HAVANA | Fri Feb 3, 2012 10:57am EST

Feb 3 (Reuters) – Cuba is opening the door to private management of some
state-run cafes and food service outlets in an apparent test of further
reforms aimed at keeping the island one of the world's last communist
countries.

The government said food prices rose nearly 20 percent in 2011 in a
warning sign that economic change will not be painless.

Spain's Repsol YPF brought the massive Scarabeo 9 drilling rig into
Cuban waters and began drilling what Cuba hopes will be the first of
many wells in its untapped offshore oilfields.

ECONOMIC REFORMS

In eastern Holguin province, officials said 211 state-owned cafeterias
would be leased to employeesin a semi-privatization similar to what has
been done nationally with barber shops and beauty salons the past year
and recently expanded to other service businesses such as watch repair
and carpentry shops.

The Holguin program has not been mentioned in national media, but is
likely a trial run before it becomes generalized, as was done with the
other services.

The government, which wants to slash a million jobs from its payroll and
encourage more private initiative, has said it will turn many small
businesses, nationalized since the 1960s, over to employee cooperatives.

It is encouraging self-employment, with more than 362,000 people now
working for themselves.

Economy Minister Adel Yzquierdo Rodriguez told the National Assembly in
late December that 170,000 state jobs would be cut in 2012 and as many
as 240,000 new non-state jobs added.

The government's goal is to have up to 40 percent of the island
workforce of 5.2 million in non-state jobs by 2015.

President Raul Castro has made reform of Cuba's lagging agricultural
sector a top priority and the Cuban state, which owns 70 percent of the
country's land, has leased 3.5 million acres (1.4 million hectares) to
150,000 private farmers since he succeeded older brother Fidel Castro as
president in February 2008.

In some areas, the state has increased the land farmers can lease to 165
acres (67 hectares), extended their leases to 25 years, allowed them to
build homes on the land and will let them pass the leases on to family
members.

Yet food output was up just 2 percent in 2011 and still below 2005 levels.

That, reduced food imports by the cash-strapped government and reforms
allowing farmers to sell more of their production for market prices
combined to make food prices shoot up in 2011.

The National Statistics Office reported that meat prices rose 8.7
percent while produce prices increased 24.1 percent, for an average of
19.8 percent on the year..

At the same time, the average monthly salary inched up only a few
percentage points to the equivalent of $19 a month, the government said.
The statistics stated what Cubans already knew — their buying power has
shrunk under Castro's reforms.

President Castro told the National Assembly that Cuba still expected to
spend $1.7 billion on food imports in 2012.

He also emphasized at a Communist Party conference the importance of an
ongoing crackdown on corruption, which already has shuttered three
foreign firms and sent executives of some of Cuba's biggest state-run
firms to prison.

He said the party would implement term limits for the country's leaders,
but he gave no details.

What to watch:

- The pace of reforms and their consequences.

- The development of small businesses.

- Agricultural production and food prices.

FINANCIAL HEALTH

Castro said the economy grew 2.7 percent in 2011 and was expected to
rise 3.4 percent in 2012.

Cuba said it drew a record 2.7 million tourists in 2011, bringing in
revenues of about $2.3 billion.

Travel industry experts say tourism has boomed this winter as the Arab
Spring scared Europeans away from northern Africa, relaxed U.S.
regulations made it easier for Americans to visit the island and
Castro's reforms drew visitors curious to see the effects of changes.
They said Cuba needs more hotels to accommodate its growing tourism
industry, which is a top hard currency earner for the country.

Cuba is heavily indebted and still recovering from a liquidity crisis
that led to a default on payments and freezing of foreign business bank
accounts in 2009.

Castro told the National Assembly that accounts for foreign suppliers to
Cuba had been unfrozen and steps taken to prevent the problem from
happening again.

Hopes that reforms would bring more foreign investment have been slow to
materialize, but Brazilian company Odebrecht said it would sign a
contract to help Cuba improve its troubled sugar industry. One executive
said the deal would include ethanol production.

Long-awaited golf course developments, aimed at attracting wealthier
tourists, remain on hold.

What to watch:

- Resolution of outstanding short-term debt

- Signs of increased interest in foreign investment

- Growth of tourism and Cuba's ability to handle it

OIL PLANS

The Chinese-built Scarabeo 9 arrived in Cuban waters and at January's
end began drilling the first of three exploration wells in Cuba's part
of the Gulf of Mexico.

Spain's Repsol YPF and its partners plan to drill two of the wells and
Malaysia's Petronas and its partner, Russia's Gazprom Neft, will drill
the other, all this year and with the same rig.

The project has drawn opposition in the U.S. Congress, but, to allay
safety concerns, Repsol allowed U.S. experts to inspect the Scarabeo 9
in Trinidad and Tobago. They said it met all international engineering
and safety standards.U.S. companies are forbidden from operating in Cuba
by the U.S. trade embargo.

Cuba depends on imports from its oil-rich ally Venezuela, but says it
may have 20 billion barrels of oil offshore. The U.S. Geological Survey
has estimated 5 billion barrels.

What to watch:

- Results of Repsol's exploratory well.

- U.S. pressure to stop the drilling.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

A planned Papal visit in Marchimproved ties with Brazil, whose President
Dilma Rousseff paid an official visit in January,are bright spots even
as Cuba faces a more hostile Spanish government elected in November.

A major concern for Cuba is the health of Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez, a loyal ally whose government provides 114,000 barrels of oil a
day and investment to Cuba. He underwent chemotherapy in Cuba and has
declared himself cancer free, but experts say it is too soon to tell.

If he were unable to continue in office, it would be a big blow to Cuba.

U.S.-Cuba relations, which thawed briefly under President Barack Obama,
have been frozen by the imprisonment of U.S. aid contractor Alan
Gross.He is serving a 15-year sentence for providing Internet gear to
Cuban Jews under a U.S. program promoting Cuban political change.

A document reported to be the court's sentence said Gross knew the
political aims of his work and tried to hide it from Cuban authorities
despite his claims to the contrary.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/03/cuba-risks-idUSRISKCU20120203

“The responsibility for Wilman Villar Mendoza’s death in custody lies
squarely with the Cuban authorities, who summarily judged and jailed him
for exercising his right to freedom of expression.”
Javier Zúñiga, Special Adviser at Amnesty International
Fri, 20/01/2012

The death in custody of a Cuban prisoner of conscience after a hunger
strike is a shocking reminder of the Raúl Castro government’s
intolerance for dissent, Amnesty International said today.

Wilman Villar Mendoza, 31, died this morning in Juan Bruno Zayas
Hospital in the city of Santiago where he was transferred from prison on
13 January due to health problems allegedly arising from a hunger strike
protesting at his unfair trial and imprisonment.

He was serving a four-year prison term on charges related to his
participation in a public demonstration against the government.

“The responsibility for Wilman Villar Mendoza’s death in custody lies
squarely with the Cuban authorities, who summarily judged and jailed him
for exercising his right to freedom of expression,” said Javier Zúñiga,
Special Adviser at Amnesty International.

“His tragic death highlights the depths of despair faced by the other
prisoners of conscience still languishing in Cuban jails, who must be
released immediately and unconditionally.”

“The Cuban authorities must stop the harassment, persecution, and
imprisonment of peaceful demonstrators as well as political and human
rights activists.”

On 14 November 2011, police arrested Villar Mendoza and eight other
members of the Cuban Patriotic Union dissident group in the eastern town
of Contramaestre for taking part in a protest against the Cuban government.

While he was in detention, police intimidated Villar Mendoza, telling
him he would be disappeared or face imprisonment on criminal charges
stemming from an earlier arrest if he did not stop his protests and
leave the dissident group.

He was released after three days in police custody but was then summoned
to Contramaestre Municipal Tribunal on 24 November. Judges tried him in
private and refused to accept testimony from his wife or other defence
witnesses.

The judges sentenced the activist to four years’ imprisonment and
immediately transferred him to Aguadores prison, in the provincial
capital Santiago. The same day, he began a hunger strike in protest at
the ruling.

As Villar Mendoza’s health deteriorated over recent days, members of the
Cuban Patriotic Union and the Ladies in White opposition group organised
a vigil outside the hospital. On 18 January, state security officials
broke up the gathering and detained more than a dozen people.

Wilman Villar Mendoza is not the first prisoner of conscience to die in
Cuban custody.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a prisoner of conscience jailed after the “Black
Spring” crackdown on opposition groups in March 2003, died in prison on
23 February 2010 after several weeks on hunger strike.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/cuban-authorities-responsible-activists-death-hunger-strike-2012-01-20

Amnesty International said Monday that three Cubans held without charge
for 52 days following their arrest at a protest were released last week,
hours after the human rights group named them as prisoners of conscience.

The release of the three also came a day after a hunger-striking
dissident died, prompting condemnation from island dissidents, rights
watchers, the United States and other nations. Amnesty had planned to
designate Wilman Villar, 31, a prisoner of conscience but he died in
custody before it could.

Ivonne Malleza Galano, Ignacio Martinez Montejo and Isabel Haydee
Alvarez were set free Jan. 20 but threatened with "harsh sentences" if
they do not stop their anti-government actions, the human rights monitor
said in a statement Monday.

It said all three were detained at a Nov. 30 protest in Havana at which
Malleza and Martinez held a banner that read "Stop hunger, misery and
poverty in Cuba." Alvarez was arrested for objecting when security
forces took the other two into custody.

"Amnesty International had adopted them as prisoners of conscience, as
they were detained solely for exercising their right to freedom of
expression and freedom of assembly, and had called for their immediate
and unconditional release," the statement said.

Cuba considers dissident activity to be counterrevolutionary, and the
dissidents to be mercenaries out to bring down the communist-run
government. It denies holding any political prisoners in its lockups.

Amnesty, which has strict criteria for who constitutes a "prisoner of
conscience" including a history of nonviolence, had not recognized any
Cuban inmates as such since the previous spring, when the last of 75
dissidents jailed since a 2003 crackdown were freed.

Villar was arrested in November in the eastern city of Santiago
following an anti-government protest.

The Cuban government denied that he had been on hunger strike or was
even truly a dissident. It described him as a "common criminal" sent to
prison for domestic violence, said he received all the medical attention
he needed and alleged that his case was being manipulated for political
ends.

Authorities' indignation continued Monday as official newspapers Granma
and Trabajadores published an editorial titled "Cuba's Truths." Taking
up the entire front pages of both publications, it attacked critics' own
records on human rights and defended the island, citing achievements in
health care, education and literacy, and calling the accusations a smear
campaign by Cuba's enemies.

"The so-called political prisoner was serving a sentence of four years,
following a fair process … and a trial according to the rule of law,
for brutally and publicly beating his wife, threatening police and
violently resisting arrest," the editorial said

The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which
monitors detentions of dissidents in Cuba, sent an open letter to the
government demanding access to the investigation.

It said it wanted to confirm or rule out its belief that Villar was
unfairly and disproportionately punished for his political activities,
held in solitary confinement and given inadequate medical care when he
went on hunger strike. Signed by Commission founder Elizardo Sanchez, a
dissident and former prisoner himself, the letter doubted that Villar
was truly imprisoned for beating his wife.

"The family incident from July 2011 should be clarified, as well as the
reasons why he would be freed and sent back to the family home despite
the possible risks from a supposed situation of domestic violence," it read.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/amnesty-cuba-releases-prisoners-conscience-15422861#.Ty7HQYF63To

A Cuban-American jailed in Cuba since 2006 is freed and sent home
because of ill health

Julio Rafael Mesa Fariñas, freed by Cuba on Friday, was in a cell next
to Alan Gross during part of his incarceration.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com

The Cuban government freed a former Hialeah truck driver jailed since
2006 for a people-smuggling attempt in which a smuggler died and allowed
him to fly home because he was ill.

Julio Rafael Mesa Fariñas, 51, said he was taken to the Havana airport
Wednesday directly from a cell next to the one where U.S. subcontractor
Alan Gross is being held and flew to Miami with the help of U.S.
diplomats in Havana.

During his six years in prison, Mesa said, he was hospitalized several
times because of hunger strikes, was bitten twice by guard dogs while
handcuffed and suffered hypothermia when he refused to wear prison uniforms.

Cuban officials told him that he was being freed because of his ill
health. He is now in a wheelchair and suffered a seizure Thursday that
landed him in a hospital, Mesa told El Nuevo Herald during a lengthy
phone interview Friday.

Mesa said he and two other Cubans set out from Mexico's Caribbean state
of Quintana Roo aboard a 40-foot boat in April of 2006. They had been
hired to pick up 44 people trying to escape from the southern coast of
Pinar Del Rio Province.

The Cuban government alleged the boat was intercepted by one of its
Coast Guard vessels, failed to heed a warning to stop and took
"aggressive actions" that required guardsmen to open fire. Geovel
González Morera, one of the smugglers, was shot and killed and Rosendo
Salgado was shot in the foot. Salgado and Mesa, both U.S. citizens, were
sentenced to 26 and 20 years in prison, respectively.

"There was no warning of any kind. A flare went up and they
automatically opened fire. They assassinated Morera," said Mesa, who
added that he plans to file a lawsuit against Cuba "for Morera's murder."

Mesa noted that during the clash a guardsman threw a rock that hit him
on the head, causing partial paralysis and landing him in a hospital for
a month. While odd, he said, the rock-throwing is noted in the documents
of his court case.

He launched several liquids-only hunger strikes at the Combinado del
Este prison in Havana to demand a transfer to La Condesa, reserved for
foreigners, or a reduction of his sentence, Mesa added. Former political
prisoners Oscar Elias Biscet and Angel Moya confirmed Friday that they
met Mesa in prison and that he staged several hunger strikes. Other
details of his tale could not be independently confirmed.

Mesa said he was in and out of several hospitals because of his hunger
strikes, and spent two periods in the prison wing of the Military
Hospital Carlos J. Finlay in Havana's Marianao section. That is the
hospital where Gross is being held.

Gross was arrested in late 2009 and was sentenced to 15 years for
delivering sophisticated communications equipment to the Cuban Jewish
community. The equipment was paid for by the U.S. government as part of
a program that Havana has labeled as "subversive."

Mesa said during his second stay at the military hospital where he was
held for 60 days before he was released, Gross appeared to be thinner
and "unwell" but "in good spirits" and that he had benefits that Cuban
prisoners did not, such as air conditioning in his room and a special diet.

Guards did not allow them to talk, he added, but he heard Gross shouting
that a State Security official "had lied" by promising benefits, such as
a reduction in his sentence, if he cooperated with the investigation.

Also held at the military hospital is Rolando García Pereira, a U.S.
resident convicted of people trafficking in 2001.

Mesa left Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and during a return
visit he met a woman and they had a son. He promised smugglers to pick
them up for $20,000, he said, and was working off the debt when he was
captured.

He said that after Cuban officials told him that he would be freed, two
U.S. diplomats in Havana visited him to arrange his departure. He
received a valid U.S. passport, and a daughter sent him the money for
the flight to Miami.

It was not immediately clear whether Mesa could face criminal charges in
the United States for the people-smuggling case.

As he left Havana, Mesa said, Cuban immigration officials stamped every
single page of his passport so he could never use it again. Arriving in
Miami in a wheelchair and with a stamped-up passport after a six-year
absence, he said he was greeted with a "Welcome home. No questions. No
nothing."

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/03/2623925/a-cuban-american-jailed-in-cuba.html#storylink=misearch

A recurring theme among the last days of 2011 and early 2012 by Cubans
and foreign individuals interested in the Cuban reality has been about
the outlook for the year just begun, given the chronic nature of the
national economic crisis, the ongoing measures (reforms) of the
General-President, with his Galapagos kind of pace, the announced
increase in the worldwide recession and the political events that will
have an important influence on the situation in the medium term, namely,
the presidential elections that will take place in the United States
and, fundamentally, those in Venezuela.

The warning signs that constitute the tip of an iceberg floating adrift
erratically became more pronounced in Cuba in 2011: the removal of some
subsidies, the end of the monthly lifetime allowance in hard currency
(50 CUC) to staff having completed health "missions" in other Third
World countries, the shut-down of several work centers and other silent
layoffs, the reduction in ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of
Our Americas) student programs, especially at the Latin American Medical
School, increases in food prices and other staples, worsening economic
living conditions in the poorest sectors of society (the majority), in
contrast against increases in the standard of living of a small sector
of the new middle class, among others. This, coupled with the general
apathy and the growing feeling of helplessness on the part of groups
that will not benefit from Raulista measures, is a picture that points
to the further deterioration of social situations and the potential
increases in crime, among other adverse factors.

One of the strongest contradictions is the slow pace of government
reforms, which, so far, has been unable to stop the deterioration of the
system, compared to the rapid social impoverishment that is directly
reflected in the disappointment, uncertainty, and lack of confidence in
the future, especially a future dependent on the power group that
controls both the macro economy and national politics. There don't seem
to be many flattering indicators, or reasons for hope. If the welfare of
Cuban families hinges on setting up a kiosk or an eatery, on remittances
received from relatives abroad –those who have that luxury- or on
expectations that hang on the generosity of the government, we might as
well start turning out the lights and closing the doors: that is not a
future.

On the other hand, none of the new economic "rights" has been matched by
social and political rights, as is logical under totalitarian regimes.
Cubans have been so thoroughly disenfranchised and have been subjected
to such "paternalistic" controls that even we in the opposition factions
and independent civil society have sometimes unconsciously wished that
freedom of expression, of association and of the press be "allowed", as
if they weren't natural rights inherent to the human condition. What can
we expect from others who have let discouragement win!

Nevertheless, 2011 was also witness to a surge in alternative and civic
groups and to obvious links between the two. A spontaneous process of
modest but visible growth has been taking place within the independent
civil society, which could be consolidating gradually. Undoubtedly,
though it is a small sector, corresponding to the conditions of the
dictatorship, this is the reflection of the will of Cubans with
emancipated mentalities, determined not to ask permission to be free,
convinced that it is vital to transform reality within ourselves. A few
years ago this was unthinkable. Similarly, along with the growth of
civic spaces, we can expect strong resistance from the authorities, and
an eventual increase in repression.

The fate of one and all in this 2012 will be marked, among other
situational factors, by the interests that have already been outlined
more clearly, which, in very general terms, are: the olive green elite
and all of its caste, by virtue of recycling itself in order to maintain
power; the great entrepreneurs, members of that same caste or associated
with it, for maintaining an economic monopoly and increasing their
private capitals; new small businessmen and owners, for increasing their
profits, making use of the meager reforms, and perhaps for fighting for
other reforms; the ever-unfortunates, for surviving another year of
shortages; we, the disobedient dreamers, for increasing activism in
order to promote awareness of democratic changes and for seeking new
ways to foster them.

Some readers may think I'm pessimistic, but that is not the case. My
greatest optimism consists precisely in viewing reality face-to-face and
continuing to wish for changes. Today, the despair of tens of thousands
of Cubans is one of the main allies of the regime. However, we must not
give up. We might find the opportunity and perform a miracle in the
midst of all this dark, murky and imprecise present. Nobody knows how
much time we have left, but it is not the time to throw in the towel.
Those of us who are alive and want to achieve will not allow fatigue and
defeat to win the game.

Translated by Norma Whiting

January 9 2012

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13947

A little less than a year ago I lived for two weeks thinking I had
cancer in my lymph nodes. In November, 2010, a team of pathologists at
the "Carlos Manuel de Cespedes" Provincial Hospital in Bayamo signed a
yellowish paper, prepared on a typewriter with a number of typing
errors, telling me I had a Hodgkin lymphoma of the nodular sclerosis type.

The news was soon running like wildfire in a city of two hundred
thousand people where my name, due to journalist-politician
confrontations, had gained unfortunate notoriety.

Fifteen days later, another team of pathologists, these belonging to the
"Hermanos Ameijeiras" Hospital in Havana, would make my mother let loose
a flood of withheld tears,by telling us that opinion was nothing but a
monstrous error.

The tests repeated in Havana on my lymph nodes showed an alteration
(hyperplasia) which may have been the product of an ancient virus, which
did not contain any sign of malignancy.

The diagnostics that would save me from the clutches of chemotherapy
came after procedures as tortuous as a bone biopsy of the hip, a
medullogram, and another nasal tissue biopsy (only practicable by
introducing a kind of fine scissors in my nose to the larynx, and
cutting a piece of tissue), from which I suffered for several days.

On returning to my eastern city, with another paper telling me that at
age 26 I was not facing any cancer, never let me know what the five
pathologist from Bayamo did or did not see when they determined that I
had Hodgkin's lymphoma.

That's right: literature searches and dozens of questions to other
physicians let me know that these kind of lymphoma cells have a clear
structure, well-defined, classical, which make any confusion very difficult.

I will never assert that behind an opinion that destroyed the nerves of
my family and my friends, was the dark and powerful hand of the State
Security, as several of those close to me asserted, alarmed at the
inconceivable error. It is not my specialty to found my opinions on
subjective bases, without arguments in hand: that is the specialty of
the slanderers.

However, now that after the incredibly sudden death of Laura Pollan some
well-known Cuban dissidents (Elizardo Sanchez, Guillermo Fariñas, Jose
Daniel Ferrer, among many others) have signed a declaration of refusal
to be hospitalized for illness, I find it impossible not to recall my
own experience.

The national tragedy reaches such extremes of justified paranoia: when
apparatchiks of State intelligence have the power to expel students from
the University, to decide who can and cannot travel outside the country,
to block a person from purchasing food at a supermarket, or entering a
public movie theater; when these apparatchiks are present even in the
most anodyne and least important institutions of society, why not
believe their interests would also prevail in a hospital?

This statement of the Cuban Democratic Alliance, saying that only in
case of emergency surgery do they want to be transferred to a "hospital
of the regime" (read: all Cuban hospitals), and only if a doctor they
trust tells them so, I believe represents one of the most terrible
statements that could be known for a long time: not even in the medical
system do the disaffected feel they have full rights.

Not even in a quasi-sacred ground such as health care, where
professionals swear the Hippocratic oath to defend the lives of their
patients at all costs, an area that should not ever yield to pressures
or influences of any kind, not even there can Cubans who oppose the
government can feel safe.

Yoani Sanchez once told me how the emergency medical attention she
received at a clinic in Havana, was reported later, in minute detail, by
a reporter who aired a television report against her.

Just as I will never know how much was error and how much was
intentional in a diagnosis that ripped away a large part of my youth,
it's likely we may never know to what extent two deadly viruses entered
the body of Laura Pollan naturally, if she was already infected with
them, and whether they were really the cause of death of the Lady in
White. That's one of the many consequences of the obscurantism with
which everything moves at the official level in Cuba.

But we do know a hard truth: the values of a society are too riddled
with rot if even the responsibility, the incorruptibility of medical
ethics must be distrusted by those who disagree with government policy.
With or without reason.

(Originally published in Martí Noticias)

October 20 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13955

Communist country's embrace of free market not an unmitigated success

A year at the vanguard of Cuba's economic revival has not brought Julio
Cesar Hidalgo riches. The fledgling pizzeria owner has had his good
months, but the restaurant he opened with his girlfriend often runs at a
loss. At times, they can't afford to buy basic ingredients.

Yet the wide-faced 31-year-old says he is grateful to be in business at
all. A year ago, Hidalgo was concocting chalky pastries in a Spartan
state-run bakery where employees and managers competed to pilfer eggs,
flour and olive oil, the only way to make ends meet on salaries of just
US$15 ($19) a month. Today, he is his own boss, a taxpayer, employer and
entrepreneur.

"I think my expectations were met because in Cuba today I couldn't have
hoped for anything more," he said one recent December afternoon as his
girlfriend, Giselle de la Noval, served customers. "We survived."

Hidalgo's story is mirrored by many of the entrepreneurs the Associated
Press followed through 2011 in a year-long effort to document Communist
Cuba's awkward embrace of free-market reforms.

Their experiences, like the reforms themselves, cannot be described as
an unmitigated success. Of the dozen fledgling business owners,
including restaurateurs, a DVD salesman, two cafe owners, a seamstress,
a manicurist and a gymnasium operator, three have closed down or begun
working for someone else, and one has been harassed by her former state
employers. None could be considered successful by non-Cuban standards.

But despite their struggles, many tell of lives transformed, dreams
realised, attitudes changed, and doors opened that had been closed for
more than half a century.

For Hidalgo, personal hardships have added to the challenges of starting
a business on a Marxist island that has looked askance at
entrepreneurship since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution turned a one-time
capitalist playground into a Soviet satellite.

After suffering through a slow, hot, summer when nobody wanted a pizza,
Hidalgo had to close for two months to care for his grandmother, who has
Alzheimer's disease. Even while the business was shut, he and de la
Noval had to make tax and social security payments, wiping out the few
hundred dollars they had saved.

They reopened in late November with so little money they can't always
afford to serve their house special.

"We've had to start from scratch, but the only reason we didn't lose the
business altogether is because we were disciplined," said de la Noval,
23. "Before we did anything, we always put away the money we needed to
pay the state."

A year that President Raul Castro described as make or break for the
revolution has ended after a dramatic flurry of once-unthinkable reforms.

In October, the Government legalised a used car market, and a month
later extended it to real estate, sweeping away decades of prohibitions.
In late December, the state began extending bank credits to new business
owners and those hoping to repair their homes.

But one of the most powerful reforms was Castro's decision last year to
greatly expand the ranks of the self-employed, part of a somewhat
unsuccessful effort to trim bloated state payrolls.

Some 355,000 people have received licences to start their own
businesses. On nearly every street in Havana and in thousands of hamlets
and towns across Cuba, makeshift signs and bright parasols mark the
entrances of new businesses, and the long-lost cries of kerbside vendors
hawking everything from fruit and vegetables to mops and household
repair services fill the warm Caribbean air.

The Government has declined to release any statistics on tax revenue or
payroll savings from the reforms, except for an October report in the
Communist Party newspaper Granma that said tax revenue from new
businesses had tripled.

Cuban leaders last month lowered their forecast for economic growth for
2011 to just 2.7 per cent from the 3 per cent originally hoped for. By
contrast, China is forecast to grow by about 9 per cent in 2011, Vietnam
by between 6 and 6.5 per cent and Brazil by 3.8 per cent.

Because most entrepreneurs don't have the capital to start innovative
businesses, many have opened cafeterias, nail parlours, small roadside
kiosks and the like.

Maria Regla Saldivar is a black belt in taekwondo who got a licence to
give private lessons to neighbourhood kids in a scruffy park across the
street from her job.

She began the year with dreams of persuading the Government to let her
turn an abandoned dry-cleaning warehouse into a private recreation centre.

But the Government refused to grant her a lease. Then her bosses at
Cuba's National Sports Institute docked her pay because they said her
outside work was affecting her performance. She quit. Finally, her
former boss prohibited her from using the park for martial arts lessons,
which are technically prohibited. The Government considers it
potentially deadly training, even though most of Saldivar's students are
not even teenagers yet. "It's called envy," Saldivar said of her boss.

She insists she is not teaching taekwondo, slyly calling the discipline
"Quimbumbia" a word of her own invention. She has moved classes for her
14 students into the tiny covered patio in the back of the apartment she
shares with her teenage daughter.

But Saldivar says she has no regrets. She says making business decisions
for herself has increased her self-esteem, and she is thrilled that
she's managed to put away US$80, about four months salary at an average
state job. "You may laugh, but for me it's a lot of money," she said,
running her coarse fingers over the stripes on a pair of sky-blue track
suit bottoms she bought. "I've wanted these for so long and now I have
them. I look like a proper trainer now, not someone out picking mangoes
from a tree."

Rafael Romeu, the head of the Washington, DC-based Association for the
Study of the Cuban Economy, said Castro had "changed the conversation"
since taking over from his ailing brother in 2006, pushing the
leadership to get the island's economic house in order rather than
blaming external factors such as the 49-year US travel and trade embargo.

But so far, the changes don't go far enough to revive Cuba's moribund
economy.

"These are positive steps but when you say them out loud, just think
about it. … You are allowed to have a cellphone, you are allowed to
buy a home, you are allowed to buy a car or have a microenterprise. This
is not the fall of the Berlin Wall. These are not major changes," he
said. "Cuba has tremendous difficulties. This is a marathon, and they
are taking baby steps."

Romeu, who has worked around the world studying emerging economies, said
that Cuba was moving much more deliberately than the Chinese did when
they began opening their economy in the late 1970s, or the Vietnamese a
decade later.

Cuba's predicament is somewhat different, as well. Both China and
Vietnam were deeply agrarian economies whose challenge was lifting tens
of millions out of crushing poverty, Romeu said. Cuba is a more urban
country with an ageing population whose citizens have got used to
benefits including health care and education, but who have grown
accustomed to a system that doesn't make them work for such middle-class
perks.

"In Cuba, the challenge is sustaining the middle class, not creating
one," Romeu said.

Still, some reforms seem to be moving along more quickly than many
analysts had hoped.

Business is booming at a street corner long known as the centre of
Havana's informal real estate market. Only now, the handwritten listings
on trees openly advertise legal home sales, instead of disguising them
as property "swaps".

Mendez Rodriguez, an unofficial real estate broker, said the buying and
selling was aboveboard, controlled by a relatively untangled bureaucracy.

"Everything is by the law now," said Rodriguez, even if his profession
is not officially licensed. He and other so-called facilitators work for
"gifts" left to the discretion of their clients, he said.

Rumours that real estate brokers would be the latest addition to the
list of 181 licensed entrepreneurial activities have not come to pass,
but there's still hope the profession will be added in 2012. Rodriguez
said the opening seems to have led to a steep increase in prices, with a
home worth US$20,000 a couple of months ago going for 50 per cent more
today.

Javier Acosta has sunk more than US$30,000 he saved as a waiter into his
own upscale establishment, and says business is far from booming.

"There are days when nobody comes, or when I have just one or two
tables, and then there are days when the place is filled."

He said his costs run to about US$1000 a month, and when business is
slow he struggles to break even.

Yet the reforms, he says, have changed the face of Cuba, and cynical
countrymen who doubt the opening will be lasting must wake up to a new
reality.

Despite his struggles, Acosta says he would take the risk again if given
the chance.

- AP

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10777860&ref=rss

This article was written by Luis Felipe Rojas for 'Diario de Cuba'. It
has been re-posted on this blog:

In regards to the year which has just begun, it is evident that the
directions of the Cuban government are like forked transit lines. With
more desires to give orders to its members than to implement any sort of
political economy, on January 28th they will hold the First National
Conference of the Communist Party (PCC).

Towards the end of March the General-President will receive the Vatican
authorities, rosary and timbrel at hand. And during the middle of the
year he will once again be in the limelight, with our without the
fulfillment of promises. Cuba will once again see how dreams and
demands dissipate.

On a tour which was expected to come sooner or later, the Castro
leadership has gone up against itself. Against the inflated staffs,
administrative corruption, and economic inefficiency. The three whips
of Cuban society have been exposed in numerous public meetings: the
communist congress and the ordinary session of the National Assembly.

We would have to see if the Cuban technocrats are willing to change
their mentality and cast away their furies against the same projects as
always. While the historic direction holds tight to the old art of
snapping orders and marching, thousands of Cubans try to improve their
lives selling what they themselves cultivate, carrying out service jobs
or applying their talents to new technologies.

However, enthusiasms aside, the penalization of difference still weighs
heavy over the heads of the majority of Cubans, as well as the rake
against free association and the establishment of unions, and laws like
Social Dangerousness which seem to belong in the Middle Ages.

Without being able to defend their most basic rights, the Cuban
citizenry, since the beginning of the millennium, has been trapped in
the delicacies of capitalism and civilization which has been placed
before them. They produce foreign currency, which they cannot freely
enjoy. They substitute imports with medical services which they can
rarely enjoy and, on top of that, they carry the weight of errors
committed by the senile leadership.

The more moderate forces among the rulers (which are not always visible)
opt for a change of tactics and for a reasonable strategy which would
favor the betterment of the citizen. A consensus of the majority of
workers has demonstrated the weariness produced by slogans and
inefficiency of promises.

The criticisms of Raul Castro and the dissidents of the government are
going to crash against the accommodated tendency of the bureaucrats.
Attempting to impregnate from stamps of eternal solidarity with Cubans,
the maximum leadership deprives them of health services which are
obliged to serve their third-world contemporaries.

At this point, many are asking themselves about the relationship between
the statistic offered by Cuba of 4.9 children who have died per each
thousand born alive, and the fact of not publishing the statistics of
the budget cuts in the public health sector. Will this statistic be
upheld despite the cuts? As for the popular sophism of 'tossing the
house out through the window', there is also the fact that there are
many necessities, due to a weakened system of primary attention.

Upon being asked if he was a militant (of the Communist Party, of
course), a well known professor for the University of Oriente responded,
"No, I am the culprit". The joke has transcended university property
and illustrates the disillusion of that 'minority' (in the words of
Rafael Rojas) which, in regards to political strength, has transmuted to
another social ill.

Translated by Raul G.

9 January 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13886

I'm not treading on thin ice if I argue that the legalization of
self-employment — which never should have been outlawed — has been well
received by most citizens and, for many, has become a significant form
of subsistence for their families, despite the high taxes, the
bureaucracy and the inspectors and other complications.

However, in the legalization, I want to call attention to a group of
professionals who have been discriminated against because they have not
been authorized to practice their professions on their one. I'm
referring to doctors, dentists, professors, architects, engineers,
lawyers and others. These, if they work for themselves, cannot exercise
the professions for which they studied and gained work experience — but
may work in other occupations such as parking attendants, taxi drivers,
restaurant owners or workers, or repairers of eyeglasses, lighters or
shoes, and so on, none of which they prepared for or have experience in.
When a country can afford to ignore its professionals in this way, it is
either because there is a surplus or because something isn't working. I
think its the latter.

Photo Peter Deel

The argument for such a prohibition is that if they are authorized to
work in their professions, the State would be without a great number of
them, due to the miserable salaries they receive and their poor working
conditions. I don't doubt it because it's very easy to check, but the
solution is not to continue banning something that might come to pass in
excess.

I think different possible solutions can be analyzed. I'll limit myself
to two: the first, which could be difficult to apply in this time of
economic crisis, would be to raise their salaries to make them
competitive with what they would receive working for themselves, and to
improve working conditions. The second, which could be a transition
phase, would be to limit them to working part of the day for the State —
with the associated wages — and part for themselves, at their own risk.

This would satisfy both interests: the State's and the individual's,
with one as important as the other. It's nothing new: in the years of
the Republic it worked this way in different sectors, such as health,
education and others.

One or the other of these possible solutions, or some other approach,
should be tried sooner rather than later, the full legalization of work,
and every citizen engaged in whatever suits him, for which he is
prepared, when he desires, without absurd prohibitions, within the
framework of free competition.

This would result in economic improvement, bettering the services and
developing the nation. What's more, we would not experience the bitter
originality of having doctors driving cabs, architects making pizzas, or
lawyers serving food. It's true that no decent work is a disgrace, but
please, each one in his place. Good is good but not too much.

January 3 2012

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13721

I dread the hospitals on my planet! At least those I'm entitled to go
to. I told a doctor friend who works in a clinic in my neighborhood, a
recent graduate who is still rotating between different health centers
to acquire practice.

She not only told me I was right, but told me the great state of
unhealthiness she found in most of the centers where she rotated. The
doctors, she tells me, denounce these situations, but their complaints
fall into the void. According to what else she said, the Gonzalez Coro
Maternity Hospital, formerly the Sacred Heart Clinic, is in a deplorable
state with regard to hygiene.

She adds that they often accumulate bloody gauze, and debris of all
kinds used in healing, at the end of a dark corridor, overflowing, with
no one taking them out and burning them, as is required.

That's a great deal of bacteria, Staphylococcus, and all kinds of germs,
which are filtered into the rooms of the sick, so close to this deposit,
where hygiene is not optimal. Likewise, the holes for the electrical
outlets are eaten away, leaving room for small cockroaches, already so
typical of our hospitals. In the same bad condition are the door frames,
detached in part from the masonry which they should seal.

The same is true in the clinic where she's now rotating, they don't
collect the waste with sufficient regularity: disposable gloves,
syringes and other items used with the patients, and far from the
incinerators which have been established in order to avoid
contamination, they throw them in the trash container right at the
entrance of the emergency room.

I told her of my shock and dismay when I took my sister to the Angiology
Institute, which is nothing more than an old pavilion of the once famous
Covadonga clinic, which is what everyone keeps calling it, even though
that is no longer its name.

There, while waiting for them to heal some leg ulcers on a patient, I
watched with horror as a nurse applied the medicine with her right hand,
while holding a piece of pizza in her left, which she ate with impunity
in front of the patient. That is just one of the facilities, that like
so many of its kind, were once the pride of our country. From this, you
understand, was born my nosocomofobia.

November 26 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13739

Cuban state media has accused the social networking site Twitter of
helping spread a rumour that former leader Fidel Castro had died, and
criticised anti-Castro expatriates it dubbed "necrophiliac
counter-revolutionaries" for jumping on the story.

An article on the state-run Cubadebate website accused Twitter of
allowing an account holder with the sign-on "Naroh" to start the rumour
this week from an Italian server, then quickly deactivate the account.

It said Twitter then helped spread the disinformation by allowing the
hash tag "fidelcastro" to become a trending topic. It briefly became the
fourth most popular in the world as it drew many more people to the subject.

The site also accused Twitter of censoring subjects in the past that
were in favour of the Cuban government.

There was no immediate reaction from Twitter.

Rumours that a celebrity or other public figure is dead are common on
social media sites and can spread quickly because of their nature.

Cubadebate also blamed anti-Castro expatriates anxious to see Castro's
demise for gleefully furthering the rumour, saying "necrophiliac
counter-revolutionaries, aided by some media, immediately started to party".

Castro, 85, turned power over to his brother Raul in 2006 during an
illness that nearly killed him. He is officially retired, although he
occasionally publishes opinion columns.

In recent months, Castro has alluded to the limits of age but has also
taken pride in his longevity. Cuba boasts that along with besting the
actuarial tables, the former Cuban leader has survived hundreds of
assassination attempts at the hands of his enemies in the United States.

Cubadebate noted that a false story about Castro's demise was spread on
the internet and elsewhere back in August.

On that occasion, there was even a computer virus embedded in a spam
email titled "Fidel is Dead", which featured a doctored, grainy
photograph of the former Cuban leader that appeared to show him lying in
a coffin.

As usual, the Cuban government has declined to make any official comment
about Castro's health. But the former leader hasn't been silent. On
December 31, he sent a get-well letter to a Cuban baseball star that was
read over state television.

Cubadebate on Wednesday reiterated a refrain it used the last time the
Castro rumours began, saying that the latest hubbub was spread by
"people inventing things in the virtual world that even the CIA could
not accomplish in real life".

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/6218745/Cuban-media-blame-Twitter-for-Castro-death-rumour

HAVANA Jan 4 (Reuters) – Cuba has opened more of its retail services to
the private sector and liberalized land lease terms so farmers can rent
more state land and keep it in the family as reforms aimed at fortifying
the socialist system for the future continue.

The Caribbean island's self-employed sector has continued to grow and
Cuba's long-delayed hope of exploring for oil offshore is close to
becoming a reality as a Chinese-built drilling rig is expected to reach
Cuban waters this month.

If oil is found, it will take at least three to five years to produce,
but eventually should reduce or eliminate reliance on oil imports from
Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez, the island's top ally and
economic partner, had surgery for cancer last year.

ECONOMIC REFORM

The government said it would allow Cubans to operate various service
businesses such as appliance and watch repair, locksmith and carpentry
shops, just as it has done the past year with 1,500 state barbershops
and beauty salons. [ID:nN1E7BPOOL]

They will pay a monthly fee for the government-owned space, buy
supplies, pay taxes and charge what the market will bear in another step
away from the doctrinaire communism imposed after the 1959 revolution.

Government officials said there are now more than 357,000 people working
in the self-employed sector, the growth of which is being encouraged
because the cash-strapped government wants to slash a million jobs from
its payrolls and encourage more private initiative. It has temporarily
lowered taxes and begun providing credits to the new entrepreneurs.

No figures have been released but government insiders said in October
that just under 150,000 people had lost their jobs as the government
pushes toward its goal of having up to 40 percent of the island
workforce of 5.2 million in non-state jobs by 2015.

Economy Minister Adel Yzquierdo Rodriguez told the National Assembly in
late December that 170,000 state jobs would be cut in 2012 and as many
as 240,000 new non-state jobs added.

The Cuban state owns 70 percent of the land on the island and, according
to figures given at the National Assembly, has leased almost 3.5 million
acres (1.4 million hectares) to 150,000 private farmers since 2008 with
the goal of increasing agricultural production so it can reduce
budget-draining food imports. About 70 percent of the leased land was
said to be under cultivation.

Food output was up in 2011, but still below 2005 levels, so starting
this month, in response to farmer suggestions, the amount of land they
can rent has been quintupled to 165 acres (67 hectares) and leases
extended from 10 years up to 25.

The leases can be renewed and passed on to family members and farmers
can build homes on the land. [ID:nN1E7BH02Q]

President Raul Castro told the National Assembly that Cuba still
expected to spend $1.7 billion on food imports in 2012.

He also emphasized the importance of an ongoing crackdown on corruption,
which already has shuttered three foreign firms and brought the arrest
of top executives at Tecnotex, a company run by the Cuban military.

Cubans had hoped Castro would announce reforms making it easier for them
to travel abroad, but he said only that changes would be made gradually.

The Cuban Communist Party and the government passed a series of reform
plans this year that would move all business administration out of the
ministries and grant newly formed holding companies more authority to
make day-to-day decisions and control a percentage of their profits.

Cubans are now allowed, for the first time in decades, to buy and sell
homes and used cars. As of the end of November, 6,009 cars had changed
hands and 301 homes had been sold, officials said.

What to watch:

- The pace of reforms and their consequences.

- The development of small businesses.

- The shedding of business management by the ministries.

FINANCIAL HEALTH

Castro said the economy grew 2.7 percent in 2011 and was expected to
reach 3.4 percent in 2012.

Cuba said it would end 2011 with a record 2.7 million tourists for the
year and a 9 percent increase in tourism revenues over the $2.1 billion
in 2010. Tourism is a top hard currency earner for the island.

Reserves at the Bank for International Settlements stood at $5.649
billion in June, double what they were three years ago.

Cuba is heavily indebted and still recovering from a liquidity crisis
that led to a default on payments and freezing of foreign business bank
accounts in 2009. [ID:nN24211495]

Castro told the National Assembly that accounts for foreign suppliers to
Cuba had been unfrozen and steps taken to prevent the problem from
happening again.

Hopes that reforms would bring more foreign investment have yet to
materialize with no significant new ventures this year.

Long-awaited golf course developments, aimed at attracting wealthier
tourists, remain on hold. [ID:nN04118234]

What to watch:

- Resolution of outstanding short-term debt

- Signs of increased interest in foreign investment.

OIL PLANS

A Chinese-built drilling rig, the Scarabeo 9, was in Trinidad and Tobago
in early January and expected to reach Cuba later in the month. It will
be used in the first major exploration of Cuba's part of the Gulf of
Mexico. [ID:nN1E77P03U] Spain's Repsol YPF and its partners will get the
rig first, followed by Malaysia's Petronas and its partner, Russia's
Gazprom Neft.

The project has drawn opposition in the U.S. Congress [ID:nS1E78R1P9],
but, to allay safety concerns, Repsol will let the United States inspect
the rig. [ID:nN1E79H1XN] [ID:nN1E7BJ077] U.S. companies are forbidden
from operating in Cuba by the U.S. trade embargo.

Cuba depends on imports from its oil-rich ally Venezuela, but says it
may have 20 billion barrels of oil offshore. The U.S. Geological Survey
has estimated 5 billion barrels.

What to watch:

- U.S. inspection of drilling rig.

- Results of Repsol's exploratory well.

- U.S. pressure to stop the drilling.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

A planned Papal visit in March [ID:nL6E7NC3I6] and improved ties with
Brazil are bright spots even as it faces a more hostile Spanish
government elected in November.

A major concern for Cuba is the health of Chavez, whose government
provides 114,000 barrels of oil a day and investment to Cuba. He
underwent chemotherapy in Cuba and has declared himself cancer free
[ID:nN1E79J13X], but experts say it is too soon to tell. If he were
unable to continue in office, it would be a big blow to Cuba.

U.S.-Cuba relations, which thawed briefly under President Barack Obama,
have been frozen by the imprisonment of U.S. aid contractor Alan Gross.
[ID:nN1E7AT2CK] He is serving a 15-year sentence for providing Internet
gear to Cuban groups under a U.S. program promoting Cuban political change.

Cuba is angry that five Cuban agents have been jailed in the United
States since 1998, and has given no indications that Gross will be
released early. [ID:nN1E7BR0BZ] (Additional reporting by Marc Frank;
Editing by Kieran Murray)

http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFN1E7BR07020120104?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

HAVANA – Where some might see a rotten window frame pocked by termites,
Julio Cesar Hidalgo envisions a polished takeout counter, the rich smell
of garlic and oregano wafting out onto a warm Havana street.

In his mind's eye, the coarsely-laid concrete covering the surfaces of
his shabby living room is already a gleaming white countertop laid with
sandwiches, pastries, and balls of yeasty dough; a gas oven in the
corner bakes mouthwatering pizza.

Franklin Reyes / AP, file

Julio Cesar Hidalgo takes a break after preparing pizza at his newly
opened Baldoquin's Cafeteria, run out of his home, in Havana, Cuba.
After Cuban authorities announced last September that they were opening
the island's closed Marxist economy to a limited amount of private
enterprise, Hidalgo was one of the first to line up for a new business
license.

Ever since, the 31-year-old baker has been transforming the front of his
narrow apartment in a run-down section of Old Havana into a standup
pizza joint and cafe. In a land of modest dreams, Hidalgo says his is
simple: to be the master of his own labor.

"It's not going to make me rich," he laughs, adding that he may make
only a little more than he does now in a $12-a-month job at a state-run
bakery. "But I'll be working in my own home and I'll be my own boss."

Hidalgo and tens of thousands like him are chasing their entrepreneurial
ambitions in Cuba's year of economic change, hopeful that a sweeping
fiscal overhaul announced last year by President Raul Castro is for
real. The Cuban leader said the country would lay off half a million
state workers by March 31, while granting licenses for a broad, if
slightly random, array of businesses.

The new entrepreneurs face towering challenges in getting their
enterprises off the ground, including high taxes, a lack of raw
materials, an uncertain customer base, labyrinthine bureaucratic rules
and limited access to startup capital. Yet, their success or failure
will go a long way in determining the future of Cuba's revolution.

The Cuban state now employs 84 percent of the island's workers and
controls 90 percent of the economy in one of the world's last bastions
of Soviet-style communism. If the free-market experiment works, the
cash-strapped government could shed millions of dollars from its payroll
while boosting much-needed tax revenues and creating a new business and
consumer class. It could also legalize part of a booming black market
that provides everything from sausages to satellite television.

If the experiment fails, however, this already disillusioned and
dysfunctional country will have turned hundreds of thousands of people
out of their government jobs and into an uncertain future. All of this
in the same year that Raul Castro turns 80, and his older brother Fidel
is widely expected to step down from his final official post as head of
the Communist Party.

Through January 7, more than 75,000 people had received new licenses,
joining about 143,000 private sector workers left over from the island's
last dabble with capitalism. Government economists say they hope a
quarter of a million new entrepreneurs will eventually sign up.

Almost all the new businesses are small, operating out of homes or on
street corners. But the stakes for Cuba couldn't be higher, with the
economy weighed down by crippling disorganization, a broken
infrastructure, endemic corruption and an enormous labor force that has
become accustomed to getting paid very little — and doing very little in
return.

Among the thousands who have taken the leap into private enterprise are
Maria Regla Saldivar, a 52-year-old black belt in Taekwondo who plans to
open a gymnasium in the ruins of a destroyed laundromat, and Javier
Acosta, who has started an upscale restaurant catering to tourists.
There is Danilo Perez, a 21-year-old accountant who has gotten a license
to buy and sell bootleg DVDs in Havana's hardscrabble El Cerro
neighborhood, and Anisia Cardenas, a seamstress with a license to make
clothes.

Many others are giving manicures, painting homes, fixing cars and
driving taxis — services on the list of 178 officially sanctioned
private activities. Some of the other opportunities are more obscure,
such as fresh fruit peeling. And some are so specific they refer to just
two people, like No. 159, which makes it legal to be part of the Amor
Dance Duo.

Even the Cuban government — in an internal document to party leaders
obtained by The Associated Press — warned that many of the businesses
will fail within a year. And many Cubans say privately that they will
wait and see if ventures such as Hidalgo's prosper before jumping into
the fray themselves.

But for now, optimism and excitement reign among the new entrepreneurs.

"We are going to be a success. I am sure of it," says Gisselle de la
Noval, 20, Hidalgo's bright-faced girlfriend, who will work the till at
the pizzeria and share in its profits. "This (economic) opening was
marvelous … I think those who know how to take advantage of it will
have a bright future."

Judy Gross, whose husband Alan has been in a jail in Cuba for two years,
talks about his conviction and the struggle to bring him home.

Dismal economy
Cuba's push to open its economy to private enterprise does not indicate
an ideological change of heart among its Communist leaders. It is based
on necessity.

The economy has been slammed by the global economic downturn, a drop in
nickel prices and the fallout from three devastating hurricanes that hit
in quick succession in 2008. Revenues from tobacco, rum and sugar have
fallen, as have remittances from Cubans living overseas.

Prevented from borrowing from international monetary institutions by the
48-year U.S. trade embargo, Cuba was forced to reduce food and other
imports from its main trading partners by 37 percent.

The economy grew by just 1.4 percent and 2.1 percent respectively in
2009 and 2010, a terrible performance for a small, developing country —
and figures many economists dismiss as fantasy anyway, since Cuba counts
state spending on social programs when calculating economic growth.

Even state-run newspapers have been filled with stories of extraordinary
inefficiency, with dozens of "watchmen" paid by the state to guard
fallow fields, or 30 emergency workers at a hospital standing idle
because all have been assigned to a single ambulance.

"My fear is that the Cuban state is completely broke," says Uva de
Aragon, a Cuba expert at Florida International University, who is
closely watching the free enterprise experiment. "I don't want to think
about what will happen, even in the medium-term, if it doesn't work."

Shortages are everywhere: in the sparse shelves at state-run
supermarkets; along the unlit city streets and empty, rutted highways;
in the antiquated factories on the outskirts of cities and in the
tractorless farms dotting the countryside, many still relying on oxen to
till the earth. The country of 11.2 million people has the lowest
Internet penetration in the Western Hemisphere.

The state pays workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free
health care and education, and nearly free transportation, utilities and
housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to
them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.

Getting by on those salaries is such a struggle that stealing from
state-owned companies is endemic, a major perk of having a job, and a
frightening loss for those about to be laid off. The thievery is also a
huge cost to the government, one of the reasons the country finds itself
in such dire economic straits.

Since taking over from his ailing brother Fidel in 2006, — first
temporarily, then permanently — Raul Castro has been whittling away at
the subsidies.

In recent months he's cut free workplace lunches, removed potatoes,
peas, cigarettes, soap, detergent and toothpaste from the ration book,
and suggested the whole system must eventually be scrapped.

Just how bad things had gotten became apparent in September, with a
red-letter headline in the Communist Party newspaper Granma that the
state would lay off a tenth of the island's work force, while opening up
the private sector. Days later, authorities published the list of 178
activities in which new licenses would be issued.
advertisement

The list steers clear of activities that could present a threat to the
state's monopoly on most economic activity. There are no licenses for
independent lawyers, bankers or engineers, nor for Cubans to work
privately in strategic sectors such as mining or hotel management.

Still, there is no overestimating the scope of the change.

For the first time since the 1960s, Cubans will be able to hire
employees. They may rent out their homes and cars more freely, and hope
to one day get business loans from state banks. Raul Castro has even
called a rare Communist Party Congress, scheduled for April 16-19, in
which the reforms will be enshrined as the country's only way forward.

The new entrepreneurs
Hidalgo is a round-faced man with a permanently amused look in his eyes.
Unlike most Cubans, he has been down the free enterprise road before —
with disastrous results.

Cuba last opened up to some private enterprise following the collapse of
its Soviet benefactor in the 1990s, which ushered in an era of extreme
hardship known as the "Special Period."

In 1997, a 17-year-old Hidalgo and an older cousin opened a pizza joint
in the same dingy apartment, only to find it was impossible to buy the
cheese, flour and tomato paste they needed in state-owned shops.

They turned to the black market, and ran into trouble.

"The inspectors would show up … sometimes once a week, sometimes twice
a week," Hidalgo says. "They demanded receipts, and when I couldn't
provide them they confiscated everything. They forced us to close."

In those days, Fidel Castro decribed the reforms as a necessary evil and
quickly scaled them back once the crisis had ebbed. From a high of
209,000 license holders for private enterprise in 1996, Cuba's tiny
entrepreneurial class had dropped by a third by 2010.

Raul Castro has vowed it will be different this time around, telling
Parliament in December that "the life of the revolution is in the
balance." The government has pledged an initial investment of $130
million to purchase the raw materials new businesses will need, and
Hidalgo pointed to a stack of unopened boxes of white tile he purchased
for $8 a box in a state-owned shop.

Still, the path to self-employment promises to be tough.

Hidalgo has already invested $700 in the pizzeria, largely with a gift
from a cousin in Atlanta.

Given the price of ingredients, Hidalgo thinks he'll have to charge
upward of 20 pesos ($1) for a personal-size pizza with olives and
oregano — a small fortune for anybody living strictly on a Cuban
government wage. And he's already got competition: Two neighbors on his
rundown street have licenses to open cafes.

The government has made it easier for Cubans to rent space to each
other, but there is no retail property available for private citizens,
and few would have rent money even if there was. Most people either must
carve out part of their home, or come up with creative ideas to get
around the real estate shortage.

Saldivar, the martial arts black belt, beamed with excitement as she
walked through the skeleton of a building that was once an industrial
laundry in Havana's Nuevo Vedado neighborhood. She is petitioning the
government to turn over title to the property so she can transform it
into a gymnasium, and meanwhile, is using a small park nearby to hold
fitness classes.

The building has no roof or walls, and the oil-stained concrete floor is
littered with truck-sized pieces of rusted machinery, but Saldivar is
not deterred.

"I'll fix it up," she insists. Her bigger worry is that authorities have
not included martial arts in the list of acceptable activities. Saldivar
says she will either have to limit her classes to aerobics, or
"inventar," a Cuban specialty that roughly translates as "to improvise."

"I don't plan to give Taekwondo classes," she deadpans. "I'm teaching
the kids 'Quimbumbia'," Saldivar's word for a discipline remarkably
similar to Taekwondo.

Making life-long dreams come true?
Another challenge facing the private sector is taxes, which can be as
high as 50 percent, not including social security. Many prospective
entrepreneurs say the taxes will make it difficult for new businesses to
break even, and could also scare many people already making a living on
the black market from becoming legit.

One woman, who has legally rented out rooms in Havana's trendy Vedado
neighborhood since 1994 and describes herself as a strong supporter of
the revolution, complained the new system significantly increases her
taxes: She will pay double the current $108 per room, per month.

"I'm thinking of turning in my license," she says, asking that her name
not be used for fear of attracting the attention of authorities. "What
will be left for us after we pay the government?"
advertisement

The burden will not be as high for some, however. For cafes, gymnasiums
and many other activities, business owners will pay a fixed monthly fee
of somewhere between 100 and 350 pesos ($5-$17), plus social security
and payroll taxes.

At the end of the year, most will be asked to declare their income under
oath and pay a percentage of the profits. But in a nearly all-cash
economy, few are expected to give an honest account.

Phil Peters, a specialist on the Cuban economy who is vice president of
the Arlington, Virginia-based Lexington Institute, says the government
must walk a thin line between zealously policing the private sector for
tax dodgers and black marketeers, and sucking the life out of the
economic opening before it gets off the ground.

He says the government must make good on its pledge to create a system
of wholesalers, and find a way to extend microcredits to small
businesses. Eventually, employee-owned "cooperatives" could take over
inefficient state enterprises.

"If the government is serious about laying off half a million
unproductive workers, then it has a very strong interest in making the
entrepreneurial sector work," Peters says.

Already, there are signs that the other major prong of the reform effort
— the layoffs — are going more slowly than anticipated. Four months
after the cuts were announced, it is unclear how many people have
actually lost their jobs.

Midlevel managers told AP that workers' commissions set up to decide who
is expendable have been slow to hand over names. Cubans familiar with
deliberations in several ministries and state-owned companies say
leaders — including some Cabinet members — have been reluctant to shed
thousands of their employees.

"It is a difficult and dangerous process, particularly if it is not
handled well, or if there is favoritism or corruption," a worker on one
of the commissions told AP, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear
of losing her job.

Perhaps the strongest warning that the reforms do not go far enough has
come from two prominent economists at the state-run Center for Cuban
Economic Studies.

In a rare opinion piece published in a small Catholic magazine, Pavel
Vidal Alejandro and Omar Everleny Perez warned that there are not enough
approved free-market activities to absorb half a million laid-off state
workers, and not enough white-collar jobs for an educated population.

They said it was hard to imagine that illiquid state banks could make
good on the government's pledge to extend microcredits, and urged the
state to reach out to foreign investors.

On a small scale, such investment is already happening. Several
entrepreneurs said they had received seed money from relatives overseas,
most of them in the United States. A recent decision by the Obama
Administration that allows any American to send up to $2,000 a year to
Cuba could make such loans easier.

Even if these new businesses get off the ground, it remains to be seen
whether they will have enough customers, with so many newly unemployed.
But entrepreneurs such as Hidalgo are riding a wave of hope.

Hidalgo waits as a van pulls up carrying a gas oven, a loan from his
girlfriend's mother. He says he expects to be open for business by the
end of February, and plans to call the pizzeria "Baldoquin," after his
grandfather. After more than a decade fantasizing about his own
business, Hidalgo says he can hardly contain himself.

"Just imagine it!" he gushes, thinking of that first pizza out of the
oven. "It will be the realization of a dream I have held onto forever."

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/03/9911431-bright-future-ahead-cubas-economic-changes-create-new-entrepreneurs

If you think about it, Cubans really have very little to celebrate. But
the mere fact of being alive, being healthy, and feeling real desire for
change, are sufficient reasons to do so. Let us decorate our houses to
make ourselves feel better and joyfully welcome visitors, and under no
circumstances allow ourselves to lose the few traditions that we have,
those traditions, which, despite wind and tide, have remained alive in
the hearts of all.

Last night, walking down some of the neighborhood streets, I observed
with satisfaction that, despite shortages and high prices for Christmas
items, many homes are decorated and lit in celebration of the holidays.
Even just a few years ago, few people dared to do this; the majority
placing flags in front of their homes to celebrate another anniversary.

In the past, we alone adorned our balcony with garlands. Now, on my
block, at least four houses are decorated with lights and that was
sorely missed.

Besides handing out flyers advertising gastronomic offerings for the
24th and the 31st of December with Santa's face on them (grapes and
more!), the new paladares are all decorated with Christmas themes,
adding some life to the neighbourhood. Even five years ago, this was
unthinkable. Now, I hope and believe that this will be unstoppable.

Every time you meet someone in the street and you greet them, even if
they don't know you know, they will greet you with: To your health, and
to change. It might be said that in these times the greatest desire of
all Cubans is that these openings continue and that a great
transformation take place in our country, once and for all.

The door of totalitarianism has finally been opened just a crack; our
duty is to continue to keep on pushing so as to open the door wide. We
still have time, it's coming to an end.

Translated by: jCS

December 21 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13455

HAVANA TIMES, Dec 31 — In Cuba, the trend toward vegetarian diets is
becoming more popular. Though it has been fueled by the mass media and
health food advocates, it still hasn't been easy to motivate most people
in this regard.

Cuban dining culture has historically been sustained by the consumption
of meat, fish and carbohydrates (with this latter having been the basis
of the diet since the advent of the Special Period crisis starting the
early 1990s).

Likewise, the inconsistent availability of vegetables and their high
prices in state-run markets have dissuaded many from vegetarianism.

We should remember that barely ten years ago the vegetarian rage broke
out in Cuba as vegetarian restaurants sprouted up in cities and towns on
the island. Nonetheless, it proved to be impossible to sustain these
establishments, with their homeopathic plates and naturopathic dishes of
solely fruits, grains and vegetables.

Their menus begin to see green vegetables replaced by portions of
chicken and anything else that had nothing to do with vegetarianism.

There are, however, some individuals — because of the positions of
leadership they occupy — who can enjoy the luxury of vegetable-based
diet therapies (even rather exotic ones). An incident which I witnessed
a good while ago allows me to testify to that fact.

As part of a series of lectures and debates that I had to attend, the
main guest was a senior government official in a major ministry.

The confirmation of her visit created a major uproar, not only because
of the prestige of this scientist, but also because my co-workers were
responsible for seeing to her meal for that evening. As this was to
consist solely of vegetables, they would have to go around from place to
place looking for the most appetizing vegetables. In fact they enquired
as to what were his preferences.

But they were left with their jaws hanging wide open when they got the
response saying: "Anything, provided it's fresh. Oh, but not broccoli –
it gives her stomach acid!"

Needless to say, broccoli is not grown in Cuba; it is a native of
Europe, where it's consumed in all its varieties. Here it can only be
found as an imported product that is sold in markets that specialize in
products sold in hard currency, making it almost unattainable and
unknown to most Cubans.

In fact, if you asked about it, a good number of people wouldn't know
what you were talking about.

To the ordinary Cuban, that space on their plate is reserved for
lettuce, spinach, watercress and cabbage. Extravagant vegetables like
broccoli, asparagus and mushrooms are only available to those in high
positions, those who are able to enjoy the pleasure of choosing in the
middle of the vegetable rage.

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=58744

Repression still the rule, but Cuba sees year of change

Now you can get a loan, buy a house and — maybe soon — travel abroad
more easily. But the Castro government has no desire to ease its
authoritarian ways.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Joe Garcia, a former executive director of the Cuban American National
Foundation, likes to joke about the chat he might have today with the
late Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the powerfully anti-Castro exile lobby.

Garcia says he would tell Mas Canosa that Cuba's rulers have abandoned
their dream of an egalitarian utopia, and that even Fidel Castro had
confessed that his model of sub-tropical communism "does not work."

He would add that Raúl Castro is now allowing Cubans to start more small
businesses, recognizing their right to sell homes and vehicles and even
embracing foreign investments in those icons of capitalism — golf resorts.

"Jorge would immediately say, 'It's over. We won!'" said the smiling
Garcia, a South Florida Democrat who keeps tabs on developments in Cuba
and has made two unsuccessful bids for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Castro critics would disagree strongly and portray the changes as
nothing more than lipstick on the rotting corpse of a Soviet-styled
economy. Raúl Castro himself timidly calls the changes not "reforms" but
"updates" and has vowed to keep central planning as the backbone of the
island's economy and prevent any accumulation of private wealth.

Yet the changes clearly reflect an ambitious effort to address the
structural flaws of Cuba's communist system, abandon its culture of
paternalism and attack its parasitic bureaucracy — without risking the
government's power to repress dissent.

In a nutshell, Castro's goal is to slash a bloated state sector that
controls an estimated 80 percent of the economy, and to allow more space
for small-scale enterprises that can produce more efficiently, pay taxes
to the government and often can count on financial support from
relatives or friends abroad.

It's not been easy. Pushback from entrenched ideologues and bureaucrats
appears to have undercut some of the changes, and cuts in the ration
cards that provide basic food items at highly subsidized prices have
pummeled Cuba's neediest.

A Catholic church in Havana reported a hefty increase in the number of
people at its free lunches in recent months. And the government
reportedly stopped disability and other aid payments to about 3,000
people in the city of Santa Clara this year.

But many reforms are under way, and the pace of change increased after a
congress of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba in April gave a broad
endorsement to Castro's 300-plus proposals for change.

SLOWLY UNDOING NATIONALIZATION

Perhaps the most important reform for the average Cuban was the decision
in 2010 to permit an expansion of private economic activity in a country
that nationalized every single business in 1968, down to push carts that
sold hamburgers.

Today, 357,000 people have licenses for "self-employment" — in tightly
controlled categories such as party clowns and street vendors of music
CDs — and most have incomes well above the official average salary of
$20 a month.

For the first time this year, private entrepreneurs were allowed to hire
employees — previously "the exploitation of man by man" — rent some
state-owned storefronts and even list their services in the island's
phone book, which once rejected them as too "consumerist."

Many state-owned businesses, such as locksmiths, carpentry shops and
repair centers for electrical appliances such as rice cookers, will be
turned into private businesses, according to an official announcement a
month ago.

The government also postponed some taxes and fees and reduced others
when it became clear they would drown the new businesses, and promised
bank loans to the enterprises and to hire some of them to work in areas
like construction.

But the initial rush to obtain self-employment licenses appeared to be
slowing down, and official figures indicate that nearly 20 percent of
those who recently received licenses in Havana surrendered them later,
apparently because they could not make a profit.

Cubans complain that the permitted activities are too limited, that
there are no legal wholesalers for the raw materials they require —
lumber for carpenters, for instance, — and that some taxes and fees
remain unfair. Those who rent rooms to tourists pay the same fees
regardless of their occupancy.

0BTAINING LOANS TO FIX UP A HOME

Changes in the government's banking monopoly, which has never offered
credit cards, never mind a toaster, also mean that Cubans can now obtain
loans to build or renovate homes and pay for materials as well as labor.

Private farmers can open previously unavailable bank accounts to handle
their money, and loans can rise above the old limits — and go even
higher if the borrower has a co-signer or collateral.

Some of the new entrepreneurs are eager to apply for those loans but
less eager to put their money in government banks, amid fears that the
government could seize their accounts in case of a financial crisis.

PUTTING FALLOW LAND TO BETTER USE

Castro also stepped up his attack on Cuba's second most vexing problem:
the myriad failures in agriculture that forced the island to import $1.5
billion in food last year — estimated at 60 to 80 percent of its total
consumption.

As of November, 3.4 million acres of fallow state lands had been leased
to 170,000 private farmers. Farmers also were permitted to sell directly
to consumers and tourist centers, which pay better prices and therefore
help to increase production.

Another change coming soon will increase the limits on the leases from
33 to 165 acres and from 10 to 25 years, and will allow relatives and in
some cases laborers to inherit the leases, according to news media reports.

The upcoming change also for the first time would allow the farmers to
build homes on the leased land, and promises the government will
reimburse the farmers for any improvements should they lose their
leases, added the reports.

Yet nearly two million acres still remain fallow and farmers must do
most of their business through Acopio, the notoriously inefficient state
agency in charge of buying their products and getting them to market —
but which regularly allows them to rot on the way to market and fails to
pay the producers.

Communist Party officials in some provinces are alleged to be grabbing
the best leased acres for themselves and getting all the supplies they
need, like seeds and fertilizers, while other farmers get only part of
their needs.

HOMES FOR SALE — AND ALSO CARS

Also generating a buzz has been Castro's easing of the restrictions on
the sale of homes and vehicles — at times hailed as an unprecedented
recognition of private property rights, at times dismissed as merely
legalizing what had been going on illegally for years.

The permission to buy and sell homes immediately turned the properties
into potential cash and erased the unwieldy requirements for the
previously allowed permutas — swaps of homes of roughly equal size or value.

More than 4,000 "for sale" signs had gone up as of late December and the
government lifted most restrictions on the sale of construction
materials to private buyers, cut prices and made a deal with Brazil's
version of Home Depot to import supplies.

The government reported last week that since the change went into effect
it had registered 360 homes sales and nearly 1,600 "donations" — most
likely efforts to legalize previous sales that did not fulfill all
government requirements.

Cuba faces a critical housing shortage, officially put at 600,000 units
in a country of 11.2 million people. Many properties have been
subdivided many times over the decades to accommodate more families,
making for a messy trail of ownership rights.

The government also announced that it registered 3,310 sales of vehicles
and 994 "donations" in just the first month of the new regulations
allowing the sale of all used cars and trucks.

Previously, only pre-1959 vehicles could be bought and sold without
restrictions. Today, all used vehicles can be sold. But new vehicles are
sold only to Cubans who are approved by the government and earned their
money working for the benefit of the country — like doctors who work in
Venezuela.

THE SAME INEFFICIENT CENTRAL PLANNING

Less clear is the impact of Castro's campaign to reduce the direct
controls that the government exercises over the economy, and to give the
managers of state-run enterprises more autonomy to run their business
more efficiently.

The Ministry of Sugar, for example, which ran Cuba's once-premier
industry as it plunged into disaster over the past decade — the 2006
harvest was the worst since 1905 — was turned into a state enterprise.
So was the island's postal service.

But the new "enterprises" apparently will still depend on the same
central government planning system that proved inefficient in the past —
in the case of the sugar harvest, failing to ensure the timely delivery
of supplies like fuel and spare parts.

Government officials have raised the possibility of allowing foreign
investments in the sugar sector, and already have approved foreign
financing for half-a-dozen golf resorts to be built on state lands
leased out for 99 years.

NEXT UP? MAYBE UNFETTERED TRAVEL

Castro also has said that he's working on the one reform unquestionably
and most urgently desired by Cubans — the right to travel abroad without
an exit permit that is expensive and must be approved by State Security
agents.

Most Cubans also want to ease the restrictions on the return of
relatives and friends living abroad, and an abolition of the "definitive
exit" category, which punishes those who leave the island to settle
permanently in another country.

Castro told Cuban lawmakers on Dec. 23 that he understood the calls for
reforms of the migration policy, but said that changes will have to come
slowly because of the continued hostility of the U.S. government. Any
Cuban who sets foot on U.S. territory is allowed to remain and receives
U.S. residency.

CLOSING CLINICS, CUTTING SPENDING

Raúl Castro's reforms have come at a price.

As he slashed government subsidies, he had to cut spending on some of
the sectors the revolution still holds out as its iconic "victories" —
health, education and welfare — greatly damaged since the end of the
Soviet Union's massive subsidies in 1991.

Several neighborhood clinics are being closed in favor of more regional
facilities, universities are cutting enrollment in some study areas and
a dozen or so food items once sold through the ration cards are now
available only at much higher prices.

What's more, some of the reforms announced by Castro, now in his sixth
year in power after succeeding ailing brother Fidel, were postponed or
dropped amid reports of stiff opposition from within the ruling hierarchy.

A plan to lay off 500,000 state employees — a whopping 10 percent of the
public payroll — between October of 2010 and April 1 of 2011 was
postponed without a new deadline. And a scheme to tie wages to a
worker's individual productivity, announced with much fanfare in 2008,
has not been mentioned for nearly two years.

Meanwhile, the basic outline of Cuba's political system has not changed:
one-party rule, tight controls on of the mass media and varying levels
of repression for those who actively oppose the government.

WHAT IT ALL MEANS STILL HARD TO SAY

To Castro's critics, all the changes amount to worthless cosmetic
surgery, a confession of failure in 53 years of what the Castros call
"building socialism." After all, they say, private enterprise existed
and houses could be bought and sold under the Batista dictatorship,
before the Castros' 1959 revolution.

To supporters, they are part of a slow but sure-footed campaign to
eliminate a number of senseless economic constraints, move toward a more
productive brand of socialism and keep the Cuban Communist Party in power.

The only certainties are that Cuba is in the midst of complex changes —
which may or may not lead to a more productive brand of socialism — and
that the Castro government has no intention of easing its authoritarian
and coercive political system.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/21/v-fullstory/2568650/repression-still-the-rule-but.html

The United States is deeply disappointed that the pardon was not
extended to Alan Gross.

The government of Cuba says it has pardoned and will release some 2,900
prisoners held in its jails. President Raul Castro called the
pre-Christmas announcement a humanitarian gesture that would include
women, the ailing, people older than 60, dozens of foreigners and a
small number of political prisoners who have served a large part of
their sentence with good behavior.

The United States is deeply disappointed that this pardon was not
extended to Alan Gross, an American who is unjustly imprisoned in Cuba.
The fact that the Council of State did not consider Mr. Gross's
deteriorating health and the two years he has already spent behind bars
suggests the gesture was a calculated and hollow one indeed.

Sixty-two years old and suffering from arthritis, Mr. Gross is a
dedicated development professional who has a long history of providing
assistance and support to underserved communities in more than 50
countries. He was a subcontractor working on a project sponsored by the
U.S. Agency for International Development in Cuba helping connect
members of civil society to the outside world. For these
well-intentioned activities, he was arrested on Dec. 3, 2009, convicted
of crimes against the state and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

We continue to call on the Cuban authorities to release Mr. Gross and
return him to his family, where he belongs.

http://www.voanews.com/policy/editorials/Cubas-Humanitarianism-Falls-Short-136449808.html

To Dr. Adelaida Fernández de Juan.

Esteemed colleague:

I recently read your article, "Medicine defended, which circulated on
the web this past August. Before I read it I saw your name at the
bottom, and as this is a sign of responsibility and courage — as those
who dare not to hide in anonymity may be arrested — for me, in advance,
I felt your sincerity and valor, and so I feel a reverence, far beyond
what I can share. Like you, I am a doctor, graduated in 1994, and I find
in your writing references to the abuse and misunderstandings, so I
would like draw your attention to some details.

During the time I practiced medicine I was a witness to various
situations in which a health worker mistreated, consciously or
unconsciously, some patient or family member. This is undeniable. But as
undeniable as this, is the fact that for each of these cases of
mistreatment I can recall a dozen cases (without exaggerating), on the
contrary, only in these, different from the others, were rarely reported.

When a patient feels mistreated, frequently they immediately complain to
the different levels of the Health System, the Government and the Party,
but this almost never happens when the mistreatment — much more
frequently than people think — happens in reverse. Sometimes the patient
isn't even aware of his attitude, as the grievance is assumed from the
professionalism of the mistreated, in this case us.

However, there is a point where I disagree with you or with whomever
suggests it. When you refer to the topic, "…the extremely low and
disproportionate salaries, the undervaluing of the vocation, the truly
abusive treatment of which we are victims and other grave matters…";
then giving the sense that, "…there are possibilities of lessening these
evils."

This takes me to past times, when our sector was on the list of the
so-called "budgeted," that is those depending completely on State
financing. This was the excuse to explain why professional salaries in
the health sector were so low and could not in any way be raised. But
time passed, then came the era of medical missions abroad and now we
live in a very different reality.

Today Cuba maintains collaborative medical missions in over 70
countries, which have been reported in recent years to bring up a sum of
between five billion and eight billion dollars annually. A rapid
calculation converts 8 billion dollars — in the Cuban peso in which we
receive our wages — into 180 billion pesos annually.

With this alone we are the most productive economic sector of this
country. But to these millions in income (which greatly exceeds even
Tourism, which generates some two billion) we have to add that
contributed by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, the
third highest exports after nickel and petrochemicals. It's clear: our
section has become the engine of the Cuban economy, so there is no
compelling reason that we should be paid this miserable salary,
equivalent to less than 30 dollars for an entire month's work.

If I go on about the numbers, it's only because they are very eloquent.
You know, as I do, that the added human sensibility that makes our work
priceless, despite our great scarcities that perhaps those who judge
with surprising lightness us don't know, don't fully understand the
seriousness of the matter.

You, like me, have been on medical duty where there is a lack of vital
medications, reagents, X-ray film and essential disposable materials;
where we don't even have running water, where we can't even wash
ourselves on a 24-hour shift, without even being able to wash our hands;
resting in such tough conditions that people wouldn't even believe it if
they saw it; eating poorly — for example broth and mashed potatoes, or
corn flour and boiled potatoes for every meal — knowing beforehand that
this shift did not bring us a penny to feed our children and knowing, as
well, what is even more painful, that other State sectors like ours,
which don't generate anywhere near the income we do, are much better paid.

For decades we have been a very poorly served sector. In my case, I
remember that since 1994 I worked for seven years with only the two
doctor's coats I was given as a recent graduate, and this compares with
other sectors that have received uniforms and shoes every year — some
even every six months — as well as extra monthly pay in convertible
pesos, personal hygiene products and food. I couldn't explain this if it
weren't accepted, with pain I say it, hard evidence: those responsible
for dealing with this sector don't concern themselves with the
well-being of our workers, nor with our families, everything is a matter
of sheer laziness, a proverbial irresponsibility, or both.

You quote another journalist, Fernando Ravsberg, as part of what is
already becoming a crusade, also on the attack — according to what I
infer from what you wrote, because I haven't had access to that article
— extending the shadow of bribery on the just and the unjust. I read it
and remember, however, such elevated examples of moving dedication:
professionals who are second to none in knowledge, and also in ethical
principles, people of integrity, who carry their wisdom with a shining
humility, living in the midst of shortages and that it shames me even to
remember, and who even so, prefer to die rather than stoop so low.

I know there are the unscrupulous among us, I know its face, its name,
its last name, they are not abstract examples but reality. But for my
pride and yours, Doctor, and perhaps to the surprise of Mr. Ravsberg,
they will never be the rule, they are a painful exception. That I know
and I would hold both my hands to the fire for that, my disinterested
and honest people. Who search the trees for firewood, who look above us
and find enough reed to cut it; but when there is not enough courage, it
is more comfortable and certain to take from us, those below.

For saying words very similar to yours, Doctor, I was stigmatized, and
some idiot even accused me publicly of being "money-grubbing," when I am
among those convinced that capitalism is very far from offering a
solution to the problems of the world, but to belabor this point would
take us far off topic.

I think it is stupid to run after the superfluous, following a consumer
culture that compels me to buy a cellphone every month or a new car
every year. But as absurd as this is, after working 26 years, to be
without a penny three days after being paid; that the workers of our
sector eat lunch at noon without knowing if they will eat dinner that
night; that our "salaries" honorably earned don't even allow us to feed
our families for more than a week a month; that a specialist with 20
years experience has only one pair of broken shoes; that the most that
we can aspire as physicians is to a battered bicycle.

Before such a picture, even Kafka would pale, would certainly suffer a
massive heart attack with all the complications described by cardiology.
I don't ask for irrational opulence, but nor do I deserve the miserable
existence they seem to want to condemn me to.

Excuse my manners, allow me to present myself: I am Jeovany Jimenez
Vega, I live in Artemisa and I have been a specialist in Internal
Medicine since 1999. Five years ago I was disqualified to practice
Medicine anywhere in the national territory indefinitely, since October
2006, for having channeled to then Minister Dr. José R. Balaguer Cabrera
the opinions of 2300 professionals in Public Health about that
disrespectful "salary increase" in our sector in mid-2005.

At the time of my punishment I was a Party member – since 1995 – and was
studying the final year of specialization in Internal Medicine; I was
expelled from the party immediately and suspended from my Residence, and
several months later was disqualified, along with a colleague and friend
who accompanied me on that initiative.

The details of they flat out lied to try to legitimize our punishment
can be found in the first post of my blog "Citizen Zero"
(http://citizenzerocuba.wordpress.com), open since last December to
denounce this injustice and fight to regain the exercise of the
profession that was taken from me.

Doctor: Despite everything, I have no doubt, we can count on the respect
and caring of the majority of our patients and this is a great
encouragement to continue. Along with this, I am comforted that there
are professionals like yourself, who are not resigned to look on with
indolence and shame, but who break their silence and share the truth. We
consecrate our lives to the medical profession, as we must, but this
should never be understood as renouncing the right to proudly defend our
rights.

We live proud of our sublime profession, far beyond that "…contempt for
the vocation, the abusive treatment…" to which we are subjected by those
whose job it is to ensure our well-being as workers.

We will never forget that our oath imposes on us the duty to comfort man
in his sickness and at his death, and to always comfort him in his pain,
even if in his delirium he comes to bite the hand that cures him. In
this endeavor, Doctor, we hold our heads high and our hearts open, and
nothing else matters. Be assured, better times will come.

September 12 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13000

Cuban Jewish leaders meet with jailed American
By PAUL HAVEN
Associated Press

HAVANA — A leader of Cuba's small Jewish community who visited jailed
American contractor Alan Gross and even released pictures of them
celebrating the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah together said Wednesday that
he was in good spirits and fine health. But her account was quickly
disputed by the man's wife, who said he was increasingly frail and
despondent.

Adela Dworin said that she and another Jewish leader spent nearly two
hours Monday with Gross at the military hospital where he is being held.
They lit candles, ate potato pancakes and passed around chocolate coins
to celebrate Hanukkah.

Photographs taken during the meeting show a thin Gross wearing a
light-blue guayabera shirt standing between Dworin and another Cuban
Jewish leader, David Prinstein. Gross has a gray beard. They are
believed to be the first photos released of Gross inside the military
hospital.

"His health is very good," Dworin told The Associated Press ahead of the
photos' release. "He has gained some weight. He's not fat, but he's not
so thin anymore."

But that account was questioned by Gross's wife, Judy, who revealed that
she had traveled to Cuba to visit her husband a few weeks ago, and said
she speaks to him regularly on the phone.

"He is deteriorating more and more every day," she wrote in a statement.
"He told me he is feeling very hopeless … I truly do not know how much
longer he can take this ordeal."

Judy Gross said her 62-year-old husband had recently cried for the first
time while they spoke on the phone together, and said if he appeared
cheerful in front of Dworin it was only to "put on a brave face."

"We continue to beg the Cuban authorities to let Alan come home to us,"
she wrote, adding that one look at the photos released by Dworin show a
man who is weak and frail compared to the way he looked before his arrest.

Gross, who was portly, reportedly had lost 100 pounds (45 kilos) since
he was arrested in December 2009.

Dworin said he told her he now weighs 161 pounds and walks five miles a
day within the military hospital he is being held. She said he looked
considerably better than on a previous visit she made to see him, and
even made a muscle to show her his returning strength.

Dworin said Gross even told her he would like to return to Cuba for a
visit after his release, noting he has seen the entire island except for
the western province of Pinar del Rio.

Gross was working on a USAID-funded democracy-building program when he
was arrested. His supporters say he was only trying to help the island's
small Jewish community improve its Internet connection. Cuba says the
USAID programs are aimed at bringing about regime change on the island.

Gross was sentenced to 15 years in jail earlier this year. His family
and other prominent Americans have pleaded with Castro to release him on
humanitarian grounds, noting that both his mother and daughter have been
diagnosed with cancer since his incarceration.

Castro has voiced concern about Gross' condition, but the American was
not included on a list of 2,900 prisoners the Cuban leader pardoned last
week, most of them in jail for common crimes.

Gross' wife, Judy, said Saturday that her family was deeply distressed
to hear that Gross was not included in the pardon.

"To receive news in the middle of Hanukkah that the Cuban authorities
have once again overlooked an opportunity to release Alan on
humanitarian grounds is devastating," she said.

Dworin said Gross was extremely anxious to get back home to his wife and
family, but said he was upbeat during the visit.

She said they did not discuss Castro's prisoner amnesty at length during
the Hanukkah celebration, but that Gross knew about it and was clearly
disappointed not to be part of it.

"He wants to have hope," Dworin said. "We Jews always live with hope, or
we would have disappeared from the earth long ago. A miracle could
occur. After all it is Hanukkah, which is all about a miracle."

Hanukkah, which concluded Tuesday, is the Festival of Lights for Jews.
The holiday commemorates the rededication of the Jewish Temple in
Jerusalem in 164 B.C. According to tradition, a candelabra was lit with
only enough oil for one day, but it miraculously burned for eight days.

Paul Haven can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/paulhaven/

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/28/2564490/cuban-jewish-leaders-meet-with.html

Translator's note: Asclepius is the ancient Greek god of Healing and
Medicine

If you are moderately well-informed you know that we 11 million Cubans
living in Cuba are subject to a ban on free travel abroad. In this case
it's not about a personal decision, but requires that you be invariably
authorized by an arm of the Ministry of the Interior with discretionary
power to say yes or not to your "permission to leave"; a privilege that
becomes the stuff of blackmail, with perks awarded to those who remain
"quiet" and refusals as punishment for the irreverent, to set an example
to others. This general prohibition is contained in the Ministry of
Public Health (MINSAP) Resolution 54, specifically designed for those
who work in Public Health, and which presents a bleak picture.

But returning to our mental exercise, here we have our thoughtful doctor
who is forbidden to travel abroad, who can't support his family on his
evanescent salary, who can't go to work in another better paid sector
because the Resolution prohibits it, with a purely decorative Union that
bows to the orders of the Administration and the Party, through which he
can't channel any solution to these basic problems, nor will it
acknowledge his starvation wages, nor the terrible conditions of hygiene
and good, coupled with the lack of resources and medications which, save
in happy exceptions, he passes his medical shifts in our polyclinics and
hospitals; shifts for which our doctor, incidentally, does not receive
even a penny.

Then our thoughtful physician has only one way out, and resignedly
chooses the only door left open; he applies to be part of some medical
mission that our supportive government sustains in some dozens of
countries. He just has to fill out the rigorous documents, and spend a
few months or years, and then our doctor leaves his office or hospital
to care for the poor of the world.

I believe in human solidarity like I believe in the light of the sun,
but in life you have the discern the luster of gold from the shine of
the mirrors. When a doctor, dentist or other Cuban health professional
leaves to work on a foreign mission, regardless of any moral valuation,
he does it under indisputable circumstances. This worker, until now
deprived of a decent wage, will from this moment forward receive 300 or
400 dollars a month, while his family in Cuba – which under no
circumstances Is allowed to accompany him — will receive his full wages
in Cuban pesos along with 50 convertible pesos every month.

Although under certain circumstances it can come to more depending on
the destination country, it will never exceed 15% to 20% of what the
host country is paying Cuba for his services. This is an estimate, as
this information is practically inaccessible, but it's true that around
80% of what our doctor generates in his contracted wages — not taking
into account extras for additional tests, radiology studies, etc., which
are generously covered — goes directly to the coffers of the Cuban state
to be administered by human functionaries.

Meanwhile, the Cuban health workers abroad receive a wage that in many
cases is less than the legal minimum wage for a native of the country
they are working in. When the worker returns to Cuba on completing his
mission, he is once again subject like any good Cuban to the travel ban.
Any professional that abandons his mission is invariably treated like a
traitor, and is never permitted to enter Cuba again and will not be able
to see his children grow up; he will not even be authorized to come in
the case of an illness or death of a loved one.

Now let's look at a revealing fact: over the last decade contracting for
medical services has brought the Cuban government tens of billions of
dollars, and has become the country's largest source of export earnings.
The selfless medical missions which our government exports to the
world's poor, in the last decade, have generated between five and eight
billion dollar annually; tourism is a distant second at two billion.
This number accounts for the export of services only; our professionals
in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are third in line,
surpassed only by the nickel industry and the petroleum products.

Note, first, the enormous economic dividend this implies, and secondly
the obvious, and no less important, political benefit, that makes our
leaders smell like Messiahs and garners votes for them in international
forums. Add to that, thirdly, the escape valve it provides for the mood
of the worker, who knows if he waits patiently for a mission abroad he
can multiply his salary by 20 to 40 times during the two or three years,
on condition he remain silent.

For the protestors, the outlaws, they will never join this mass of
internationalists who now amount to about half of our practicing
physicians who, clearly, resent the quality of medical care offered to
the Cuban population.

Every human society is a complex system of relationships that require
adjustments in their mechanisms and which should reward personal effort,
because this will encourage respect for the value of honest labor. In
this system, each one should have a well-defined place. While it is the
role of the doctor to safeguard health and human life, that of the
senior leaders of this country should be to guarantee the strategic
design of a balanced and functional society and this, without a doubt,
they have not managed to accomplish after 50 years of projects and
conferences.

Not only did they fail in their design, but they did so resoundingly.
The apologists talk about "free" education and health, but without
attempting to complain of the sun for its spots, I suggest that this is
relative, because the money they don't charge me at school or at the
hospital, bleeds from my fingers in the hard-currency stores with their
absurd policy of extremely abusive prices, where things are marked up
500% or 1000% over their wholesale price. Also, to guarantee an
education and people's health is not a gesture of goodwill, but an
obligation of the State. We mustn't forget that over his whole life a
worker salary is cut by 33% to guarantee his Social Security. This
gloomy subject is rarely spoken of in my country.

I have clean hands and I like to play it straight, so someone who's
playing a game can save the lectures on patriotism. I believe the
necessary Revolution of 1959 was right and authentic, but I can't
applaud what it has condemned us to, because if there is no respect for
the rights of man, there is nothing left to defend.

I am with the Revolution, but will never resign myself to its errors,
nor with the acts of demagogues and opportunists. I am a doctor, a
Cuban, I live in the real and difficult Cuba, not in the TV newscasts
and I do not wish to emigrate. I graduated in 1994, and since 1998 have
had a specialty in General Medicine. I was a third-year Resident in
Internal Medicine until April 2006 when, in my last year, I was
suspended from the study of this specialty and then disqualified from
the practice of medicine in Cuba, for an indefinite time in October
2006, along with a colleague, Dr. Rodolfo Martinez Vigoa.

The ancestral intolerance to which we were already accustomed made the
powers-that-be react as if we had thrown a Molotov cocktail. Terrified
by that tiny consensus, they did what they do best: put down by force
and show of dissent. They never responded, they were unscrupulous and
brutal. The details of this injustice are fully known by all the
relevant central agencies including the Attorney General's Office,
without anyone doing anything to fix it.

I am one more among tens of thousands of Cuban doctors who live every
day under this outrageous reality. I live under a government that
deprived me of the right to exercise my profession for political
considerations, that systematically censored my opinions, that took away
my right to travel freely, that doesn't respect my right to receive
information first hand and that denies me 21st century Internet access,
all of which give an idea of how retrograde they are when topic is man's
right to think freely.

The government that commits this flagrant violation of the rights of
millions of Cubans now occupies no less than the Vice Presidency of the
Human Rights Council of the UN. If you had the patience to read this
far, you already have a rough vision of what our professionals in Public
Health experience. If you belong to the group of apologists or those
with clenched fist, know that this is the Cuba that you applaud or
condemn so fervently as your conscience dictates.

August 19 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13051

Today, December 3rd, we celebrate the Day of the Doctor in my world.

I have a doctor friend, with twenty-five years of experience,
specializing in psychiatry, with good results, according to the
acknowledgement of her patients, which is what really counts, who this
year will be in her house baking cakes to be able to survive, while in
her ancient place of employment, a polyclinic in Central Havana, they
will hand out flowers and make speeches, with out taking into account
that of the five psychiatrists who work there, only one of whom kept
their job, while the other four, including my friend, were let go.

My friend is still young, not yet fifty years old, and has vast
experience in her field, is divorced and has two children to take care
of who are still studying. It is inconceivable that a doctor's knowledge
and experience would be wasted in this way. I understand that if this
polyclinic had too many psychiatrists, something I doubt as this is an
overpopulated city in which people do not enjoy the best living
conditions, they should have had the others sent to other health centers
where they could have used them. The sick who come in search of medical
help almost always have to be attended to by inexperienced foreign
students, who in some case cannot communicate very well with them,
because they do not speak our language correctly. In general, this is
not well received by those who come seeking medical attention, when our
government shows off by sending so many doctors on foreign missions.

Is it that, since people here the do not have life insurance (it doesn't
exist), they come to practice on us as if we were guinea pigs? What's
certain is that already this is causing discomfort among people; we like
to be well served and to be in the presence of an experienced doctor,
from whom the students next to them can gain experience, rather than
practice on the sick.

Nevertheless, my congratulations to all these hardworking Cuban doctors
who take the bus (guagua in "good Cuban") or bicycle to their hospital
or polyclinic, who have shifts too often, who work with many difficult
materials and who even so are kind and professional with the patients
(as they should be), receiving a lower salary than an employee at Aurora
(a business that sweeps the streets) or a fumigator. To all of them, my
deepest respect.

Translated by: Meg Anderson

December 3 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13380

Asclepius is the ancient Greek god of Healing and Medicine

The Cuban Revolution has always raised great passions. Millions within
and outside the island are split between those who applaud and offering
moving excuses, or those who clench their fists and launch incendiary
accusations. But without a doubt, among the picturesque barbarities that
flourish under the tropical sky there is one that is particularly
atrocious: the condition of semi-slavery affecting public health
professionals. To shed some light on the matter, I suggest you follow me
through this attempt at a chronicle.

Imagine for a moment you decided to study medicine in Havana and
graduated in 1994, during the worst economic crisis in our history. Some
of your friends from high school, who take life a little more lightly,
decided to raise and sell pigs, open their own businesses, or start
working in tourism. Once you graduate, after six years of personal
sacrifice, you naturally aspire to live honestly on your salary, but it
starts at 231 Cuban pesos a month, that is you receive less than two
dollars for a whole month's work for almost two years.

From time to time you run into a friend from high school, who has
bought an elegant car, as compared to your raggedy bicycle. But you want
to get ahead so you devote four more years of your youth to study. After
a total of ten years study (combining medical school and your
specialty), you end up as a specialist in internal medicine, with which,
given that specialty, your salary will be around 531 Cuban pesos a
month, Meaning you will work a full month for a salary equivalent to $21
U.S. Meanwhile, a barman at a hotel earns $200 U.S., on one shift! The
customs official at the airport earns $500 U.S. extorting the tourists,
and this is 25 times the monthly salary of a doctor, again, on one shift!

This abysmal difference in living standards is the root of our dramas.
Painfully, in Cuba, the well-being of your family doesn't depend on your
dedication to work or on your desire to excel, nor on the respect shown
your profession, which also illustrates the chaos that has ruled our
lives for the last 20 years. It is in this jungle where our doctors
"fight," not living in the encouraging world of International Cubavision
TV, where the Revolution continues strong and victorious, with GDP
growing 10% a decade, while the little guy suffers an economy in ruins,
a complete divorce from reality, as if we are talking about two
different countries.

Faced with such a hostile reality, our doctors have to invent miracles
in their free time to feed their families, badly; make "magic" in the
black market, work as a photographer, clown, carpenter, shoemaker or
cosmonaut, always illegal, because up to a few months ago the Ministry
of Labor prohibited, by Resolution, access to self-employment.

Suppose that you, a specialist in internal medicine, decide to go for a
second specialty. After another four years of great sacrifice you
graduate, for example, as a surgeon and now your monthly salary is
augmented with 50 Cuban pesos (just over $2.00 U.S.), which is enough to
buy four bars of soap. Thus, while a surgeon's monthly salary is 623
Cuban pesos ($27.00 U.S.), a guard in the Specialized Protection
Services, after a one month course, earns about 1,500 Cuban pesos
monthly in cash, plus extra food and toiletries, while a cop on the beat
receives up to 1,600 Cuban pesos, plus other benefits. For some obscure
reason our government believes that doctors don't merit such deference.

After getting over your shock, you say, "But come on man! If a salary
isn't even enough to buy toilet paper, become a barman, a customs
inspector, even the security guard at the hospital will make out
better!" I would respond: My friend, the leaders of my country literally
turned the sacred practice of medicine into the famous tunic of Nessus —
the poisoned shirt that killed Heracles; our doctors cannot work outside
the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) because a Labor Ministry
resolution categorically forbids it. No entity outside MINSAP is
permitted to offer a doctor work. Can you comprehend it? But you
meditate on this and your face lights up: "Emigrate! To some country
that needs doctors, at least temporarily, while things improve."

Then I ask you to make yourself comfortable and listen carefully to the
good part, because here it comes…

Everything you're read up to this point will seem like a game of little
girls playing in the convent garden, compared to how you will live if
you decide to travel outside Cuba as a doctor and Cuban citizen. In July
1999 the Minister of Public Health issued Resolution 54, still in force,
whose details I don't know and nor do our workers, as they are hidden
from us with the zeal of a State Secret. This Resolution of Ignominy, as
we call it, is the most humiliating insult inflicted upon those who
embrace the medical profession in Cuba since the coming of Columbus. It
states that if you want to permanently leave the country, or even do so
temporarily, you must ask the Minister of Public Health for "liberation"
from the sector.

That is, if the happy idea occurs to you to visit your family or friends
abroad during your vacation, you must wait an obligatory five years of
your life at a minimum (!!), during which you will be held against your
will by the Ministry of Public Health, with no options. It doesn't
matter if you just graduated or if you've been working for 30 years,
both have to wait five years! I know, personally, cases held for 7 years
before their "liberation." Even retired doctors and dentists are held
for three years before being allowed to travel; even a nurse faces this
aberration!

Let's clarify that from the moment that you begin the paperwork to
travel, you will automatically be placed on a list of the "unreliable,"
and will be relieved of all your administrative posts and teaching
positions, if you have any, and you will be transferred from your job to
one further away and that is a demotion. As the years pass marriages
break up, children are traumatized, parents die without seeing their
children again.

I can't adequately describe the human suffering that is caused by the
monster to those who see their rights undermined, but none of this
concerns the Union or Parliament: they can always blame the Cuban
Adjustment Act for your death if instead of resigning yourself you
improvise a raft and end up devoured by the sharks. As you can see,
under such circumstances to speak of semi-slavery is much more than a
euphemism.

*Footnote: As of two decades ago, two currencies circulate in Cuba: the
Cuban peso (CUP), also called "national money" — in which workers
receive their wages — and the convertible peso (CUC), also called
"convertible currency" — which is used in the chain of hard-currency
stores that accept only this money.

EXCHANGE RATES:

1994: 1 CUC = 1 USD = 140 CUP

Since the late 1990s to 2001: 1 CUC = 1 USD = 21 CUP

September 2001 to today: 1 CUC = 25 CUP

(To be continued …)

August 17 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13008

Supporters of a Maryland man who is entering his third year of captivity
in Cuba are holding a vigil Monday in downtown Washington.

Alan Gross, 62, of Potomac, was arrested at the Havana airport in 2009
and was sentenced to 15 years in jail by a Cuban court for crimes
against the state. At the time of his arrest, Gross was working for a
Bethesda company called Development Alternatives, which recently won a
government contract to promote democracy in Cuba. Family and U.S.
officials said that Gross’ job was to distribute computer and satellite
phone equipment to Cuba’s small Jewish community. The Cuban government
claims that such programs, which are sponsored by the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID), are aimed at undermining the
Communist government of Raul Castro.

The most recent vigil comes after Cuba announced Friday that it was
releasing 2,900 prisoners in advance of a visit by Pope Benedict XVI
early next year. A Foreign Ministry official confirmed to the Associated
Press that Gross was not among those who would be released.

U.S. officials have been lobbying for Gross’ release on humanitarian
grounds, citing his deteriorating health and the cancer diagnoses that
his elderly mother and daughter have both received. American Jewish
leaders have also stepped up calls for Gross’ release, which would have
coincided with the beginning of Hannukah.

Today’s vigil begins at noon, and will be held at the Cuban Interests
Section at 2630 16th Street, Northwest.

Copyright Associated Press / NBC4 Washington

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Demonstration-Planned-For-American-Held-in-Cuba-136223848.html

A year at the vanguard of Cuba's economic revival has not brought Julio
Cesar Hidalgo riches. The fledgling pizzeria owner has had his good
months, but the restaurant he opened with his girlfriend often runs at a
loss. At times, they can't afford to buy basic ingredients.

Yet the wide-faced 31-year-old says he is grateful to be in business at
all. A year ago, Hidalgo was concocting chalky pastries in a Spartan
state-run bakery where employees and managers competed to pilfer eggs,
flour and olive oil, the only way to make ends meet on salaries of just
$15 a month. Today, he is his own boss, a taxpayer, employer and
entrepreneur.

"I think my expectations were met because in Cuba today I couldn't have
hoped for anything more," he said one recent December afternoon as his
girlfriend, Giselle de la Noval, served customers. "We survived."

Hidalgo's story is mirrored by many of the entrepreneurs The Associated
Press has followed since January in a yearlong effort to document
Communist Cuba's awkward embrace of free-market reforms.

Their experiences — like the reforms themselves — cannot be described as
an unmitigated success. Of the dozen fledgling business owners,
including restaurateurs, a DVD salesman, two cafe owners, a seamstress,
a manicurist and a gymnasium operator, three have closed down or begun
working for someone else, and one has been harassed by her former state
employers. None could be considered successful by non-Cuban standards.

But despite their struggles, many tell of lives transformed, dreams
realized, attitudes changed, and doors opened that had been closed for
more than half a century.

For Hidalgo, personal hardships have added to the challenges of starting
a business on a Marxist island that has looked askance at
entrepreneurship since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution turned a one-time
capitalist playground into a Soviet satellite.

After suffering through a slow, hot, summer when nobody wanted a pizza,
Hidalgo had to close for two months to care for his grandmother, who has
Alzheimer's disease. Even while the business was shuttered, he and de la
Noval had to make tax and social security payments, wiping out the few
hundred dollars they had saved.

They reopened in late November with so little money they can't always
afford to serve their house special.

"We've had to start from scratch, but the only reason we didn't lose the
business altogether is because we were disciplined," said de la Noval,
23. "Before we did anything, we always put away the money we needed to
pay the state."

A year that President Raul Castro described as make or break for the
revolution is ending after a dramatic flurry of once-unthinkable reforms
that are transforming economic and social life.

In October, the government legalized a used car market, and a month
later extended it to real estate, sweeping away decades of prohibitions.
On Tuesday, the state began extending bank credits to new business
owners and those hoping to repair their homes.

But one of the most powerful reforms was Castro's decision last year to
greatly expand the ranks of the self-employed, part of a somewhat
unsuccessful effort to trim bloated state payrolls.

Some 355,000 people have received licenses to start their own
businesses, and the results can be seen and heard everywhere. On nearly
every street in Havana and in thousands of hamlets and towns across
Cuba, makeshift signs and bright parasols mark the entrances of new
businesses, and the long-lost cries of curbside vendors hawking
everything from fruit and vegetables to mops and household repair
services fill the warm Caribbean air.

"The reforms have advanced, perhaps not quickly enough considering the
problems that have accumulated, but they have advanced, one after
another, and there is no sign that they will stop or be rolled back,"
said Omar Everleny Perez, the head of Havana University's Center for
Cuban Economic Studies.

The government has declined to release any statistics on tax revenue or
payroll savings from the reforms, except for an October report in the
Communist Party newspaper Granma that said tax revenue from new
businesses had tripled.

Cuban leaders this month lowered their forecast for economic growth for
2011 to just 2.7 percent — from the 3 percent originally hoped for — an
extremely poor showing for a developing country. By contrast, China is
forecast to grow by about 9 percent in 2011, Vietnam by between 6 and
6.5 percent and Brazil by 3.8 percent.

Private business owners have complained about the high taxes they must
pay, the lack of raw materials and the fact they are suddenly surrounded
by competitors. Because most entrepreneurs don't have the capital to
start innovative businesses, many have opened cafeterias, nail parlors,
small roadside kiosks and the like.

Anisia Cardenas, a seamstress, is among more than 100,000 Cubans who
have held private business licenses since the 1990s, the island's last
experiment with the free market. In the latest reform, she decided to
expand, paying $2 a day to rent the front porch space of a neighbor's
house to set up her sewing machine.

But business was slow — and competition from new license holders fierce.
Within a few months she had to retreat to her tiny apartment. By the
summer, she began to wonder if she might have to close down, unable to
meet the $19 monthly tax payments. By December, she had gone to work as
an employee for another seamstress.

"Things are hard," said Cardenas, who is trying to save money for her
daughter's 15th birthday party in January. "Everything is very expensive."

Others complain of rules that are often illogical, and state employers
who still view entrepreneurship with suspicion.

Maria Regla Saldivar is a black belt in taekwondo who got a license to
give private lessons to neighborhood kids in a scruffy park across the
street from her job. She began the year with dreams of persuading the
government to let her turn an abandoned dry-cleaning warehouse into a
private recreation center.

But the government refused to grant her a lease. Then her bosses at
Cuba's National Sports Institute docked her pay because they said her
outside work was affecting her performance. She quit. Finally, her
former boss prohibited her from using the park for martial arts lessons,
which are technically prohibited. The government considers it
potentially deadly training, even though most of Saldivar's students are
not even teenagers yet.

"It's called envy," Saldivar said of her boss.

She insists she is not teaching taekwondo, slyly calling the discipline
"Quimbumbia" — a word of her own invention. She has moved classes for
her 14 students into the tiny covered patio in the back of the apartment
she shares with her teenage daughter.

But Saldivar says she has no regrets about how the year has unfolded.
She says making business decisions for herself has increased her
self-esteem, and she is thrilled that she's managed to put away 2,000
pesos ($80), about four months salary at an average state job.

"You may laugh, but for me it's a lot of money," she said, running her
coarse fingers over the stripes on a pair of sky-blue track suit bottoms
she bought. "I've wanted these for so long and now I have them. I look
like a proper trainer now, not someone out picking mangoes from a tree."

Rafael Romeu, the head of the Washington, D.C.-based Association for the
Study of the Cuban Economy, said Castro has "changed the conversation"
since taking over from his ailing brother in 2006, pushing the
leadership to get the island's economic house in order rather than
blaming external factors such as the 49-year U.S. travel and trade embargo.

But so far, the changes don't go far enough to revive Cuba's moribund
economy.

"These are positive steps but when you say them out loud, just think
about it. … You are allowed to have a cellphone, you are allowed to
buy a home, you are allowed to buy a car or have a microenterprise. This
is not the fall of the Berlin Wall. These are not major changes," he
said. "Cuba has tremendous difficulties. This is a marathon, and they
are taking baby steps."

Romeu, who has worked around the world studying emerging economies, said
that Cuba is moving much more deliberately than the Chinese did when
they began opening their economy in the late 1970s, or the Vietnamese a
decade later.

Cuba's predicament is somewhat different, as well. Both China and
Vietnam were deeply agrarian economies whose challenge was lifting tens
of millions out of crushing poverty, Romeu said. Cuba is a more urban
country with an aging population whose citizens have gotten used to
benefits including health care and education, but who have grown
accustomed to a system that doesn't make them work for such middle-class
perks.

"In Cuba, the challenge is sustaining the middle class, not creating
one," Romeu said.

Still, some reforms seem to be moving along more quickly than many
analysts had hoped.

Business is booming at a street corner long known as the center of
Havana's informal real estate market. Only now, the handwritten listings
on trees openly advertise legal home sales, instead of disguising them
as property "swaps."

Mendez Rodriguez, an unofficial real estate broker, said the buying and
selling is aboveboard, controlled by a relatively untangled bureaucracy.

"Everything is by the law now," said Rodriguez, even if his profession
is not officially licensed. He and other so-called facilitators work for
"gifts" left to the discretion of their clients, he said.

Rumors that real estate brokers would be the latest addition to the list
of 181 licensed entrepreneurial activities have not come to pass, but
there's still hope the profession will be added in 2012. Rodriguez said
the opening seems to have led to a steep increase in prices, with a home
worth $20,000 a couple of months ago going for 50 percent more today.

That's the kind of price jump many of the new struggling business owners
say they could use.

Javier Acosta has sunk more than $30,000 he saved as a waiter into his
own upscale establishment, and says business is far from booming.

"This has been a hard year, a year of sacrifice," he said. "There are
days when nobody comes, or when I have just one or two tables, and then
there are days when the place is filled."

He said his costs run to about $1,000 a month, and when business is slow
he struggles to break even.

Yet the reforms, he says, have changed the face of Cuba, and cynical
countrymen who doubt the opening will be lasting must wake up to a new
reality.

"After 50 years where everything was prohibited it takes time to change
people's minds and make them understand that this time is different," he
said, sitting in his empty second-floor restaurant one recent afternoon.
"If you don't work, you don't eat."

Despite his struggles, Acosta says he would take the risk again if given
the chance, a sentiment shared by Hidalgo and de la Noval. They had
hoped to close on New Year's Eve, which Cubans of means celebrate with a
traditional feast of pork leg, yucca, black beans and sweets.

Hidalgo said the family simply doesn't have enough saved to take the
night off after its year of trials and tribulations. Instead, he's
planning to keep the pizzeria open late and celebrate on the job with
his girlfriend and his aunt at his side.

"We're thinking of making a small meal for the three of us," he said.
"If we can afford a leg of pork it'll be to sell, not to eat ourselves."

___

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi, Andrea Rodriguez and Anne-Marie
Garcia contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/cuba-wraps-dramatic-economic-change-150750760.html;_ylt=A0wNcnL6ePZOMSEB1Qb9SpZ4

(Reuters) – The State Department said on Saturday it deplored Cuba's
failure to free Alan Gross – a U.S. citizen serving a 15-year prison
term in a case that has stalled progress in U.S.-Cuba relations – as
part of an announced humanitarian release of some 2,900 prisoners.

"If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact
that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to
extend this humanitarian release to Mr. Gross this holiday season,
especially in light of his deteriorating health, and to put an end to
the Gross family's long plight," Mark Toner, a State Department
spokesman, said Saturday.

The Cuban government said on Friday it would free 2,900 prisoners in
coming days for humanitarian reasons ahead of a visit next spring by
Pope Benedict XVI.

Those to be pardoned do not include Gross, a government spokesman said
in Havana. He was imprisoned after setting up Internet equipment as a
subcontractor in a U.S.-funded program promoting political change in Cuba.

The Cuban government considered his work subversive. His arrest halted a
brief warming in U.S.-Cuba relations that have been hostile since Fidel
Castro embraced Soviet Communism after his 1959 revolution.

In a statement, Toner reiterated a U.S. call on Cuban authorities to
release Gross "and return him to his family, where he belongs." The
State Department has said in the past that Gross was merely providing
Internet access for Jewish groups in Cuba and should be released
immediately.

(Reporting by Jim Wolf; additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing
by Sandra Maler)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/24/us-cuba-usa-gross-idUSTRE7BN0E720111224

Cuban-Americans stream to the island for holidays
By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ
AP Hispanic Affairs Writer

MIAMI — Deborah Labrada was giddy as she stood in line at Miami-Dade
International Airport, waiting to fly to the town of Guantanamo, Cuba.

It is the place she visits roughly once a year to see her grandfather,
aunts and uncles and cousins. She still considers it a second home, even
though she has lived nearly all her 17 years in South Florida.

"The first thing I'm going to do when I get there is cry, and then give
everyone hugs," she said Monday, as she leaned against her cart of bags
secured in the festive, neon green airport plastic wrap. The duffel bags
- cheaper to ship through than heavier, traditional luggage – bulged
with food, over the counter medicine, toys and other necessities hard to
obtain in Cuba's struggling economy.

Labrada was among thousands of Cuban-Americans flying to the island this
week to celebrate the new year. These types of annual pilgrimages would
have been sharply curtailed if two South Florida, GOP Cuban-American
congressmen had succeeded in returning to the Bush-era limit of once
every three years. The measure backed by U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart
and David Rivera was tucked into the congressional spending bill, but
Republican leaders jettisoned it last week as part of a last minute
compromise.

Labrada said Monday she didn't appreciate the effort to restore the old
restriction.

"I think it was very disappointing, because the least we can do is help
our own families," she said. "We should go and take advantage of the
opportunity to bring them things and help any way we can."

President Barack Obama allowed unlimited family visits by
Cuban-Americans shortly after taking office and removed the $1,200
annual cap on remittances. Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but
the Cuban government said earlier this year it expected about 500,000
U.S. visitors annually, the vast majority of them Cuban-Americans. Cuban
officials did not immediately respond to requests for corresponding
statistics from past years, but they have previously said there were
nearly 300,000 visits from Cubans living outside the island in 2009. It
was not immediately clear whether that included repeat travelers.

Many Cuban-Americans, like Labrada have already been traveling to Cuba
for years. They just had to go through special church trips or through a
third country to get around the three year ban.

Of nearly a dozen families interviewed at the Miami Airport, all but two
said they'd last visited the island in the last year or two.

"I don't think it should be any different for us than it is for anyone
else going to visit family in any other country," Labrada said.

Except it is different.

Most Cubans who come to the U.S. are able to immigrate here as a result
of U.S. policy that views them as victims of political oppression. And
as Diaz-Balart is quick to note, not everyone can travel. While average
Cubans may be able to visit family off the island, their visa requests
can easily be denied. The Cuban government has refused to allow blogger
and internationally renowned activist Yoani Sanchez to travel to the
U.S. and Europe to accept human rights awards.

But Professor Andy Gomez of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuba
and Cuban-American Studies says the flood of travelers isn't likely to
stop any time soon, and he says trying to stem the flow makes no sense.

"I was at the Miami airport last week, and there were flights on the
hour," he said. "Stopping it? Impossible. It is the people-to-people
contact we want and need, and it is already happening."

Most of the flights to Cuba still originate from South Florida, with
nearly 300,000 people departing to the island just from Miami
International Airport in 2010. Numbers for 2011 were not yet available.
But they also now leave from places such as Tampa, Fla.; Oakland,
Calif.; Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta and Puerto Rico.

Flights to Cuba from the Tampa International Airport began in early
September after a 50-year hiatus, and local officials are banking on it
as a new source of revenue. Airport officials said about 45,000
passengers will travel the route in 2012.

Manny Martinez, a 21-year-old Tampa resident, was standing at the back
of the long line four hours before Tuesday's flight. He said he's
spending two weeks on the island and staying with family. Like Labrada,
he said Cuba still feels like home, even though he's lived in the U.S.
for 11 years.

When asked to name the first thing he would do once he arrived, he laughed.

"Party," he said. "Just go out with my old friends and have fun."

Not everyone goes just to see family.

Gomez said his maintenance man just returned from a trip to Cuba to
visit his dentist because he has no health care insurance in the U.S.
and can't afford the visit here. Meanwhile, media reports are on the
rise in South Florida about Cuban-Americans involved in Medicare fraud
fleeing to the island.

Back at the Miami airport, Isabel Baez, 39, teared up as she talked
about visiting her family in Santiago de Cuba. Yet, she said she knows
of people who also go as "mules," taking much needed provisions for
others on the island who are not relatives, sometimes even for resale.

"But most of those people still go to see their family," she said. "They
bring the packages as a way to get a free ticket."

Associated Press writer Tamara Lush contributed to this report from
Tampa, Fla.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/23/v-fullstory/2558933/cuban-americans-stream-to-the.html

HAVANA – President Raul Castro is Friday expected to announce an end to
onerous, unpopular travel restrictions that have been in place for
almost 50 years and which keep most Cubans from traveling abroad.

The Roman Catholic Church and regime-friendly musicians like Silvio
Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes have joined a chorus of Cubans calling for
an end to the rules, including one that penalizes "permanent emigrants."

And observers say Castro is widely expected to make the announcement in
an address to the National Assembly.

"Cuba normalizing its relations with Cubans who have left the country is
going to have to include eliminating all restrictions," analyst Jesus
Arboleya said in a recent interview in the Catholic magazine Espacio Laical.

To travel abroad legally, Cubans have to obtain an expensive exit permit
as well as a passport – this in a country where the average monthly
salary is about 20 dollars.

The exit permit, which is granted for 30 days, can be renewed 10 times,
and can also be denied. Travelers who let their exit permits expire are
declared "deserters."

As so-called "permanent emigrants," the assets of these illegal
travelers are promptly seized, and they are not welcome to return to home.

Among the changes anticipated in official media: the maximum allowable
stay abroad will increase from 11 months to two years, but on a
renewable status.

That will spell a de facto end to the "permanent emigrant" status, and
should mean that no one's assets will be confiscated any longer, and no
one will be less than welcome to return to their homeland.

Cuba will be asking for its emigres to travel home on Cuban passports
even if they are nationals of other countries, officials say.

In recent reforms, Raul Castro, 80, has authorized the sale of personal
possessions by emigres as a sort of halfway step toward ending
confiscation of personal goods.

The president has said reforming travel restrictions aims, among other
things, to preserve "human capital created by the Revolution."

It is not just about stemming a "brain drain" – it is also tremendous
business for the only communist regime in the Americas, which is
politically and economically isolated, and desperate for cash.

The incomes from medical service staff working abroad and paid to the
Cuban government now tops $6 billion a year, making Cuban overseas
medical staff – not sugar exports or tourism – Cuba's top hard-currency
earning industry.

Professionals, especially Cuban-trained doctors, whom the government
sends overseas on foreign-currency earning and cooperation contracts,
will still have to seek permission for every single trip they make.

If doctors make a little over $20 a month in Cuba, they might make a few
hundred a month working in Venezuela, Uganda or Haiti; if they leave for
the United States, they might make more than $10,000 a month.

Cuban doctors fled Cuba en masse at the beginning of the revolution led
by now retired Cuban icon Fidel Castro, 85. Only 3,000 were left in the
country, and the health care system collapsed. Now there are more than
76,000 in a country of 11.2 million.

In 2006, the United States said that any Cuban doctor in a third country
could get a US entry visa for themselves and their family. In a reprisal
Cuba slapped its toughest travel restrictions on its own doctors.

Back in August, the president said migration reform was in the works,
promising better ties for the two million Cubans – about one in six
Cuban nationals – who live abroad. Although they live in more than 40
countries, 80 percent live in the nearby United States.

Since 2006 Raul Castro's government has ended several unpopular
restrictions. Among other things Cubans are now allowed to rent rooms in
hotels geared to international tourism, sign cell phone contracts, and
buy appliances – a government energy saving measure.

In September, the government authorized Cubans to buy and sell cars, and
this month private homes.

Cubans are extremely keen for the government to eliminate its onerous
restrictions on travel abroad.

If Havana makes that move, it could be a stunning wake-up call to the
United States, which as part of held-over Cold War policy, still grants
any Cuban who reaches US soil legal US residency on request. The United
States does not have this policy for nationals of any other country.

http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20111222-317692.html

Towards the end of October, sociologist Mariela Castro Espin, Director
of the National Center of Sexual Education of Cuba (CENESEX), while on a
visit to this country, expressed her admiration for the "dignified
manner" with which prostitutes uphold the value of their work in Holland.

But in these latitudes, whose Revolution since its first steps
eliminated prostitution and where the sending of thousands of Cubans to
the camps of the notorious UMAP* became so naturally institutionalized
under the ethereal category of "improper conduct", this being expressed
by the daughter of our President, seen quite suddenly, takes some work
to digest.

It is indisputable that Cuban society – not exempt yet from
discrimination based on this motive – has become, for the good of all,
more tolerant in everything relating to sexuality, including the more
permissive modality with which the phenomenon of prostitution is
perceived after the upturn in values made acute with the arrival of the
90′s, but it would be well to ask … will we see in 2012 the Director of
CENESEX propose the structuring of a "Red Light District" in Havana?
Would the "profession" be institutionalized as one more job alternative
for the million workers finding themselves furloughed in the last few
months? Will our picturesque Jineteras (prostitutes) count on a labor
union of their own to represent them? Would they have base leaders,
their meetings of associates, their union halls across the whole
country? Would this Union be a part of the Central de Trabajadores de
Cuba (Cuba Workers Union) and as such be represented in their
congresses? Would our government dare go so far?

Mariela Castro's words, unsettling for some, surprising for others, are
sufficiently eloquent: "I admire and respect the way in which [the
prostitutes of the Red Light District] have found a dignified way of
doing their sex work and made themselves worthy of respect. Really, it
has been a pleasure to get to know directly how they do it … What I have
enjoyed the most is seeing how they have known to create a process and
dignify the way they make this work worthy, because it is a job. And,
moreover, making their rights respected. That seems very important as
much as the health care, protection from violence, protection from abuse
in a broader sense."

Though she doesn't clarify how or how much "directly" she knows how the
licensed prostitutes "do what they do," it is indisputable that much of
the evolution in the way in which some part of Cuban society projects
with respect to homosexual persons and transsexuals, is due in good
measure to the work sustained by the CENESEX. Now then, along with this
forward step, a different treatment is urged regarding the topic of
prostitution and all of this only forms a part of the strategy that
seeks to export to the world the mirage of the opening being extended to
civil rights, it is a polemic that enters speculative terrain, something
many here see as certain.

Not withstanding, today my neighbor Eva, the jinetera, with much faith,
did her ministrations to Oshun and to Elegua so they give her her aché
(life force), so they sweeten life a little and so that they blaze the
trails, a little bit at a time.

*Translator's note: UMAP (translated into English) stands for Military
Units to Aid Production. These were labor camps established in 1965
where undesirables such as homosexuals, "bourgeois,"
"counterrevolutionaries," Jehovah's Witnesses and others were incarcerated.

Translated by: lapizcero

November 28 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13081

He worked for years in the Urbano Noris sugar plant. He complied with
all of the daily chores required by his job. He was useful. And
efficient. But today, he is another one of the many Cubans floating adrift.

Humberto Hernandez Palma lives in San German and worked in the Urbano
Noris central for quite some time, but now he has been faced with
something very difficult. He is sick. He has gone through the medical
commission in his region three times in just one year. During the first
occasion- he told me- they diagnosed him with "table one", which means
that he is completely limited in his physical strength. However, the
provincial medical commission refused to recognize that measure and
handed him a report which stated he had "median limitation of physical
force".

He sought answers within what he thought was fair- the National Medical
Commission- but in November, the National Commission responded that they
denied his request for medical leave. He tried to find some answers in
the sugarcane production plant Urbano Noris but there they also told him
that he does not meet the necessary prerequisites to have a medical
leave on the grounds of health problems. During recent times he has
also started to suffer from serious heart conditions (cardiopathy).

They then sent Humberto to the Labor and Social Security Department of
the municipality to obtain 60 percent of the salary in one year, to
later end up unemployed and with serious difficulties to buy all the
medicines he would need to take care of his heart condition. He is
another Cuban who, amid sugarcane and some light smoke, has ended up
floating adrift with his horizon plagued by countless dark clouds.

Translator: Raul G.

20 December 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13076

An old joke I heard for the first time more than 20 years ago in Havana
says that the three biggest achievements of the Cuban revolution are
health, education and low infant-mortality rates, and that its three
biggest failures are breakfast, lunch and dinner.

A new study by the Brookings Institution think tank shows that, two
decades later, things remain just as bad, if not worse.

Consider some of the findings of the study, titled "Reaching out: Cuba's
new economy and the international response." It was written by Richard
E. Feinberg, a former Clinton administration Latin American adviser who
supports growing international development cooperation with Cuba and who
traveled to Cuba earlier this year and interviewed Cuban officials,
academics and average citizens.

• Despite big increases in tourism, some investments in mining and
massive subsidies from Venezuela, "the Cuban economy remains in the
doldrums." The main constraint slowing the Cuban economy is not U.S.
trade sanctions, but Cuba's own outdated economic model, inherited from
the Soviet Union, of central planning, it says.

• Cuba's average income is one of the lowest in Latin America: 448 pesos
a month, or $20 at the official exchange rate. University graduates are
in a frantic search for jobs, such as hotel doormen or waiters, that
offer access to foreign currency, or they want to emigrate, it says.

• Measured in per-capita income on a purchasing power parity basis,
Cuba's per capita income is $6,000 a year. By comparison, it is $8,000
in the Dominican Republic, $11,000 in Brazil, and $14,000 in Mexico,
Chile and Uruguay, according to United Nations figures.

• Industrial production stands at only 43 percent of its 1989 levels and
employs only 10 percent of today's workforce. Exports of goods are a
paltry $3 billion to $4 billion a year, only slightly more than
Venezuela's annual oil-for-doctors subsidies to the island.

• Cuba's external debt is "alarming." According to Cuba's Central Bank,
the island owes $8.9 billion to foreign creditors, plus another $7.6
billion in "frozen debts" that have not been restructured in more than
two decades.

• Cuba has developed service industries — such as tourism, which has
grown to 2.5 million visitors a year — and exports doctors to Venezuela
through government-run oil-for-doctors swaps. The services sector now
accounts for 81 percent of the island's economy but is not enough to get
the economy on its feet, the study says.

• Despite Cuban President Raul Castro's recently announced pro-market
economic reforms — including allowing certain forms of home ownership —
implementation of these reforms is slow and erratic amid fierce quarrels
between hard-liners and reformers within the regime, it says.

Feinberg's study proposes supporting economic reforms in Cuba through a
growing involvement of international financial institutions, such as the
International Monetary Fund, and by lifting U.S. barriers to these
institutions' technical assistance to Cuba.

Interestingly, Cuban officials expressed some interest to engage with
the IMF and the World Bank, especially since these institutions have
conceded that "there is no single model of development," and have gained
experience from their recent advisory roles in Vietnam and Nicaragua, it
says.

"When asked by the author for the Cuban position regarding IMF
membership, a senior official of the Cuban ministry of foreign affairs
responded: 'Cuba has no principled position against relations with the
IMF or the World Bank,'" the study says. It was the first time Cuba has
made such a statement, it says.

My opinion: If Gen. Castro's military dictatorship wants IMF help, after
decades of lashing out against that Washington-based institution — it
shouldn't be denied technical assistance. It would help build bridges
with reformers within the regime, and would amount to a dramatic example
of how Cuba's octogenarian rulers have failed on all fronts.

Those who claim that the Castro brothers are still popular, and that
Cuba has a model education system, should be asked: If Cuba's leaders
are so popular, why don't they dare hold free elections? And if Cuba's
education system is so good, why doesn't Cuba participate in the
world-wide PISA tests of 15-year-old students? The answer is simple:
Cuba's entire propaganda campaign, unchallenged on the island because of
rigid state censorship, would not hold up to the most basic independent
scrutiny.

The old joke I heard in Havana doesn't work anymore. Today, Cuba has the
worst of both worlds: It doesn't have great social services, or
breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami
Herald. His email address is aoppenheimer@miamiherald.com.

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2011/dec/20/imf-aid-would-highlight-failures-cuba/

Venezuela agreed to put Cuba in charge of medical purchases for an
expansion of the South American country's pharmaceutical industry,
Telesur reported.

One of 12 health-related agreements signed during a meeting of the
bilateral commission in Havana puts the Cuban government in charge of
purchases for the construction of pharmaceutical manufacturing
facilities in the South American country, Venezuelan Health Minister
Eugenia Sader said.

The bilateral commission agreed Dec. 19 on 47 joint projects worth $1.6
billion, including in energy and agriculture. Neither government
released any details.

As part of an effort to substitute medical imports, Venezuela's Servicio
Autónomo de Elaboraciones Farmaceúticas (Sefar) announced last year it
was planning to build a joint venture plant with Cuba for various basic
drugs, and a joint venture plant with Portugal for antibiotics.
According to the Sefar Website, the state institution is planning to
produce Atenolol, Vitamin C, Ethambutol, Ibuprofene, Loratadine and
other drugs.

Sader was in Europe in early December to coordinate purchases for the
project. The health ministry plans to begin some production as early as
May 2012, she said.

This is not the first time Cuba is in charge of medical purchases for
Venezuela. Among others, Venezuela relied on Cuban expertise for
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of purchases for the Barrio
Adentro medical program and the Misión Milagro eye surgery program.

http://www.cubastandard.com/2011/12/20/venezuela-puts-cuba-in-charge-of-medical-purchases/

The death of Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator, has Cuban Americans
and dissidents in Cuba pondering about the day when they will read Fidel
Castro's obituary.

As North Korea urges its people to rally behind Jong-il's youngest son
and heir apparent, Kim Jong Un, Cubans in the U.S. can't help but see
the Korean family succession of totalitarian power as an omen to the
future to come for the Cuban people.

For 52 years, Cuban exiles and pro-democracy advocates have awaited the
death of Castro in the hope that it would cripple the Communist regime –
only to see that excitement wane by the appointment of his brother, Raul
Castro, as president in 2006.

Today in North Korea, the realities of a totalitarian government run
through bloodlines have ruled out any hope for democracy in that country.

"Without a doubt, both regimes are similar in concept in that the heirs
to both dictatorships end the same way – family dynasties and
bloodlines," internationally known Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez
told Fox News Latino.

The quick succession to power of Jong-il's son after the father's death
has sent mixed messages about what may transpire after Castro dies. Will
democracy break through? Will native Cubans mourn?

North Koreans have marched by the thousands to their capital's landmarks
to mourn, many seen crying uncontrollably and flailing their arms in
apparent grief over news of the death of their "dear leader," according
to the Associated Press. On the nation's state television, Ri Chun Hee,
known as the voice of North Korea, tearfully broke the news of the
dictator's death on Monday.

"I don't think we are going to see a Cuba filled with images of people
crying in the streets, and tearing their clothes as a sign of their
pain," Sánchez said. "Actually instead, when Fidel Castro dies,
everything will be held in an official ceremony and Cubans will breathe
a big sigh of relief."

Since Fidel Castro came to power, Cuban exiles have hoped to be able to
return — at least for a visit — to a democratic Cuba. Numerous times
during the bearded revolutionary's tenure, exiles thought certain events
would bring down the regime — the end of the Soviet empire, which kept
Castro's government propped up with billions of dollars in aid annually;
news of Castro's health problems; the passage of laws by the U.S.
Congress tightening the embargo against Cuba.

Each bit of news prompted Cuban exiles to say "Next year in Havana,"
about where they would celebrate Christmas.

But the regime continued.

The future date of Castro's death has always been marked as a date of
reckoning – a new beginning. But experts point to Kim Jong-il's death as
a sign of what the current regime hopes will take place on the island.

"People think that whether he lives or dies is the only thing that will
determine the future course of events in Cuba," said Aramis Pérez, a
secretariat member of the Cuban Resistance Assembly and Miami native.
"In order for there to be an end to the regime there is an entire system
that needs to be removed."

Even though the power has already been transferred to Raul as President
of Cuba, and succession plans have been set for years, Pérez believes
there is hope that Castro's death can be more than symbolic.

But, he says, don't expect change to come from the regime.

"I do see great hope in the democracy movement and the real trends of
the ordinary Cuban on the street seeing these activists taking these
risks," said Pérez. "The ordinary person on the street losing that fear
and starting to join more frequently."

Others say Castro's death alone will not bring any miracles.

"The death of Fidel will not be that meaningful now compared to about 10
years ago," said Jose Millares, 71, a Cuban exile and New Jersey
resident who left the island at 23. "When both die that's when change
can happen."

Activists like Alina Alvarez, president and founder of Cubans for
Democracy in New Jersey, believe that unlike North Korea, the
pro-democracy movement is alive and well in Cuba.

"I think his death is still going to mean something," she said. "People
in Cuba are sick and tired of living the way they are living. There were
people that were skeptical. But now Cubans are seeing a different
picture because of tourism, Facebook, and Twitter."

Sánchez, the blogger, says she finds hope in the face of a discouraging
omen from North Korea.

"North Korea is the only country in the world that makes me feel
relieved to live in Cuba today," she said.

Follow Bryan Llenas at @bryan_llenas or e-mail him at
bryan.llenas@foxnewslatino.com.

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/12/19/after-kim-jong-ils-death-cubans-wait-for-castros-turn/

52-year-old Irma Caceres, who has worked for decades in a storage
business located in the municipality of San German (Holguin province)
has been denied of her right to retire due to illness.

According to the medical documents she submitted, Irma suffers from
arterial hypertension, obesity, two hernias, chronic sciatica,
degenerative osteoarthritis, and circulatory deficiency.

"Even then", Irma tells me, "the medical group which examined me last
month refused to give me medical leave due to illness, alleging that
even with those ailments I still did not fulfill the necessary
requirements".

Mrs. Caceres explained to me that the only solution that the
"specialists" offered her was that the head of the business should
relocate her to another job. The victim claims that she has ousted all
resources and tried all methods to prove that her health will not allow
her to even work in another place, but she has grown tired because no
one is tending to her case.

The 26 years which Irma Caceres has served in that business have served
her for nothing because with all the ailments she is suffering from, it
has become evident that she will become one of the many workers who make
up the list of the "unemployed".

What has happened, she tells me, "is the new practice of the State
applied in order to do away with us without having to pay us retirement.
It leaves us floating adrift, for there is nowhere to look".

Translated by: Raul G.

17 December 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=13017

HAVANA — Along Havana's northern coastline, storms that roll down from
the north send waves crashing against the concrete seawall, drenching
vintage cars and kids playing games of chicken with the salty spray.

Fisherman toss their lines into the warm waters, shirtless men play
dominoes on card tables, and throngs of young people gather on weekend
nights to laugh, flirt and sip cheap rum.

This is the achingly beautiful and most instantly recognizable part of
Havana's cityscape: the Malecon seafront boulevard, with its curlicue
lampposts and pastel buildings rising into an azure sky.

Just about anywhere else in the world, it would be a playground for the
wealthy, diners in four-star restaurants and tourists willing to spend
hundreds of dollars a night for a million-dollar view.

But along the Malecon, many buildings are dank, labyrinthine tenements
bursting beyond capacity, plagued by mold and reeking of backed-up sewer
drains. Paint peels away from plaster, and the saline air rusts iron
bars to dust. Some buildings have collapsed entirely, their propped-up
facades testimony to a more dignified architectural era.

Now, for the first time since the 1959 revolution, a new law that
permits the sale of real estate has transformed these buildings into
extremely valuable properties. Another new law that allows more people
to go into business for themselves has entrepreneurs setting up shop and
talking up the future. And a multimillion-dollar revitalization project
is marching down the street improving lighting, sidewalks and drainage.

The year has seen some remarkable first steps toward a new Cuban
economic model, including the sacrificing of a number of Marxism's
sacred cows. The state is still firmly in control of all key sectors,
from energy and manufacturing to health care and education, but
increasingly people are allowed to engage in a small measure of private
enterprise. Officials say the changes are irreversible, and this is the
last chance to save the economy.

Yet Cubans will tell you that change comes slowly on the island. Strict
controls on foreign investment and property ownership mean there's
precious little money to bankroll a capitalist revival. Even some
Malecon denizens who embrace the reforms see a long haul ahead.

"It's not that I see the future as black, more like I'm seeing a little
spark from someone 3 kilometers away who lit a match," said Jose Luis
Leal Ordonez, the proprietor of a modest snack shop."But it's a match,
not a lantern."

Leal's block, the first one along the promenade, has offered a front row
seat to five decades of Cuba under Fidel Castro. The residents of
Malecon 1 to 33 have watched the powerful forces of revolution play out
beneath their balconies, and today they're bracing for yet another act
as Castro's younger brother Raul turns a half-century of Communist dogma
on its ear.

___

Given that Cuba's national identity has been inextricably bound up with
its powerful neighbor 150 kilometers (90 miles) to the north, it is
perhaps fitting that the Malecon is the legacy of a "Yanqui."

The year was 1900 and the country was under U.S. control following the
Spanish-American War. Governor General Leonard Wood, who commanded the
Rough Riders during the war with friend Teddy Roosevelt as his No. 2,
launched a public works program to clean up unsanitary conditions and
stimulate the economy. A key element was the Malecon.

At that time Havana ended about a block from the sea, separated from the
waves by craggy rock. Raw sewage seeped into the bay nearby, so
fishermen and bathers avoided this part of the waterfront. Only later
would high-rise hotels and casinos spring up to make the Malecon a
world-famous tourism draw.

For those early American occupiers, "The idea was to create a maritime
drive so the city, which until now had its back to the sea, would begin
to face the ocean," said architect Abel Esquivel. Since 1994, he has
been working with the City Historian's office to restore the crumbling
Malecon.

As the boulevard and promenade took shape, buildings sprang up on this
block. One of the first was a three-story boarding house for singles and
childless couples who occupied 12 apartments.

Today those have been subdivided horizontally and vertically, again and
again, to take advantage of every last inch of space, and some 70
families live crammed into every nook and cranny.

Leal runs his cafeteria in the home where he was born 46 years ago, at
the dark crux of an interior passageway. It caters mostly to neighbors
and goes unnoticed by tourists on the sun-drenched walk outside.

A lifelong supporter of the revolution, Leal is grateful for the
opportunity to live rent-free and earn two master's degrees on the
state's dime. Still, after years of frustration working for
dysfunctional government bureacracies, he quit his state job. He opened
his snack shop May 1, and already it brings more income than before,
enough even for his daughter's upcoming "quinceanera," her coming-of-age
15th birthday party.

He is one of the people on this block who is buying into Castro's
entrepreneurial challenge.

Another is Omar Torres, who operates a private restaurant known as a
"paladar" on a second-story terrace with sea and skyline views. He
praised the government for lifting a ban on the serving of lobster and
steak and allowing him to more than quadruple the number of diners he
can seat.

Downstairs, an artist runs an independent gallery selling paintings of
"Che" Guevara and cityscapes to tourists. Although he doesn't own the
house, he's so confident in the future that he's using the income to
remodel his rental.

Elsewhere folks are letting out rooms to travelers, and newly licensed
street vendors are now legally peddling peanuts in tightly wrapped paper
cones.

"Cubans dream of truly feeling like masters of their own destiny, for
the state not to interfere in personal matters," Leal said. "Until now
the state told you that you couldn't even sell your home."

___

From its early days, the Malecon was a place to see and be seen, to
celebrate a success, drown a sorrow or woo a sweetheart. By the 1920s it
was a favorite strip for middle-class Cubans who motored up and down to
show off their vehicles.

Havana developed without a strong central plan or dominant core, and the
Malecon became one of its most important communal spaces, said historian
Daniel Rodriguez, a Cuban-American researcher at New York University.

"I think the closest thing Havana has to an urban center is this long
seawall," Rodriguez said. "It's a long, ribbony main square."

Today the concrete promenade stretches 6 kilometers (4 miles) from the
harbor to the Almendares River, the last section completed in 1958 under
strongman Fulgencio Batista.

Those were heady times, when the city's nightclubs pulsed with a mambo
beat and mafia casinos on the Malecon drew planeloads of American
tourists. But their days were numbered.

The following January, the young rebel Fidel Castro marched triumphantly
into Havana and in short order began seizing mansions and apartment
buildings and redistributing them to the poor, triggering a tectonic
shift in housing as well as the rest of the economy and society.

Castro declared private real estate incompatible with the revolution's
ideals. "For the bourgeoisie," he said, things like "country, society,
liberty, family and humanity have always been tied to a single concept:
private property."

___

In a country where everyone is guaranteed a place to live, millions are
jammed into dilapidated, multigenerational homes. The government is
landlord to vast ranks of tenants who pay nothing or a nominal rent of
around $2 a month. Sapped of any sense of ownership, some cannibalized
the old buildings, ripping out wood, cinderblocks and decorative tiles
to use or sell. That, combined with the punishing climate, has stifled
upkeep and hastened decay in the buildings on the Malecon.

One of them, the Hotel Surf, was a beauty when Griselia Valdes arrived
here as an 18-year-old newlywed in 1963. The entryway was tiled in pink
and black with white benches and a restaurant on the ground floor. The
rooms even had air-conditioning.

The glass bricks that lined the front wall are long gone, demolished by
big storms. A drainpipe dumps over a spider web of electrical wires
hanging at eye level in a passageway, while rainwater filters through
the walls and spills into the lobby. The elevator was taken out years
ago, but with the motor left rusting at the top of the shaft, people
fear it could come crashing down any day.

"Mostly it is us who have abused the building with the subdivisions,
with the banging and the crashing," Valdes said. "From neglecting it,
from indolence."

Jan Ochoa Barzaga, who lives in the hotel's basement, is pessimistic
about how much Raul Castro's reforms can change things. The factory
worker finds it very frustrating that his girlfriend, like many others
in Cuba, received a free university education from a generous
government, but is languishing in a low-paid job.

Ochoa Barzaga tried to make the sea passage off the island in 2009, but
was caught and returned home. If he had another opportunity to leave, he
wouldn't think long.

"If they opened it up again," said the 32-year-old. "I'd be out of here."

___

The Malecon continued to serve as center-stage throughout Fidel Castro's
rule, with the military conducting war games along the seawall during
the 1960s after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. In 2000 a flag-waving
Castro personally led marches along the seawall to demand Cuban raft-boy
Elian Gonzalez's return from the United States.

Four years earlier, with Cuba buckling under a severe economic crisis
following the collapse of the Soviet Union, thousands marched through
the streets with makeshift plywood and inner-tube rafts and set off from
the Malecon in a desperate gamble to reach Florida. Many failed.

On Aug. 5 of that year, riotous protests erupted on the boulevard and
surrounding streets that were likely the biggest challenge to Castro
since he took power. Amid looting and dozens of arrests, Castro
addressed the crowd from atop a military vehicle.

"We were witnesses to all that," said Torres, the private restaurant
owner, who saw the multitudes from his balcony. "You began to reconsider
the meaning that Fidel has for Cubans, because in a moment of chaos and
uncertainty, his presence was something else. Even the rioters began
shouting, 'Fidel! Fidel!'"

That image of a robust, charismatic father figure faded when illness
forced him from power five years ago.

The future is left to Raul, who at 80, is five years younger than his
brother. He has dropped one bombshell after another with his economic
reforms. None caused more of a stir than the measure legalizing the real
estate market.

There's no sign of an imminent gold rush along this block of the
Malecon, or anywhere else. Few individuals hold title to these homes;
most rent from the government. Meanwhile the new law contains
protections against individual accumulation of property or wealth, and
officials insist this is no wholesale embrace of capitalism.

"All these changes, necessary to update the economic model, aim to
preserve socialism, strengthen it and make it truly irrevocable," Raul
Castro said in December 2010.

There's also the question of money: Cuba has only a tiny middle class
with the kind of coin to not only buy a seafront home but afford the
maintenance needed to keep the corrosive air at bay. The new law bars
anyone not a permanent resident from buying property, including exiles
who still imagine a day when they might return.

For Jorge Sanguinetty, who grew up a few blocks from the Malecon and was
an economist for central planning under Fidel Castro before fleeing in
1967, the history of the seawalk is personal.

"I was like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. I used to go fishing there, walking
through the rocks. We could see the salt from the waves on our windows
during the storms," Sanguinetty recalled, saying he still dreams about
it more than 40 years later. "You have to see a sunset (on the) Malecon.
They are absolutely sensational."

Sanguinetty, founder of the international development group DevTech
Systems, is writing a book about potential redevelopment in Cuba and has
followed the issue closely over the years. He said the same forces that
caused the Malecon's decay also added to its charm.

"The stagnation of Havana had this unintended consequence: Even though
many things have fallen apart and are no longer salvageable, Havana will
remain very desirable because uncontrolled development didn't take
place," he said by phone from his office in Miami. "So there are many
jewels there architecturally, and the Malecon is one of the most
beautiful jewels in the crown."

___

When it comes to the Malecon, the City Historian's Office wields
near-total control. A largely autonomous institution, it collects
undisclosed millions of dollars each year from the hotels and tourist
restaurants it runs in restored buildings, and plows a big chunk of that
back into rehabilitating more. The office recently said it has more than
180 projects, on top of the hundreds already completed.

The result has been an architectural rebirth that's on display in the
gleaming Spanish-American cultural center, a rescued former tenement
next door to Leal's building. A few doors away is a near-total rehab
with brand-new apartments upstairs from a state-run restaurant, a
mixed-use model that could be repeated.

There are also reminders that money is tight. Residents here remember
how in the early 2000s, at the site of the collapsed Hotel Miramar, a
fancy hotel from 1902 where tuxedoed waiters once attended to a
fashionable clientele, Fidel Castro and Chinese President Jiang Zemin
laid the cornerstone for a $24 million hotel to be built with help from
Beijing.

Construction mysteriously froze after just a few weeks. Today, bricks
form a single uncompleted first story and a faded artistic rendering
tacked to a fence depicts the glassy, hyper-modern structure that never
got built.

Despite the decay and unfulfilled hopes, the residents say they live in
a magical place that creates a sense of community that doesn't exist
even one block inland.

"I'm right on what we call the balcony of the city," said Leal, the
cafeteria owner. "For me there's no place more sacred than where I live."

___

Associated Press writer Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami contributed to this
report.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/17/cuba-property-new-property-law_n_1155297.html

Cuba is one of the unsung heroes of medical tourism, as it has been
quietly attracting people from overseas for decades. The government
controls access to all local hospitals for overseas patients, and has
just relaunched Servimed.

Empresa Comercializadora de Servicios Médicos de Cuba S.A., known as
Servimed, is a state owned and run company that offers foreigners access
to the 16 Cuban hospitals and clinics that provide more than 100 types
of health services on the island, ranging from cancer treatment and drug
addiction programmes, to dentistry and cosmetic surgery. As an
organization, their work has been ongoing for more than 20 years,
initially as Servimed; later as Cubanacan Tourism and Health, then as
Tourism and Health, and now back to Servimed.

It has been hidden away, but as part of a more public international
role, the for-profit medical services company relaunched itself before
an international business audience at the recent International Havana
Fair. The expectation that President Obama will fulfil his promise to do
away with the rules that prevent most US citizens going to Cuba for
tourism or healthcare is part of the reason for the new openness.

Servimed deals with private individuals but its main role is to
coordinate the bigger-volume business of government-to-government
services. Servimed provides for-pay medical services by Cuban personnel
to governments of 15 countries; which includes medical tourism. For-pay
medical services to other governments are not new. Panama announced in
2011 that it will pay for the hands-on specialty training of Panamanian
doctors in Cuban hospitals. Also in 2010 Qatar agreed with Cuba to pay
for an undisclosed number of Cuban doctors to work in a new 54-bed
hospital in the oil-rich country. Cuba also agreed in 2010 to manage and
staff eye surgery centres in hospitals in China and Algeria.

Servimed is providing services to 15 countries this year, including
Algeria, China, Portugal, Jamaica, Qatar, Surinam and Ukraine. Cuban
medicine has become a worldwide leader in healthcare services for people
in poor and rural areas as well as in disaster zones; at least 38,000
medical workers from Cuba are currently deployed in 77 countries. Cuba
is in charge of a $690 million plan to rebuild Haiti's healthcare
infrastructure. Since 1998, the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina
(ELAM) in Havana has been training 7200 students from all over the
world, and graduates 1500 doctors per year.

Many of these programmes are funded by Venezuela, and others by
countries such as South Africa, Brazil and Norway, but many are
subsidised by Cuba. Cuba has proposed to the European Union and Canada
that its doctors and medical services could be part of triangulated aid
service provided in developing countries; so far, no agreement has
materialized.

Venezuela is paying at least $5 billion in oil and cash per year for the
services of Cuban doctors and for training of Venezuelan and
third-country medical students in Cuba. Venezuela has also funded
Operación Milagro, a billion-dollar programme led by Cuba that has given
free eye surgery to hundreds of thousands of low-income Latin Americans.

Now, the government wants to use Servimed to make Cuba's public health
services sustainable and more efficient by generating revenues from paid
for medical services and medical tourism and investing the profits in
maintenance, repair and purchase of equipment for Cuba's public health
institutions.

Servimed is spearheading a Cuban effort to increase for-profit medical
exports. A Public Health Ministry document published in December 2010
said that, as part of an overhaul of Cuba's healthcare system, medical
institutions should begin to sell services to foreigners wherever
possible, "The medical services will remain free for poor countries. But
they will be sold to those whose economy allows it, with the goal of
reducing our expenses and contributing to the development of the
national health system."

The Cuban medical system now offers medical services for Canadians.
Servimed's individual subsidiary Health Services International began in
January 2007. HSI is the agency officially recognised by Turismo y Salud
and the Cuban medical system. It assists and guides medical tourists. In
the agreement between HSI (Servimed) and Turismo y Salud, anyone who
does speak Spanish will always have a medically trained person nearby
who will act as an interpreter to help the medical tourist understand
test results and to help when decisions are necessary. Many doctors and
nurses do speak English and some speak French, also.

Medical tourism news
http://www.imtj.com/news/?entryid82=329322

Irina Pino.

HAVANA TIMES, Dec 15 — This past November 11, part of the house
collapsed where the family of 46-year-old Irina Pino lived. But this is
not the typical story of a Cuban house that collapses because the
construction is too old and has not been repaired for many years.

Irina Pino: The downstairs neighbors started fixing up their unit,
making repairs. Out on the front porch they removed the cornice of a
load-bearing column. First the ceiling started to crack, but then there
was this tremendous crash – the balcony and two out of the three
bedrooms of our apartment just caved in.

HT: Was the downstairs unit damaged too?

Irina: The porch had some damage, but that was all; their place is OK.

HT: You said that your house was built between 1919 and 1920, which
means it's nearly a century old. What condition was it in?

Iriana's Parent's House

Irina: It hadn't been repaired in a long while. Out front, a very large
bay tree covers the entire front of the house, which is why there was
always so much moisture on the balcony. But if the neighbors hadn't
started all that hammering, nothing would have happened.

HT: How can you be so sure that it wouldn't have collapsed when you say
it was built around 1920 and that it hadn't been maintained for many years?

Irina: That's what the architect who made the report said. Perhaps, it
would have had problems at some point in time, but much later. What just
happened was because of the hammering by the neighbors. The load-bearing
column was what held up the whole façade.

HT: So the downstairs residents should compensate you.

Irina: Of course, but lawsuits don't work here. What's more, these
people have a child who's mentally disabled, in addition to being
physically handicapped. They are a social services case. They don't own
any property, not a car, nothing that could be used to offset the
damage. We could file a claim, I suppose, but we wouldn't get anything
out of it.

Though Irina was born in this house, located in Vedado, she has not
lived there since she married. Now she lives in Miramar with her husband
and her twelve-year-old son. Her parents, her sister and her brother in
law are the ones who now live in the Vedado house.

But a little more than one year ago, Irina's mother fractured her hip
and the father suffered a stroke. Moreover, they can't be separated.
They've been married for more than sixty years. Since then, they both
have been living with Irina, in Miramar, but they hope to move back to
their Vedado house.

Irina: I haven't said anything about what happened to the house because
they're too old. My mother is 80 and my father is 82. My fear is that
all of this might upset them too much and affect their health.

Reinforcement struts have been put up throughout the interior of Irina's
house. The reality is there is no assurance that the house will be
habitable when the final building assessment report is issued after the
demolition work.

HT: What solution are you pursuing for your sister and her husband?
Where are they staying now?

Irina: They're looking for a lawyer, to see if this can be solved as a
housing case, because if my parents decide to return, there's only one
room in the house – if it even turns out to be habitable. There's not
space for all four people. But that's something that's going to take a
long time. And if they have to move into a shelter…who knows. I have a
friend who spent ten years in a one, after which time they finally
assigned her an apartment. During those ten years, she was miserable,
because shelters are not good places to live.

HT: How have your sister and her husband taken all of this?

Irina: My sister has taken it very badly. She's always had a nervous
condition, so it only worsened when the collapse occurred. The noise was
thunderous, almost staggering. We had to admit her into the hospital.
Now she's like a nomad, moving from one place to another. A person in
her condition should own their home. They're the ones getting the worst
end of all of this.

HT: Where are they staying? I suppose they are not staying at the
damaged home?

Irina: Sometimes they do stay there… but they come and go. They can't
stay there all the time because it's dangerous. Sometimes they stay over
at the husband's family's place, which is tiny and also in poor
condition with a lot of people living there.

HT: What struck me is that in the midst of all this, you had the
composure to take photos of the disaster.

Irina: I saw that everybody passing by was taking pictures. It became a
kind of tourist attraction with people taking photographs, filming. So I
decided to take pictures because that was the house where I was born.

People passing by wondered why I took so many pictures, and I told them
that it was my home. They were shocked; they were amazed at how calmly I
was taking all of this. It has indeed affected me, but not outwardly.
I'm not going around crying about it all the time, like some people who
don't even live there but spend their time whining about it and
wondering what will happen.

People know of the hardships that follow the loss of a home. Irina is
not alien to that reality, but she tries to take it with optimism and
wisdom.

Irina: I hope there's some solution to all of this. My parents won't
wind up homeless. They are with me, at least. That's what concerns me
most. A house is a house, it doesn't last forever. Everything has its
birth and its death. Nothing is forever and neither are we.

Days after Irina told me this part of the story: the demolition work of
the house was completed. The house, in which Irina was born is not
habitable anymore. The furniture had to be taken to her house in
Miramar, because she feared people would steal them.

Two doors had already been stolen. Even the workers carrying out the
demolition works were stealing things. She had to tell her parents that
their house in Vedado was being repaired. She doesn't know when and how
she will tell them the truth.

Her sister and her brother-in-law have been left only with the option of
going to a shelter. But there is no capacity for more people in the
place. The sister has been at the hospital for twenty days now.

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=57681

CUBAN nurses are in fear for their lives following two separate
burglaries at their living quarters on the compound of the Port of Spain
General Hospital.

The Express spoke with the Cuban coordinator of doctors and two nurses,
who confirmed that last Friday evening, one of their colleagues returned
to her fourth-floor apartment from a night shift and discovered that
numerous items she had bought to send back to her family in Cuba had
been stolen.

These included Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions, mobile phones
and appliances.

The terrified nurse also found a sheet and blade lying on top of a
barrel in her apartment. A police report was made and officers visited
the apartment complex, where they dusted for prints.

Then, on Tuesday evening, thieves broke into another apartment on the
first floor of the building, taking shoes, a bank card, money and
appliances. The occupant was not at home at the time of the burglary.

The Express understands that in previous years, there have also been
one-off incidents of burglaries at the apartment complex.

The majority of nurses who were staying at the nurses' living quarters
have returned to their home in Cuba in recent months, but a handful of
nurses will remain in the apartment building until their contracts
expire next month.

A new batch of Cuban health workers arrived in Trinidad last week. Many
of them are expected to take up residence in the very same apartment
building.

The nurses staying there at present say the issue of security must be
addressed urgently.

"Something needs to be done to make us feel secure. We sacrifice and
leave our families back home to come here for work, so we want to feel
safe," said one nurse.

Since the break-ins, the nurses say they are unable to sleep and are in
constant fear for their lives.

They say they are counting down the days until they return home, while
some have said fervently they will never return to Trinidad.

"What would have happened to me if I came home while someone was in my
apartment? I could have been killed. I could never tell my mother what
has happened. She can't know about this. She is old and would be
concerned for my safety. She would want me to leave and come home
immediately," said one nurse, who asked to remain anonymous.

Aside from missing burglar proofing, on the adjoining verandah of each
apartment, there are no additional security features such as alarms or
close-circuit television cameras. For safety, the Cuban nurses must rely
on security guards.

These guards, in turn, should be held accountable, said Health Minister
Fuad Khan, when contacted for a response. When the Express spoke with
Khan, he said he had not received word about the burglaries.

"We must reassess the security and put cameras on the compound that will
pick up these culprits," said Khan.

"Everybody should be guaranteed safety at our hospitals. A lot of money,
in fact millions of dollars are spent contracting security firms to
guard the hospitals and they are supposed to do their job, so the
security firm should discipline its workers. I blame poor security for
the incidents," said Khan.

"I would hate for this to cause a souring of relationships between their
country and ours," he added.

Up to press time, attempts to contact Cuban Ambassador Humberto Rivero
Rosario for comment were unsuccessful.

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Cuban_nurses_living_in_fear-135633178.html

Cuba asking advice from IMF? Don't laugh!
By Andres Oppenheimer
aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com
MiamiHerald.com/Andres_Oppenheimer/

An old joke I heard for the first time more than 20 years ago in Havana
says that the three biggest achievements of the Cuban revolution are
health, education, and low infant-mortality rates, and that its three
biggest failures are breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

A new study by the Brookings Institution think tank shows that, two
decades later, things remain just as bad, if not worse.

Consider some of the findings of the study, entitled "Reaching out:
Cuba's new economy and the international response." It was written by
Richard E. Feinberg, a former Clinton administration Latin American
adviser who supports growing international development cooperation with
Cuba, and who traveled to Cuba earlier this year and interviewed Cuban
officials, academics, and average citizens.

• Despite big increases in tourism, some investments in mining and
massive subsidies from Venezuela, "the Cuban economy remains in the
doldrums." The main constraint slowing the Cuban economy is not U.S.
trade sanctions, but Cuba's own outdated economic model, inherited from
the Soviet Union, of central planning, it says.

•  Cuba's average income is one of the lowest in Latin America: 448
pesos a month, or $20 at the official exchange rate. University
graduates are in a frantic search for jobs, such as hotel doormen or
waiters, that offer access to foreign currency, or they want to
emigrate, it says.

•  Measured in per capita income on a purchasing power parity basis,
Cuba's per capita income is $6,000 a year. By comparison, it is $8,000
in the Dominican Republic, $11,000 in Brazil, and $14,000 in Mexico,
Chile, and Uruguay, according to United Nations figures.

•  Industrial production stands at only 43 percent of its 1989 levels,
and employs only 10 percent of today's workforce. Exports of goods are a
paltry $3 billion to $4 billion a year, only slightly more than
Venezuela's annual oil-for-doctors subsidies to the island.

•  Cuba's external debt is "alarming." According to Cuba's Central Bank,
the island owes $8.9 billion to foreign creditors, plus another $7.6
billion in "frozen debts" that have not been restructured in more than
two decades.

•  Cuba has developed service industries — such as tourism, which has
grown to 2.5 million visitors a year — and exports doctors to Venezuela
through government-run oil-for-doctors swaps. The services sector now
accounts for 81 percent of the island's economy but is not enough to get
the economy on its feet, the study says.

 Despite Cuban President Raúl Castro's recently announced pro-market
economic reforms — including allowing certain forms of home ownership —
implementation of these reforms is slow and erratic amid fierce quarrels
between hard-liners and reformers within the regime, it says.

Feinberg's study proposes supporting economic reforms in Cuba through a
growing involvement of international financial institutions, such as the
International Monetary Fund, and by lifting U.S. barriers to these
institutions' technical assistance to Cuba.

Interestingly, Cuban officials expressed some interest to engage with
the IMF and the World Bank, especially since these institutions have
conceded that "there is no single model of development," and have gained
experience from their recent advisory roles in Vietnam and Nicaragua, it
says.

"When asked by the author for the Cuban position regarding IMF
membership, a senior official of the Cuban ministry of foreign affairs
responded: 'Cuba has no principled position against relations with the
IMF or the World Bank,' " the study says. It was the first time Cuba has
made such a statement, it says.

My opinion: If Gen. Castro's military dictatorship wants IMF help, after
decades of lashing out against that Washington-based institution — it
shouldn't be denied technical assistance. It would help build bridges
with reformers within the regime, and would amount to a dramatic example
of how Cuba's octogenarian rulers have failed on all fronts.

Those who claim that the Castro brothers are still popular, and that
Cuba has a model education system, should be asked: If Cuba's leaders
are so popular, why don't they dare hold free elections? And if Cuba's
education system is so good, why doesn't Cuba participate in the
world-wide PISA tests of 15-year-old students? The answer is simple:
Cuba's entire propaganda campaign, unchallenged on the island because of
rigid state censorship, would not hold up to the most basic independent
scrutiny.

The old joke I heard in Havana doesn't work anymore. Today, Cuba has the
worst of both worlds: It doesn't have great social services, or
breakfast, lunch and dinner.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/14/2546690/cuba-asking-advice-from-imf-dont.html#disqus_thread

HAVANA — Dozens of slogan-chanting Cuban government supporters faced
off with dissident women on Friday and prevented them from marching in
the street on the eve of international Human Rights Day.

About 200 backers of Cuba's communist government crowded a street in
central Havana where 20 women of the Ladies in White dissident group had
assembled in a house.

They carried signs of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and yelled
pro-government and anti-U.S. slogans.

"They're mercenaries," government supporter Elvira Gonzalez said of the
dissident women, who had planned a march to demand the release of
political prisoners.

Cuba's government routinely calls the island's dissidents "mercenaries"
and claims they are on the payroll of its long-time ideological foe, the
United States.

The Ladies in White group was formed by the wives and mothers of 75
dissidents jailed in a 2003 crackdown on Castro's opponents. The women
dressed in white to march silently along Havana streets seeking the
release of the prisoners.

The women were expected to try to march again on Saturday, the
anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.

All 75 Cubans jailed in Havana's so-called Black Spring of 2003 have
been freed, most of them following a deal between the Catholic Church
and President Raul Castro in 2010.

Dissident protests are regularly confronted by hostile mobs backing the
government, which says the free education and health services it
provides show its respect for human rights.

"There are no human rights here. They don't respect them," said Ladies
in White leader Berta Soler. "We can't go out to walk on the streets of
Havana because the government has these mobs and they won't let us
pass," she said.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/international/americas/2011/12/11/325528/Govt-supporters.htm

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuban dissidents said on Saturday that about 200
people were temporarily detained by the Communist-run island's security
services in the days leading up to an international human rights
celebration.

Government supporters danced salsa and chanted political slogans in a
Havana square to mark the 63rd anniversary of the adoption of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.

Opposition members who had planned to celebrate Human Rights Day in the
same place, and protest against abuses in Cuba, were blocked from going
to the square, dissidents said.

"Some 200 detentions for political motives have taken plan in the last
nine days in the lead up to the international Human Rights Day," said
Elizardo Sanchez of the independent Cuban Commission of Human Rights said.

"Authorities use a tactic of short-duration arrests, who are released a
few hours or days later, to impede protests."

International rights groups say Cuban laws virtually prevent all forms
of protest and dissent while the government says the free education and
health services it provides show its respect for human rights.

On Friday, government backers blocked the dissident group Ladies in
White from marching in the street.

The women were heckled again on Saturday by a crowd of government
supporters and prevented from leaving a house were they had gathered in
central Havana.

"Here come the people to fight for what is ours. These streets are ours
and that's why we defend them," shouted government sympathizer Mirta
Sosa outside the house.

"The government has prevented us from exercising the right of free
movement in the streets. Here in Cuba, human rights are violated daily,"
said Ladies in White leader Berta Soler.

The Ladies in White group was formed by the wives and mothers of 75
dissidents jailed in a 2003 crackdown on Castro's opponents. They have
since been released by President Raul Castro's government.

Havana's "Black Spring of 2003" caused a major fallout between Cuba and
the international community, and while some European nations have begun
a rapprochement since the prisoner release, relations with long-time
ideological foe the United States remain in a deep freeze.

Opposition protests in Cuba are exceedingly rare. Cuba's government,
which came to power in a 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, accuses
dissidents of being on the payroll of the Washington, which has imposed
a trade embargo on the island since Castro embraced Soviet communism in
the early 1960s.

On Saturday, state media was filled with stories and commentaries for
the anniversary of the adoption of the U.N. Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in 1948.

"The fulfillment of international commitments … has been implicit in
the work of the Cuban Revolution despite the economic war … and also
the systematic plots to destroy it," Jose Luis Mendez Mendez, an analyst
at the research arm of the Interior Ministry, wrote in an opinion piece
on cubadebate.cu.

(Additional reporting by Reuters TV; editing by Anthony Boadle)

http://news.yahoo.com/cuba-dissidents-200-detained-u-n-rights-day-170003989.html

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) — Four U.S. inspectors armed with safety glasses and
notebooks will set out on a mission next month to protect Florida's
beaches from a Cuban threat.

They'll rendezvous in Trinidad and Tobago with the Scarabeo 9, a rig
headed to deep waters off Cuba to drill for oil about 70 miles (113
kilometers) south of Florida's Key West.

Repsol YPF SA is making the Scarabeo 9 available to the U.S. inspectors
before the rig starts drilling closer to Florida than the BP Plc well
that failed last year in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the biggest U.S.
offshore oil spill. The exploration poses an environmental, political
and diplomatic challenge to the U.S. more than 50 years after cutting
off relations with Cuba's communist regime.

The Obama administration's dilemma is "what steps to take for
environmental protection and how much to honor current Cuba policy," Dan
Whittle, Cuba program director at the New York- based Environmental
Defense Fund, said in an interview.

In the aftermath of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power,
the U.S. banned exports to Cuba in 1960, withdrew diplomatic
recognition, backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and imposed
a full trade embargo in 1962.

Now generations of animosity between the two nations limit cooperation
on safety standards and cleanup precautions for the Cuba drilling
planned by Madrid-based Repsol, which would be followed by state-owned
companies from Malaysia to Venezuela. A conference on regional oil-spill
response being held this week in Nassau, Bahamas, may provide a forum
for discussions by U.S. and Cuban representatives.

Juan Jacomino, a spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section at the Swiss
embassy in Washington, declined in an interview to comment on drilling
off of the island nation.

Spare Parts

Repsol can use the Scarabeo 9 without violating the U.S. trade embargo
because it was built at shipyards in China and Singapore, and fewer than
10 percent of its components are American, according to its owner, Eni SpA.

The sanctions would block spare parts from the U.S. for the rig's
blowout preventer, a safety device that failed in the BP spill. The
restrictions also require Helix Energy Solutions Group Inc. of Houston,
which provides oil-spill containment equipment for Repsol in the Gulf of
Mexico, to seek a waiver to do so in Cuban waters in case of an accident.

U.S. companies seeking to do business with Cuba must ask the Commerce
Department, which considers most applications "subject to a policy of
denial," the agency says on its website. The Treasury Department weighs
requests to travel from the U.S. to Cuba.

Granting too few permits for spill prevention and response would keep
contractors from offering the technology and services developed after
the BP spill, Lee Hunt, president of the Houston-based International
Association of Drilling Contractors, said in an interview.

Cuban Exiles

Approving too many licenses would undermine the embargo, enriching a
regime listed by the U.S. State Department as a nation supporting
terrorism along with Iran, Sudan and Syria, according to anti-Castro
lawmakers such as Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of
Florida, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

U.S. "assistance, guidance and technical advice" to Repsol, including
the planned visit to Scarabeo 9, may violate the law by "helping to
facilitate" the company's work and providing the Cuban government "with
a financial windfall," Ros-Lehtinen said in a Nov. 1 letter to President
Barack Obama.

Ros-Lehtinen, who immigrated from Cuba with her family at age 8, is a
leader among Cuban exiles in South Florida who have opposed easing U.S.
restrictions. Florida, which has been a swing state in presidential
elections, also has been a bastion of opposition to oil drilling that
opponents say could despoil the beaches that are a prime draw for tourists.

Florida Drilling Foes

Lawmakers such as Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, have fought
to keep drilling out of U.S. waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico
bordering Florida.

Nelson and Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced a
bill Nov. 9 that would require foreign companies drilling in Cuban
waters to pay for damage to U.S. territory without liability limits.
Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, joined as a cosponsor.

Oil from BP's spill tarred beaches 150 miles away in Florida's
northwestern Panhandle.

Now Floridians are faced with drilling under the jurisdiction of Cubans,
who "don't have the resources" to control a blowout, Jorge Pinon, an
energy consultant and visiting research fellow at the Cuban Research
Institute at Florida International University in Miami, said in an
interview.

"If the U.S. is not willing to help" in an emergency, "the resources are
going to come from Canada, Norway and the U.K., and it will take a very
long time," said Pinon, who led Amoco Corp. units in Mexico City and
retired from BP in 2003, according to his biography.

Repsol's Contract

Repsol signed a contract with Cuba in 2000, according to the company's
website, and confirmed the presence of oil with a Norwegian rig in 2004.
Repsol will drill in about 5,000 feet (1.5 kilometers) to 6,000 feet of
water, about the depth of BP's Macondo well, according to Pinon.

Petroliam Nasional Bhd., or Petronas, based in Kuala Lumpur; New
Delhi-based Oil & Natural Gas Corp.; Hanoi-based Vietnam Oil & Gas
Group, known as PetroVietnam; Caracas-based Petroleos de Venezuela SA;
and Sonangol SA of Luanda, Angola, also hold Cuban blocks, Pinon said.

U.S. officials say they are doing all they can to ensure safe drilling
off Cuba.

"We are quite focused, and have been for many, many months" on "doing
anything within our power to protect U.S. shores and U.S. coastline,"
Tommy Beaudreau, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an
industry regulator, said in a Nov. 29 interview at Bloomberg's
Washington office.

Wild Well Control

The administration has issued some licenses to U.S. companies to respond
to a spill in Cuban waters, Mark Toner, a spokesman for the State
Department, said in an e-mail. He didn't say how many have been
approved, and the Commerce and Treasury departments didn't respond to
e-mailed requests for comment.

Wild Well Control Inc. of Houston is one permit recipient, according to
Hunt of the drilling contractors' trade group. The company didn't
respond to e-mails and phone calls seeking comment.

"Helix plans to build a new subsea containment cap to safeguard drilling
operations in Cuba," Cameron Wallace, a spokesman for that company said
in an e-mail about its request for U.S. licenses. "The cap and
associated equipment will be staged at a U.S. port near to the drilling
site to minimize response time."

Walking the Deck

In their visit to the Scarabeo 9, two inspectors from the U.S. Coast
Guard and two from the Interior Department will walk the deck and check
generators, the positioning system and firefighting equipment, Brian
Khey, who will be on the team, said in an interview.

The Americans will watch a firefighting simulation and conduct an
abandon-ship drill, according to Khey, the supervisor at the Coast
Guard's Outer Continental Shelf National Center of Expertise in Morgan
City, Louisiana,

While the visitors will discuss with Repsol any deficiencies they find,
they won't have enforcement powers, Khey said. Nor will they be able to
check the blowout preventer or the well casing and drilling fluid that
will be used on site, according to the Interior Department.

Scarabeo 9 was built "according to the latest and most advanced
international standards available at the time of her design and
construction," Rome-based Eni said in an e-mailed statement. "Health,
safety and environmental protection are always a top priority."

Eni Subsidiary

The vessel "is one of the very few units in the industry which is using
a technology which is not an American one," Pietro Franco Tali, chief
executive officer of Eni's oilfield- services subsidiary, Saipem SpA,
said on an Oct. 27, 2010, conference call.

One U.S. component is the blowout preventer, made by Houston-based
National Oilwell Varco Inc. The company hasn't applied for a license to
do business with Cuba and doesn't plan to, Chief Financial Officer Clay
Williams said in a phone interview.

That means rig operators will have to seek training and spare parts in
Europe or Asia, according to Hunt, whose group represents 1,494
companies including Saipem.

"It's like buying a Mercedes and being told you have to go to a Ford
dealer for parts," Hunt said in an interview.

The results of Cuba's drilling may affect U.S. energy policy. Success
would put pressure on the U.S. to open its waters surrounding Florida
for exploration, Pinon said.

A serious accident off of Cuba could throw the industry out of the Gulf
of Mexico, according to Brian Petty, executive vice president for
governmental affairs of the drilling contractors' group.

"A mess" in Cuban waters would lead critics of drilling to say, "Stop
it, don't let it go on anywhere," Petty said.

–With assistance from Nicole Gaouette in Washington and Nguyen Dieu Tu
Uyen in Hanoi. Editors: Judy Pasternak, Larry Liebert

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-09/cuba-oil-drilling-tests-u-s-on-protecting-florida-or-embargo.html

HAVANA TIMES, Dic 5 — The always interesting television program Como me
lo contaron (The way I heard It), discussed the hot topic of
cockfighting last week. Although this lucrative business is promoted by
the Cuban state — which exports about 700 fighting birds annually —
government involvement in this abusive practice was not the focus of the
program.

In my view, this was another attempt to legitimize the violent practice.

Reviewing additional coverage in the Cuban press, I found several
articles that defend this "sport" tooth and nail.

As almost always happens, their search for legitimacy requires finding a
link between the glorious history of the island and whatever the theme
in question. They managed to find several with cock fighting.

Historian Ciro Bianchi, who is interviewed each week on Como me lo
contaron, reported that in 1956, Cuba had 500 cock fighting rings.

In addition, Bianchi recalled that the emblem of the Liberal Party
carried the image of a "regal rooster" on a plow, and political figures
such as Jose Miguel Gomez and Carlos Mendieta (both were presidents)
were cock breeders and fighters (it seems he forgot to mention that the
tyrant Fulgencio Batista was one as well).

Bianchi displayed his admiration for President Mendieta when he
described how the former president once climbed on a stool in cock
fighting ring while holding up his "killer bird" and shouting "Viva Cuba
Libre! Viva Cuba Libre!"

For the journalist Lisanka Gonzalez of Granma International,
"Cockfighting is one of the few activities that some peoples continue to
practice from time immemorial as bastions of traditional culture,"
according to an article from 2004.

"[Our nation's] declaration of freedom and independence was delivered in
a cock fighting ring on February 24, 1895 in the city of Bayamo, in the
eastern part of the island, to a group of Cuban patriots who in this way
initiated the War of Independence," proudly illustrated Ramon R. Corona
in the Pinar del Rio newspaper El Guerrillero.

I'm always suspicious when they start to invoke the "homeland," "Cuban
identity," "bastions of traditional culture" and "declarations of
independence." There's usually some manipulation behind all that, some
reactionary idea they want to impose.

Historically, the issue of cockfighting has been used with subtlety and
hypocrisy by politicians in office who either approved or prohibited the
activity depending on the popular support it held at any given time.

On the television program, Bianchi explained how at the end of the War
of Independence in 1898, a group of patriots (including Maximo Gomez,
Manuel Sanguily and other political and culture figures) asked the US
governor of the island to prohibit bullfighting and cockfighting.

Dominican-born Maximo Gomez believed, "This bloody spectacle was alien
to modern culture." Yet to Bianchi, for "a man who had seen so much war
and so much blood, to display that reaction…" this was somewhat
difficult to understand. Apparently the manhood of the Mambi leader
should have distanced him from any show of feelings or a sense of decency.

It was the government of Jose Miguel Gomez that approved the law in
support of cock fighting. The single dissenting vote was cast by Manuel
Sanguily, who regarded such practices as contrary to the moral health of
the people.

However, with the support of the corrupt politicians of the day, this
business thrived. With the "advent of the free and independent
republic," as it was referred to in El Guerrillero (though I was always
taught that these were puppet governments), some people were enriched by
the heavy gambling involved, while many other families went broke.

The revolution closes the ring

The 1968 advance of the "revolutionary offensive" closed down all small
private businesses, including cock fighting. Given its immorality, far
from any sense of respect for animals, "revolutionary" banning was
imposed against that "bastion of traditional culture," according to the
Granma article.

"Fighting birds were on the verge of disappearing, however the foresight
of an authority, Guillermo Garcia Frias, plus the support of Celia
Sanchez, stopped the threat that loomed over them," according to Lisanka
Gonzalez's explanation of the return of the abusive practice.

Commander Guillermo Garcia Frias established the first state-run
gamecock hatchery and in the mid-80's the government decriminalized the
fights. Strict regulations allowed the continuation of cock fighting
under the control of the "Flora and Fauna Agency" (Spanish: Empresa de
Flora y Fauna), though gambling was prohibited.

In other words, one can now kill roosters for human enjoyment freely and
legally, but of course under the strict government control. Independent
fight organizers and participants are usually fined between 1,500 and
3,000 pesos if they are caught at independent rings, with or without
betting.

However, a good bird is valued at between 2,000 and 4,000 pesos in the
informal national market.

The Finca Alcona, in the Havana municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, is the
largest breeder of fighting cocks in Cuba. Here they are prepared,
trained and selected before being exported.

That center belongs to the "Flora and Fauna Agency," which — instead of
protecting the fowl — exports them at prices that can reach the shocking
figure of $1,000 for a prize roosters and $150 for a common rooster.
Some of the exported birds are ones seized in raids of illegal rings.

In justification of all of this, the El Guerrillero newspaper argued,
"The cock is an animal that is essentially insensitive and very
primitive. Its temperature is above 40º C, which minimizes its ability
to experience pain. That threshold is much higher than that of humans,
and therefore wounds are easily tolerated. Let's say they can handle
them much better than humans can."

"They are aggressive by nature, since they fight each other in the wild
and even in domestic conditions. This is their reason for being.
Therefore humans, far from exploiting the situation, are merely
channeling this energy to balance it and to humanize it through a
variety measures and regulations. Fighting would inevitably occur in one
place or another as an imperative of nature."

Is it possible to write anything more cynical? Almost all animals fight
(humans more than any other), but most simply do this to demonstrate
their strength in a kind of "performance attack."

Many do it to mark their territory, to obtain a mate, to defend prey or
in a mode of training to defend themselves against predators. Rarely do
these experiences result in the death of an opponent of the same species.

Only twisted minds like those of some humans are able to gloat and enjoy
the pain, forcing the birds to fight to the death. Many times they even
put spikes or steel spurs on the birds' legs to make the show bloodier.

In the El Guerrillero article, the author calls those people
"extremists" who hold critical views against these cruel practices.

Granma, in turn, sought to legitimize cockfighting through science. It
cited a group of researchers from the province of Pinar del Rio who were
also "amateur cock fighters."

These "scientists" concluded that such practices have constituted "a
tradition of the Cuban people imposed by our collective will for
centuries, one that has not changed its internal motion despite
social-historical changes that have taken place over several centuries."

I'm from Pinar del Rio and I know my people's passion for cock fighting
– and for the money it produces. The practice of torturing animals is of
course present in our culture. But why must we promote it and even
profit from it? Wouldn't it be better to educate people to have respect
for other living beings that are sharing our stay on this planet?

I'm not even a vegetarian. I approve the consumption of animal for foods
as a part of our culture and for the natural recycling of elements. But
this doesn't justify killing for the pleasure of witnessing it or to
relieve our boredom.

According to Article 27 of the Cuban Constitution, "The state protects
the environment and the natural resources of the country." But what can
be done if leaders, businesspeople, military personnel and others who
make up the Cuban political-bourgeoisie are regular participants in both
government and illegally-run cock fights?

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=57028

Family marks Alan Gross' 2nd year in Cuban prison
By ERIKA BOLSTAD
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — On the sidewalk in front of the Cuban Interests Section,
on a street that runs straight to the White House, dozens of people have
been gathering each Monday for the past month to demand the release of
an American who was imprisoned in Cuba two years ago.

Regardless of weather, the protesters carry laminated signs that say
"Free Alan Gross Now," and they sing "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu," a Hebrew
folk song that translates to "Peace Will Come."

It's impossible to know whether the Cuban diplomats inside hear the
pleas to free the 62-year-old Gross, who on Saturday marked his second
anniversary in detention. Regardless, the protesters promise to return
every Monday at noon until peace comes for Gross and his family.

"It's directed to everybody who drives down 16th Street and thinks,
'Hmm, maybe I should find out what that's about,'" his wife, Judy Gross,
said of the weekly protests, which she attended last week for the first
time. "But clearly we want the Cubans to know we're not going to just
sit down and do nothing about this."

Judy Gross also has no intention of remaining quiet anymore, and as the
second anniversary of her husband's imprisonment neared, she sat down
for interviews with McClatchy Newspapers and other publications. It's a
marked departure from her previous approach, which was to grant few
interviews and keep a relatively low profile in hopes of securing her
husband's release.

Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen whom Cuba accused two years ago of plotting
to "destroy the revolution," was convicted in March of crimes against
the state for bringing telecommunications equipment into the country and
was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

"At first we were keeping things pretty quiet because that's what we
were advised to do, and not to try to ruffle the feathers of the Cubans
at all," Judy Gross said. "But that obviously hasn't worked, so we're
now trying to go more vocal. And still being nice about it."

Sometimes, she said, she wonders whether any strategy is best.

"You don't know," she said. "It's very hard to read the Cubans. You just
don't know what they want. They've never really told us what they want."

Judy Gross also is raising the volume on her criticism of the Obama
administration and the apparent unwillingness of anyone on either side
of the Florida Straits to sit down and have constructive discussions
that would secure her husband's release.

"The State Department has put in a great deal of hours on the case, I'll
say that," she said, but she added that the Obama administration "has
kept their hands off of it."

"At least publicly," she said. "I've not heard from them once."

Neither has her 89-year-old mother-in-law, Evelyn Gross, who wrote to
President Barack Obama for help. She hasn't heard back from the White
House, Judy Gross said. Her mother-in-law's greatest fear is dying
before her son is released.

"It's hard for her to even say the word Alan without crying," Judy Gross
said. "It's heart-wrenching. She wants to go to Cuba to see him. But I
don't think she could make the trip."

Last week, Evelyn Gross released a video directed at Cuban President
Raul Castro, asking the dictator to release her son on humanitarian grounds.

"I have lung cancer in both lungs," she said, "and it stands to reason
I'm not going to be here for any length of time. So I want to see my
son. I want to see him to come home, so he can be with us. He has two
wonderful children and a wonderful wife, and they need him desperately."

Judy Gross, who visited her husband for the third time in November, said
her most recent trip was a difficult one emotionally.

While imprisoned in a Cuban military hospital, in a small cell with two
other people, Gross learned that one of his daughters had been diagnosed
with breast cancer and his mother with lung cancer. Because of the loss
of his income, his wife had to sell their Maryland home and move into
what she described as "an apartment for one" in Washington.

The White House said in March that Alan Gross' sentence "compounds the
injustice suffered by a man helping to increase the free flow of
information to, from and among the Cuban people."

Roberta Jacobson, the top official at the State Department in charge of
U.S.-Cuba relations, told a Senate panel recently that the Obama
administration has always taken its cue from the Gross family, but she
added that "we do think that it is time to speak out very loudly."

"Mr. Gross should be home with his family," said Jacobson, who was in
front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for her confirmation
hearing as the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere
affairs. "There are illnesses in his family. His own health has
deteriorated while held by the Cubans, and he deserves to be home
immediately."

Some Cuban-American lawmakers, including Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.,
and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., have argued that it's time for the U.S. to
rethink policies that allow Americans to visit more – and to send more
money to family members on the island nation.

Gross is effectively a hostage, Menendez told Jacobson last month in
front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which he's a member.
And the administration's policy allows Gross to continue to be used as a
pawn in the U.S. relationship with Cuba, Menendez said.

"I don't understand how you reward a regime for imprisoning an American
citizen," he said. "I don't get it. And I hope someone at the State
Department is going to wake up and say, 'You know what, you don't get
anything certainly until you release that American.'"

Gross was arrested and jailed in Havana after he delivered at least one
satellite telephone and other communications equipment as part of a U.S.
Agency for International Development effort to assist Jewish and other
nongovernment groups in Cuba. At the time, he was working for the
Maryland-based government contractor Development Alternatives Inc.

Cuban television reports alleged that the satellite phones for Internet
connections were part of Washington's decades-long effort to overthrow
the communist government in Havana.

Jewish leaders in Cuba have visited Gross twice: once for Passover last
spring and in September on the eve of Rosh Hashana. Consular officials
from the U.S. Interests Section in Havana visit once a month, the State
Department said.

Recently, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson visited Cuba in an
unsuccessful bid to secure Gross' release. U.S. officials denied reports
that Richardson offered concessions to the Cubans in exchange.

The chairwoman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs
Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., has called on the Obama
administration to end its conversations with the Castro regime, suspend
adding charter flights to Cuba from more U.S. airports and implement the
full range of sanctions at its disposal.

Ros-Lehtinen won't say what sorts of conversations she has had with the
Gross family or government officials.

"I don't wish to be an impediment in any discussions that are taking
place between governments about his release," she said. "We hope that
every department is doing all that they can to secure his release,
because it's totally unjustified."

The Cubans need a graceful way to let her husband go, Judy Gross said,
and the politics of U.S.-Cuba relations haven't made that easy.

"There's some very powerful vocal people in the Congress who are not
favorable to sitting down and negotiating anything with the Cubans," she
said. "If you don't negotiate, you don't get anything."

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/04/v-fullstory/2530740/family-marks-alan-gross-2nd-year.html

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Cuban leader Fidel Castro
(R) meet in Havana March 30, 2011. The United States should end its
trade embargo on Cuba to mend ties, Carter said on Wednesday, but he
also urged Havana to do more, such as freeing jailed U.S. aid contractor
Alan Gross.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Cuban leader Fidel Castro
(R) meet in Havana March 30, 2011. The United States should end its
trade embargo on Cuba to mend ties, Carter said on Wednesday, but he
also urged Havana to do more, such as freeing jailed U.S. aid contractor
Alan Gross.

HAVANA – U.S. contractor Alan Gross on Saturday marks two years behind
bars in Cuba on state security charges with no prospects in sight for
his release despite numerous appeals on humanitarian grounds.

The 62-year-old Gross was arrested December 3, 2009, for delivering
laptops and communications equipment to Cuba's small Jewish community
under a State Department contract.

In March, he was found guilty of "acts against the independence or
territorial integrity" of Cuba, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Gross was visited this week by Michael Kinnamon, general secretary of
the US National Council of Churches, who also met with President Raul
Castro to press the case for a humanitarian release for the US citizen.

Kinnamon, who met the detainee for two hours, said he had lost weight
and expressed concern over the health of Gross, who is confined in a
military hospital in Havana.

The plea was the latest following appeals from US President Barack
Obama, former president Jimmy Carter, Gross's family members and others.

A group of 19 US senators on Thursday expressed similar concerns.

"After two years in a Cuban prison, Mr. Gross and his family have paid
an enormous personal price," the Democratic and Republican lawmakers
said in a letter to the head of the Cuban interests section in
Washington, Jorge Bolano.

"Mr. Gross has lost 100 pounds and suffers from numerous medical
conditions," they wrote. "Mr. Gross's daughter and mother are both
fighting cancer, and his wife is struggling to make ends meet."

http://www.canada.com/news/contractor+mark+years+Cuba+prison/5801974/story.html

US cleric: American jailed in Cuba in good spirits
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press

HAVANA — A U.S. government subcontractor jailed for nearly two years
for bringing restricted communications equipment to Cuba has lost a lot
of weight but seems in good humor, a prominent U.S. religious leader
said after visiting the prisoner Wednesday.

The Rev. Michael Kinnamon, the general secretary of the National Council
of Churches who is leading a 15-person delegation to the island, gave
few details of his interview with Alan Gross.

"Two of us went to see him today. … We had a good conversation, and
we're grateful for the government for enabling us to have that visit,"
Kinnamon told reporters.

Kinnamon echoed reports from previous visitors who said Gross, 62, had
dropped more than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) and suffered from other
ailments.

"We have concerns for his health, but he's in good spirits," Kinnamon
said. He said he hoped Gross may be freed on humanitarian grounds, but
had no knowledge of when or whether that may happen.

The religious leader later met with Cuban President Raul Castro. State
television broadcast video of their meeting, but gave no details of what
was said.

Gross, a native of Maryland, was arrested Dec. 4, 2009, while working as
a subcontractor on a democracy-building project funded by the U.S.
Agency for International Development.

Cuba considers such programs an affront to its national security, and
last March he was sentenced to 15 years under a statute governing crimes
against the state.

Gross has said he was working to help the island's small Jewish
community improve its Internet access and was not a threat to the Cuban
government.

On Monday, his wife, Judy, said Gross had sought reassurance that what
he was doing was legal, but was told by his company not to ask Cuban
officials.

Kinnamon is the latest in a string of visitors allowed to meet with
Gross this year, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a
delegation of U.S. women leaders and a Washington-area rabbi.

Judy Gross visited her husband earlier this month for the third time
since his arrest, and officials at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana
have also had periodic consular access to the man.

Kinnamon said he would meet on Thursday with Interests Section diplomats
to report on his group's trip. He said he would also note the National
Council of Churches' view that U.S.-Cuban relations should be normalized
and lobby for change in U.S. policy toward Cuba.

"It's very clear there are issues we have to discuss between our
countries," Kinnamon said. "But the way to address those issues is in
the context of mutual respect between nations, and 50 years of animosity
and embargo simply must stop."

The New York-based National Council of Churches, an umbrella group of
U.S. Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations, has long been a
critic of the U.S. economic and financial embargo against Cuba.

Supporters of the embargo argue that it pressures for democratic opening
on the communist-run island by choking off revenue to the government led
for decades by Fidel Castro and more recently by his younger brother Raul.

Kinnamon also met Wednesday with relatives of the "Cuban Five,"
intelligence agents serving sentences in the United States whose return
is a top priority for Havana. He expressed concern over their case.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/30/2525464/us-cleric-american-jailed-in-cuba.html#storylink=misearch

HAVANA: Cuba will allow banks to lend money to small businesses, private
farmers and those who want to repair or build homes – a revolutionary
step for the communist government.

The measure, which comes into effect on December 20, is part of a
cautious overhaul of Cuba's Soviet-style economy that began when Raul
Castro took over from his older brother Fidel as president in 2006.

Farmers ''can ask for loans for the purchase and repair of equipment …
and other actions that contribute to rising agricultural production'',
the decree published in the Official Gazette on Thursday said.
Advertisement: Story continues below

The loans will be available only in Cuban pesos, and the amount and
conditions will be agreed between the bank and the borrower, the decree
said.

A convertible peso, known as CUC and pegged to the US dollar, is also
available, now valued at 24 pesos.

Cuba's economy has been controlled by the state since the 1959
revolution, and people have traditionally turned to family and friends
when they need a loan.

The few Cubans with bank accounts include musicians who go on foreign
tours and professionals, especially doctors, who work abroad.

While pay in Cuba is meagre, about $US20 a month, basic food items are
subsidised, and health services and education are free.

The new loan measures announced will help home builders and small
businesses such as ''paladares'', or private restaurants, that have
sprouted in Cuba, to service the island's growing tourist industry.

Cuba's single-party regime authorised the purchase and sale of cars
earlier this year.

Agence France-Presse

http://www.smh.com.au/world/cuba-eases-grip-on-banking-sector-by-allowing-small-loans-20111125-1nz6a.html

UN report now accepts Cuban data

Havana was not on a previous development list because of questions about
its data
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

A United Nations agency has returned Cuba to its national development
ranking after a year of exile to a separate list that included North
Korea and Eritrea because of doubts about data provided by Havana.

The Human Development Report for 2011, produced by the U.N. Development
Programme and published earlier this month, ranked Cuba 51st in the
world and fifth in Latin America and the Caribbean, behind Chile,
Argentina, Barbados and Uruguay. Cuba had the same ranking in 2009.

The UNDP index, which combines economic, education, health and some
human rights indicators to rank countries on a scale of national
development, ranked Norway first in the world and the United States fourth.

It has been issued annually since 1990, but last year the UNDP left Cuba
out of it main rankings list, noting that the manner in which the island
computes some of its economic figures makes it too difficult to compare
with other countries. Cuba counts the value of government services, such
as healthcare and education — a method not used by others.

Instead, the UNDP put Cuba on a list of other countries and territories
whose statistics were not comparable, missing or too small to provide
reliable indications of development. It included Grenada, Eritrea,
Samoa, Iraq, Somalia and North Korea.

The 2010 report added that Cuba was "currently revising and updating its
international statistics in order to establish internationally
comparable data," and it expressed hope "that in due time comparable …
data will become available.''

The 2011 report said only that a key indicator of Cuba's economy,
purchasing power parity, had been "estimated" but gave no details of how
that was done and did not mention the island had been left off the 2010
list.

Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a University of Pittsburgh expert on the Cuban
economy who has complained repeatedly to the UNDP about its acceptance
of Havana's data, said he was surprised by the island's return to the
main list. "Nothing new has happened, in terms of statistics, that would
allow them to reach a more reliable estimate," Mesa-Lago said.

Dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe complained the new ranking was
based on official Cuban government figures that don't appear to match
the reality of life on the communist-ruled island. It's difficult to
accept Cuba's ranking, he said, when the Cuban government regularly
violates human rights and is struggling to reform an economy that is all
but insolvent.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/16/2507081/un-report-now-accepts-cuban-data.html

Participants of an anti-insect fumigation brigade from the Cuban public
health system commented on November 3rd that there is an elevated number
of cases of dengue in the Havana municipality of La Habana del Este.

Calling our attention is the recent increase of this acute viral illness
— transmitted by the female aedes aegypti mosquito — and the official
silence on the subject, explained by the overused pretext of not
alarming the public, but with the result of disinforming society about
topics of fundamental interest. Due to public service announcements on
national television and the intensity in calls by health workers to
eliminate the possible focus — reproduction springs and breeding grounds
— already there is popular distrust, "he has read straightness in the
twisted lines," and suspicion of the increase in cases for this pandemic
in our country. They further mention that the reported patients are
being attended to in their houses for the number of infected people and
the people's distrust of being admitted to the hospital, given their
substandard hygienic/sanitary conditions. This illness, that the aedes
albopictus also spreads, is known as "bone breaking" and produces fever,
headaches, and aching joints; it lasts approximately a week and can lead
to death. The increasing incidence of outbreaks has also been detected
in other capital area municipalities like Arroyo Naranjo, Old Havana,
Central Havana, and Diez de Octubre, but for the lack of informative
transparency we do not know the rates of dengue in the rest of the nation.

The causes of the proliferation of this transmitter fundamentally stem
from entrance areas, the lack of water in many households, and the
shortage of places to store it. In zones lacking daily supplies of this
vital liquid, inhabitants are obliged to store it in 55-gallon tanks
with improvised caps that do not close properly and facilitate the
entrance of these insects which then consequently start reproduction.
This is brought about by people arriving in our country with the
sickness, which then encounters adequate conditions for its propagation.
The state sells plastic tanks in convertible currency and at exorbitant
prices in hard currency stores that are not within reach of the average
Cuban.

Many distrust the magnitude of the problem and the fact that they are
asking citizens to open their doors to the fumigators without
hesitating. Secrecy by the authorities in almost all levels of national
life is traditional practice and secrecy concerning dengue is no
exception. It is taking place just as we arrive at the high tourist
season in Cuba.

Translated by: M. Ouellette

November 8 2011

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=12649

Cuban boatpeople run aground in Cayman Islands
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Seventeen Cubans fleeing their country were detained in the Cayman
Islands after their wooden sailboat ran aground in the Caribbean
territory, according to a Cayman government announcement.

The interception was the fifth such incident this year in the Cayman
Islands, compared to none in 2010, and appeared to affirm reports
indicating an increase in the number of Cubans trying to leave their
island illegally in recent months.

A British-run international banking center 125 miles south of Cuba, the
Caymans lie close to the route that Cubans leaving from their southern
coast would take in hopes that the currents and winds would take them to
Central America or Mexico. They would then travel by land to the U.S.
border.

A Cayman government announcement Tuesday said immigration officials
detained the 16 men and one woman after their boat ran aground near the
island of Cayman Brac. A photo of their boat showed it was a small
wooden sailboat.

It added that the refugees were in good health and will be transferred
to the archipelago's main island, Grand Cayman, for processing — most
likely meaning they will be returned to Cuba.

The last arrival of Cubans came in October, when a boat carrying 19 men
went aground in the Cayman's territorial waters. The men were detained
by immigration officials.

Until 2005, the Cayman's policy allowed territorial officials and
residents to help Cuban boatpeople continue their voyages by providing
them with water, gas and food and even fixing their motors and sails.

But under the new policy, officials must seize the boats and detain the
Cubans if the vessels are not seaworthy. The Cubans can apply for
political asylum in the Cayman Islands, but most are repatriated to
their country.

Cuban migrants in seaworthy boats can continue their trips, without any
assistance, or voluntarily go ashore and face deportation back to Cuba.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/17/2505686/cuban-boatpeople-run-aground-in.html#storylink=misearch

No doubt pollution brings much harm to the ecosystems and deterioration
to the quality of life of mankind that makes its living on natural
resources like water, and such a thing is not an alien fact in the Cuban
province of Holguin.

Banes at Ecojoven 2011 National Event
Holguin Announced Pico Cristal National Monument
Biogas Boosted in Holguin Province

Despite the several actions aimed at lessening the harms brought by
pollution coming from cities and towns, schools, tourism resorts,
industries and several state entities the work done is not enough yet.

The actions undertaken last 2010 were step forward for it was a
contribution to pollution reduction by about six percent, what indeed
favored ecosystems in the basins of rivers, the coasts and the mountains
as well.

The measures taken this year would possibly contribute to reducing by
one more percent the contamination.

In Holguin there are more than 100 sources of pollution, according to a
national stockcheck, which produce hundreds of tons of wastes, however,
they are not the only ones but the significant ones.

More than a third of them are poured into the environment without
previous treatment, a situation that become more severe in the
municipalities of Holguin and Moa, and by state institutions like those
from Public Health, the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources, the
Basic industry and Tourism.

An encouraging horizon is expected on the investments to come in the
sewers of the city of Holguin, whose wastes are today poured without
treatment into the basin of the Cauto river.

Other ongoing works as in the municipality of Moa are also promising,
for example, at the Pedro Sotto Alba nickel processing plant they are
investing in the recycling of the water used in the industrial process.

On the other hand, they are watering the gardens of several hotels after
being previously treated.

The solution to water pollution, which is indeed a very complex problem,
demands large investments, but the challenge is posed for Holguin that
boasts of having the largest biodiversity in Cuba.

http://www.radioangulo.cu/en/news/holguin/13268-holguin-and-its-polluted-water.html