest companies to go is Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer giant, after a 15-year joint venture expired and a dispute over the controlling interest in a new venture could not be resolved, a local manager said, asking not to be named.
At the same time, an offshore oil find that Havana had hoped would lead to increased access to international capital and less dependency on socialist ally Venezuela has so far proved fruitless after Repsol, the Spanish oil company, said late last week that the first of three test wells drilled in Cuban waters had no oil.
It was hoped that sweeping reforms adopted by the Communist party last year would open the way for significant foreign investment. But the government has instead re-examined existing agreements and stalled new projects, foreign business sources said.
Four joint ventures controlled by two Canadian trading firms are in the process of being "liquidated". The top two executives in a British fund, Coral Capital, which says it has invested $75m in Cuba – much of it in the luxurious Saratoga hotel – are being held, although not charged with any offence, on suspicion of corrupt practices. Another target – Max Marambio, a Chilean businessman and friend of Fidel Castro – fled the country after being charged with corruption last year.
Although Mr Castro's reform plan promised a review of cumbersome foreign investment procedures, promoters of several golf course projects report they are still waiting for approval, despite government promises to sign off in 2011, as are various companies that have been negotiating sugar ventures since 2006.
A multibillion-dollar plan to expand a refinery in central Cienfuegos and build a petrochemical complex around it, announced years ago, has also yet to materialise.
"I like to think the government is cleaning up the house before opening the front door," Cuban economist Juan Triana told a gathering of British and Canadian businessmen last week.
One western diplomat said: "Cuba is reviewing the investment terms and some officials have said they want to fix mistakes made when the country first opened up to foreign investment in the 1990s, closing contracts that were not beneficial enough."
Most experts and diplomats believe Mr Castro's plans to lay off up to 1m state workers and lift the country out of its economic malaise will fail without large flows of direct investment, or a major oil find in the Gulf of Mexico.
The need for foreign partners is especially acute given the uncertain future of Cuba's cancer-stricken ally, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who provides the island with some 115,000 barrels of subsidised oil a day and faces a presidential vote in October, which he could lose.
"While it is far from clear what the future holds for Chávez and Venezuela, Cuba must be ready for it," said John Kirk, a Latin America expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.
"Given the continued US will to stymie any access to international lending organisations, the only source of significant capital around is still going to be foreign and private," he added.
Of the dozen or so multinationals operating in Cuba, Telecom Italia left in 2011 while those remaining include Nestlé (bottled water), Sol Melia (hotels), Pernard-Ricard (rum), Anheuser-Busch InBev (beer), Imperial Tobacco (cigars) and Bouygues Batiment (construction).
If Havana hoped an offshore oil find would strengthen its position, it may now have to think again after Repsol said on Friday that the test well it drilled to 4,500m below the seabed was dry. Russia's Gazprom and Malaysia's Petronas will soon drill a second well, and Venezuela's PDVSA is tentatively scheduled to drill a third. The US Geological Survey has estimated that Cuban waters could contain 5bn barrels of oil.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e76f3952-a34b-11e1-8f34-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1vo0KLFXk
Castro’s Useful American Students
Castro's Useful American Students Malcolm A. Kline, May 23, 2012
For years we have reported on professors who brag that they have done something worthwhile by taking their students to Cuba. For example in 2006, we reported that "Gustavus Adolphus College is ahead of the curve on junkets."
"We have funded 'Teaching for Social Justice' trips to Tanzania, Cuba and Ireland," Professor Eric Eliason, who teaches at GAC, reported to a panel at the Modern Language Association's annual convention. Dr. Eliason did not share the Civil Liberties primers that Fidel Castro provided.
"The Cuban government targets those who go there so if you're from Oklahoma and have never been to Cuba, you'll believe what your professor tells you," Tania Marstrapa, a research professor at the Institute of World Politics, said at the Heritage Foundation on May 18, 2012. "Then they come back and say they met people on the street who say they have great health care."
"They haven't: They've met plants."
Like Eastern European Soviet satellites of old, whose archives she has studies, Mastrapa points out that the Cuban government engages in "disinformation campaigns utilizing media, clergy and Western university professors to make anti-communism unfashionable."
"Visiting students stay in tourist areas," says Vanessa Lopez, a research associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "They don't see the poverty."
Lopez has visited the island nation since Fidel Castro famously ceded power to his brother Raul and argues that the alleged changes there have even been cosmetic, at best. "Many people in the media and in some academic circles are saying that the changes that Raul Castro has institute in the past six years have led to democratic changes," Lopez avers. "This is simply not the case."
She notes that there are 181 private sector activities permitted under Raul Castro. Budding entrepreneurs, for example, can shine shoes, refill cigarette lighters, be bathroom attendants, and "be a dandy, whatever that is."
"Raul Castro has governed with severe brutality since 2006," Lopez claims. "This is not a man who is less of a dictator than his brother."
As part of the presentation during which both ladies spoke, the Heritage Foundation featured audio messages from human rights activists from within Cuba. "Parallel to this important awakening of consciousness of a people who resist and refuse to continue living without freedom, the forces of the Castro-communist dictatorship have increased their repressive measures against the Cuban people and pro-democracy activists, beating women, threatening to sexually assault them and their small children, surrounding their homes, and confining them to house arrest, proving that they are very fearful of public actions out on the streets as part of the We Are All Resistance and The Streets belong to the People campaigns," black Cuban activist Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez said. "All these repressive politics are increasing, while various governments and personalities who consider themselves democratic are openly flirting with our repressors, whether it is by visiting the island to meet with our victimizers and ignoring the victims, or by attempting to legitimize the Castro regime in international forums."
"Meanwhile, it is alarming that while activism and Resistance is increasing inside Cuba and while repression also increases, the government of Mr. Barack Obama has exercised a political agenda of approach and relaxation with the regime of Havana, instead of strengthening the support for the Resistance."
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
Cuba says prison population at more than 57,000
23 May 2012 Last updated at 10:54 GMT
Cuba says prison population at more than 57,000
More than 57,000 people are in jail in Cuba, according to a rare report about the prison population published by the Communist Party newspaper, Granma.
Granma said efforts had been made to improve conditions for the 57,337 inmates, and that 23,000 had prison jobs and were being paid.
Dissident groups have put the prison population between 70,00 and 100,000.
Granma's report came as a UN panel held a hearing on Cuba, including alleged degrading treatment of inmates.
The article in Granma said rehabilitation programmes were under way, with education and training being provided at all levels.
It noted that an investment plan running until 2017 aimed to improve prison infrastructure and improve living conditions for inmates. Continue reading the main story
Prison population per 100,000 Cuba: 518 US: 730 England and Wales: 155
Sources: Cuba calculation based on official figures; International Centre for Prison Studies
About half of the inmates were in open jails, Granma said.
And the 23,000 prisoners who were working were being paid the same amount as other workers, the paper added.
Dissidents groups say prisoners are used to work for government-owned businesses but receive very little, if any, pay. White collar crime
According to the official figures, some 10,000 prisoners have been released over the past six months, including 2,900 freed as a goodwill gesture over New Year.
These have included common criminals and political prisoners. Ladies in White marching in Havana Members of the Ladies in White dissident group have been briefly held
There has been, however, a reported increase in the number of people jailed for corruption, with some reports speaking of 400 officials and managers jailed.
This suggests that the Cuban government now sees white collar crime as its main challenge, says BBC Mundo Havana correspondent Fernando Ravsberg.
The UN Committee Against Torture on Tuesday began a hearing into Cuba.
Issues raised included poor prison conditions, the use of solitary confinement, and "short" detentions where people were held usually for just 24 hours as a possible deterrent.
Cuba's Deputy Attorney General Rafael Pino Becquer told the hearing that Cuba was working to improve its prison system and that there had been no deaths in custody as a result of wrong-doing since 1997.
Alan Gross vs. the Cuban Five?
Alan Gross vs. the Cuban Five? May 23, 2012 – Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency Washington
Advocates for Alan Gross, who is serving prison time in Cuba, say that talk of a trade for five Cuban spies is a non-starter. But they acknowledge hopes that the Obama administration will consider lower-level concessions in exchange for Cuban considerations for the jailed American. Gross with his wife, Judy, at the Western Wall in the spring of 2005 Photo courtesy of the Gross family
Insiders say that Gross' advocates want the U.S. government to consider, among other things, more family visits for the "Cuban Five," agents who were arrested in 1998 and convicted in 2001 on espionage-related charges, and the permanent return home for the one among them who is now out of jail and serving probation.
The Cuban government recently came closer than ever to making explicit that the fate of the Cuban Five factors into its considerations of whether to release Gross, the State Department contractor who was convicted on charges stemming from his efforts to connect Cuba's small Jewish community to the Internet.
Gross, who is Jewish and from Potomoc, Md., was arrested in 2009 and sentenced last year to 15 years.
"We have made clear to the U.S. government that we are ready to have a negotiation in order to try and find a solution, a humanitarian solution to Mr. Gross' case on a reciprocal basis," Josefina Vidal, the top official in the Cuban Foreign Ministry handling North America, said in a May 10 interview on CNN.
Vidal would not offer specifics, but prompted by interviewer Wolf Blitzer, she said the Cuban Five were a concern. "Cuba has legitimate concerns, humanitarian concerns related to the situation of the Cuban Five," she said.
The State Department immediately rejected such reciprocity. "There is no equivalence between these situations," Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said in remarks to the media the day after the interview. "On the one hand, you have convicted spies in the United States, and on the other hand, you have an assistance worker who should never have been locked up in the first place. So we are not contemplating any release of the Cuban Five, and we are not contemplating any trade.
"The continuing imprisonment of Alan Gross is deplorable, it is wrong, and it's an affront to human decency. And the Cuban government needs to do the right thing," she said.
On background, a source apprised of the dealings among Gross' advocates, the U.S. government and the Cubans says that Gross' advocates are willing to press for visits by the wives of two of the Cuban Five, Rene Gonzalez and Gerardo Hernandez. The United States has refused visas multiple times for the women, and Amnesty International has taken up their cause.
Another possible "give," according to the source: a permanent return to Cuba for Gonzalez, who is out of jail and serving probation in the Miami area. It's not clear what the Cubans would offer in return for such concessions, but it is likely they would draw protests from the Cuban-American community, including among stalwart pro-Israel lawmakers, such as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the powerful chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, who has rejected any leniency for the Cuban Five.
Ronald Halber, who heads the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington and has directed much of the national activism on Gross' behalf, said he understands the "intensity" of the Cuban-American community's response, but said that Obama also should take into account the national interest.
"I do not believe that U.S. policy to Cuba can be held hostage by the Cuban community in Miami," he said. "It's American national interests that are at stake. They should be part of the conversation, I understand the intensity, although this intensity is more among the older generation, not the younger generation. Our government has to do what is in our interests."
Gross' family and his advocates in the organized Jewish community emphasize their agreement with Nuland's premise: There is no equivalency between a contractor installing and training others in the use of communications equipment and five spies believed to be instrumental in the 1996 shooting of two small aircraft leafleting Cuba with pro-democracy messages, resulting in the deaths of four Cuban-American activists.
Three of the five were sentenced to life and one to 19 years. Gonzalez, sentenced to 15 years, was released last year on a three-year probation.
"We're not in a position to negotiate that and I don't think the U.S. government is inclined to do so," said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the community's foreign policy umbrella.
Instead, he said, "we are continuing to press the case in various fora directly and indirectly."
That included the Presidents Conference's recent requests that Pope Benedict XVI raise Gross' plight during his March trip to Cuba.
Gross, who is held in a medical facility, has been visited by family, friends and Jewish leaders. He is allowed weekly calls to the United States.
Most recently he spoke with leaders of the JCRC of Greater Washington to thank them for leading U.S. advocacy on his behalf.
Gross, his family and his advocates want him to make a two-week visit to his 90-year-old mother, who is dying of cancer in Texas, after which he has pledged he will return to Cuba.
His family had voiced support for allowing Gonzalez to return home for two weeks to visit his brother. Gonzalez made the visit in March and has since returned.
Vidal said the two concessions were not equivalent.
"The cases of Mr. Gross and Mr. Rene Gonzalez, I have to tell you, are different," she told CNN. "First, Mr. Rene Gonzalez, who is one of the Cuban Five, he served completely his term until the last day. Rene Gonzalez was not detained and was not imprisoned for attempting against U.S. national security."
Those are the charges against Gross; Cuba says the Cuban Five were guilty only of spying on groups it considers as extremist and not on the U.S. government.
Cuba maintains that Gross' activity on behalf of the Jewish community was a cover for installing sophisticated communications equipment. Gross has said the equipment is freely available in U.S. electronic goods outlets and online.
Halber of the Washington JCRC noted a new openness to Cuba under the Obama administration, which has facilitated travel between the two countries. President Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela, is attending a conference this week in San Francisco.
Halber said the primary fault lies with the Cuban government for attempting to leverage Gross' freedom to secure concessions for the Cuban Five.
"He is a man who is being used as a hostage, who is being used as a pawn," Halber said. "The Cubans are using a man as a bargaining chip to get back five correctly convicted folks who committed crimes on U.S. soil."
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/25921/Alan_Gross_vs_the_Cuban_Five/
Cuban exports up 11 percent through April – report
Cuban exports up 11 percent through April – report Wed May 23, 2012 1:26pm EDT
* Service exports drive 11 percent increase in earnings * Tourism and sugar production up significantly By Mark Frank
Havana, May 23 (Reuters) – Cuban exports were up 11 percent during the first quarter of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011, due mostly to increased income from tourism and health care services, state media reported on Wednesday.
The increase follows a 20 percent rise in exports in 2011, the report said, quoting Vivian Herrera, director of exports at the Foreign Trade Ministry.
The numbers appear to be good news for President Raul Castro and his efforts to bolster Cuba's debt-ridden economy by increasing export income and decreasing imports.
Cuba's exports totaled $14.2 billion in 2010, according to the last official statistics available.
According to preliminary figures, Cuba's exports rose 11 percent compared to 2011, 15 percent of which was goods and the remainder services, Herrera said in an interview broadcast by local television.
"Most of the earnings from services are accounted for by tourism and health care assistance," she said.
Tourism arrivals grew 5.2 percent through April, the National Statistics Office reported. In Cuba, tourism is considered a service export.
Some 40,000 Cuban professionals, most from the health care sector, are working in oil-rich Venezuela and the bulk of earnings go to the Cuban government.
Cuba exports similar technical services to some 30 other countries.
The service category also includes communications and revenues from joint ventures and patent leasing abroad.
This year's increase in goods exports most likely came from higher prices for refined oil products and from sugar, with a 11.7 percent increase in raw sugar production reported through April.
Nickel output, the country's main export product, was believed to be down a bit through April as international prices fell.
According to official statistics and local economists, Castro's efforts to boost exports and reduce imports have resulted in annual trade surpluses averaging $2 billion since 2009.
The country has not reported on its balance of payments, which measures the inflow and outflow of all foreign exchange, since 2008, when it registered a $1.7 billion deficit.
Cuba last reported its foreign debt in 2008 at around $20 billion, with more than 50 percent classified as inactive, dating back to when the country defaulted in the late 1980s, while the remainder was active debt piled up after the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba's former benefactor. (Editing by Jeff Franks and David Adams; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/23/cuba-exports-idUSS1E84M00Q20120523
Recent Comments