Cuban women on a protest march say police harassed and detained them
Posted on Thursday, 02.02.12
Cuban women on a protest march say police harassed and detained them
They say they were trying to stage a march in the central Cuba city of Santa Clara when police searched them for cellphones
By Juan O. Tamayojtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Cuban dissidents say police beat, groped and detained seven women who tried to stage a march in the central city of Santa Clara to demand the release of an opposition couple jailed since early January.
In an audio recording provided by the dissidents, women were heard screaming and repeatedly shouting "Don't stick your hands on my breasts, murderer" — allegedly as police searched for the cellphones recording the scene.
"He put his hands inside my blouse, then they lifted my blouse in the middle of the street looking for my phone," said Idania Yánes Contreras, who led the march and recorded a narration of the Wednesday confrontation on her phone.
"We were all punched and had our hair pulled" as police carried the women to waiting patrol cars, Yánes added. Police also seized a frying pan the women had been banging on to attract attention.
Six of the women were freed Thursday and the seventh was sent home late Wednesday, Yánes told El Nuevo Herald by telephone from her home in Santa Clara.
Yánes said the seven members of the Rosa Parks Feminist Movement for Civil Rights, all dressed in black as a sign of mourning "for the victims of the dictatorship," launched the protest carrying a sign that said, "For Freedom, Against Impunity."
The march was intended to protest the continued detention of independent journalist Yazmín Conlledo Riverón and her husband, Rafael Álvarez Esmoris, who were arrested Jan. 8 on what Yánes described as fraudulent charges.
The women had gone only about half a block, shouting "Freedom" and "Down with Repression," Yánes said, when uniformed police and State Security agents in civilian clothes swooped down on them and began searching for the phones.
One security official told another, "that person has a cellular there," according to a transcript provided by the dissidents. The actual recording, posted on the blog of Jorge Luis García Pérez, known as Antúnez, is sometimes difficult to understand.
Antúnez, whose wife Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera was one of the seven women detained, writes the blog Ni Me Callo Ni Me Voy — I will not shut up or leave.
The other women were identified as Yaité Diosnelly Cruz Sosa, Yanisbel Valido, Xiomara Martín Jiménez, María del Carmen Martínez López and Damaris Moya Portieles.
The Rosa Parks movement is named after the Afro-American civil rights activist woman who sparked the bus boycott in Montgomery, Al.
Antúnez said police have subjected dissident women to sexual harassment in the past, and that his wife was once threatened with rape if she continued her activism against the government.
Dissident Miguel Rafael Cabrera Montoya, meanwhile, has started a hunger strike in a police station in the eastern town of Palma Soriano to protest his detention, his wife told Radio Martí. Yelena Garcés Nápoles said Cabrera is under investigation for a robbery in Havana last year. But he's not been in Havana in two years, she told Radio Martí.
In Washington, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution condemning the Cuban government for the death of Wilman Villar, 31, a political prisoner who died earlier this month after a long hunger strike to protest a four-year-sentence.
The resolution also asks all governments to push Cuba to halt human rights abuses and calls on the United Nations to suspend Cuba's membership in its Human Rights Council.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/02/2621727/cuban-women-on-a-protest-march.html
Cuban communists OK term limits for party and government officials
Posted on Monday, 01.30.12
Cuban communists OK term limits for party and government officials
At the Cuban Communist Party's first national conference, term limits are approved for government and party officials.By Juan O. Tamayojtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Cuba's Communist Party Sunday cleared the way for a long-term renovation of its Central Committee that might hint at the island's future leaders, while Raúl Castro issued a strong call for openness within the party and mass media — but only up to a point.
Closing a first-ever National Conference of the party, Castro as expected also confirmed that party and government officials will be limited to two five-year terms. He and brother Fidel have ruled Cuba since 1959.
Conference delegates also unanimously approved replacing up to 20 percent of the 115 Central Committee members over the next five years, a move that could shine a spotlight on younger leaders that will succeed the 80-year-old Castro.
Overall, however, the two-day conference fulfilled Castro's caution earlier this month that Cubans should not have too many "illusions" about the two-day, closed-door gathering of more than 800 delegates.
Castro spoke several times about the need to support and carry out the ambitious open-market reforms approved in April by a party congress — its supreme form of gathering — to rescue the Soviet styled economy from the doldrums.
The Central Committee will hold two plenum meetings per year to watch over the reforms as well as the annual budgets and production goals and keep them from "falling into a broken bag," he announced.
Castro also punched away at one of his complaints at virtually every one of his public appearances — the corruption at virtually every level of Cuban life that has been undermining his efforts at reforms.
"Corruption is "one of the principal enemies of the revolution, much more prejudicial than the subversive and meddlesome programs of the U.S. government," he declared, referring to Washington's pro-democracy programs in Cuba.
"The party will definitively assume the conduct" of the fight against corruption, he added, without giving details. Castro created the post of comptroller general after he assumed power to crack down on the corruption.
He urged party members to become more "democratic" and openly debate Cuba's myriad problems, adding that to abandon the island's one-party system would be "to legalize the party or parties of the [U.S.] empire."
Cuba's mass media, all party or state controlled, need to report on the debate "with responsibility and the most strict veracity," he added, "not in the bourgeois style, full of sensationalism and lies, but with proven objectivity and without useless secretiveness."
During the 40-minute address, Castro also ground away at party issues like the need for hard work, ethics and discipline, and he told party officials to not meddle in decisions that should be left up to the government officials.
"The only thing that can defeat the revolution and socialism in Cuba would be our incapacity to correct the errors committed in the last 50 years … and those that we could make in the future," Castro declared.
Marino Murillo, the island "reform tsar" in charge of guiding and enforcing the economic changes, was quoted as acknowledging that more changes are needed but adding "that there's a limit — the socialist system is untouchable."
And delegate Yosvani Verdial was quoted as saying that while the party wants young members, "we want youths who are committed, who are patriots, who are unconditional" supporters of the communist system.
One intriguing report noted that Castro's daughter Mariela Castro, who was not a delegate but was invited to address a Conference working group, had proposed amending a document to use the word "dialogue," a word much disliked by the government.
Mariela proposed "including the word in a direct way, where it had appeared more implicitly," Arleen Rodriguez Derivet, a journalist who runs the nightly public affairs TV show Mesa Redonda, wrote in the government's CubaDebate Web page.
Rodriguez added that if she herself had been a delegate, she would have approved the change, but gave no details on whether the change was approved, or how the word would have affected the document.
Castro's daughter, who heads the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, has at times said she favors more and faster changes in Cuba, and at times fiercely defended the communist system and her father's rule.
In another odd line in her report, Rodriguez asked whether the work of the Conference could be seen as "social engineering?" Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's goals for creating selfless communists were often referred to as "social engineering."
José Ramón Machado Venture, No. 2 to Raúl Castro in both the government and the party, noted that nearly 43 percent of the delegates were women and 37.5 percent were black or "mestizo," percentages higher than in the party's 800,000 members.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/29/2614707/cuban-communists-ok-term-limits.html
The Manipulative Dossier / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado
The Manipulative Dossier / Rosa María Rodríguez TorradoRosa María Rodríguez Torrado, Translator: Adam Cooper
In Cuba we have six television channels, but at 8 p.m. our options narrow, because the national news (the primetime program) is broadcast repeatedly on three of them (channels 4, 6, and 27), we are treated to sports news on channel 2, on channel 21 they show a documentary (the ones during that half hour are generally less interesting), and on channel 15 they rebroadcast (they never show it live) the "friendly" news show from TeleSur. Our satellite newscaster "informs" us how well things work in Cuba in contrast to other countries, mainly capitalist, of the world. He tells us of the abundance of products in the markets, "satisfied consumers" are interviewed, and the magnanimity of our government is sugarcoated daily. So in the face of such "marvels" I am quick as a hare with the remote control, surfing through channels and looking around in the scraps of programming for topics which I expect won't make me nauseous.
There is a journalist on the TeleSur program who wears an eye patch in the old style of buccaneers and pirates. They say he lost that eye in a helicopter accident during a mission. His image strikes me as somewhat grotesque, because I think that his warlike nature and the blackened eye-socket which highlights it are part of a well-modeled image of the militant journalist committed to a 21st century socialism without manual or program, who bases his raison d'être on the perpetuity of the power of the strongmen and on the fight against the "Empire of the United States". I have to give credit to this man, the anchor of "Dossier", which opens and closes with a catch-phrase, saying that it broadcasts "from our beloved, contaminated, and only (here he raises an index finger) spaceship", referring to Earth. I credit him and his production team, because it seems that they are getting their signal out to various corners of the Milky Way. That feeling leaves me every time he uses that unnecessary sentence to refer to his location. It wouldn't surprise me if on the same program we found another host wearing a surgical mask because he had a decaying smile or was missing his teeth. It would simply be yet another eccentricity.
TeleSur, with its headquarters in Caracas, and which counts on financing from Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, among others, is transitioning on its journalistic path toward the "Cuban disinformation style", evidence of the protective and consultative role of the largest of the Antilles in that Latin American media outlet with international distribution. It is an echo discordant with democracy and anachronistic in a particularly fashion to repeat the formulas of this long-lived, mature, and failed sociopolitical and economic experiment, and to adapt them to a project which claims to promote regional integration in societies where, despite the influence of our Antillean archipelago, plurality still survives. What would be fairer with respect to the realities of our brethren to the south is the exercise of objective, impartial, and truthful journalism in which there is no need, as there is in Cuba, for recourse to the "censorship patch" or the "surgical gag" to violate their people's rights and deceive them with disinformation and manipulation.
Translated by: Adam Cooper
December 20 2011
Medical Policy, or Political Medicine? / Ernesto Morales Licea
Medical Policy, or Political Medicine? / Ernesto Morales LiceaErnesto Morales Licea, Translating Cuba, Translator: Unstated
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
Who Will Kill the Commander? / Luis Felipe Rojas
Who Will Kill the Commander? / Luis Felipe RojasLuis Felipe Rojas, Translator: Raul G.
The socialist labyrinth consists of so much injustice that even the functionaries joke about being trapped in it. The beauracratic skeins of the tropical Cuban creature have been designed to hinder citizens, to make their daily lives harder, but it is not always possible to demarcate the frontier between the most common of passer-bys and bureaucrats, as infallible as they'd like to make themselves seem.
A group of workers from the TransNet Base, dedicated to cultivating sugar cane, have been suffering for months because they have not been paid their salary stimulus which the sugar company owes them for the 2010-2011 pay period. Today, as the new period is beginning, the correspondent organisms are not complying with the salary they owe. In the sugar production plant of the municipality of San German, Holguin, the mentioned workers (as fed up as those who protest on streets of the United States) lashed out and deposited their confidence in a social valve: writing to national newspapers. Only one of them publicly responded- Juventud Rebelde ('Rebel Youth').
For some time now, Cubans tend to their pains by writing to the Open-Letter section of the mentioned newspaper. There, the colleague Jose Alejandro Rodriguez, whom one can clearly see really wants to break away and carry out a free form of journalism without chains, dedicates himself to dissect the anatomy of home-grown bureaucracy.
In the Open-Letter section of December 18th, the journalist explained the indignation of these workers. He also mentioned the letter sent by Eliecer Palma Pupo, who was thrown around however they wanted from the transportation base, the municipal union, the organ of Social Security and Work, and all the way to the Provincial Direction of the Sugarcane Industry. Immediately, the workers were called to testify. "Who wrote the letter?". They said it would be fixed, 'damn it', that was all…
What the Juventud Rebelde Newspaper did not know was that Palma Pupo is a worker, who has worked as a driver for 27 years, and is branded as a counter-revolutionary for speaking the truth. He has also been locked up in the dungeons of State Security on the 22nd of October 2011 so that he would not hinder the visit of Jose Ramon Machado Ventura to the mentioned factory.
He suffered from fatigue for three days, product of a hunger and thirst strike he carried out from his cell. But when he was released, he went straight back to his work post to load up a truck for the sugar production process, and his coworkers asked him to denounce the absence of payment for 20 CUC which the plant owed each of them.
Before exposing the case to the independent press and the international press, they opted to send the message right back to the aggressor. The letter has been read by thousands of Cubans, among them hundreds of functionaries, who although they have not responded have been contested by their own propaganda system which is kept afloat by screams, lies, and acts of mob repudiation. I have spoken to some of them, with Palma Pupo himself, and although they have not been paid they still feel the sweet taste of vengeance.
Palma told me that they have returned to the Union Direction Center (against them) and even against some workers, who are alarmed by his rebellious condition and fear they will lose more than just the steering wheels of his old sugar-cane loading trucks.
From afar and from outside, one runs the risk of seeing this as something pointless, but these men told me this as if they had been victorious, as if they had discovered that "all as one" they could tear the rags off of the old Fuenteovejuna* commander.
——–
*Fuenteovejuna- A play by Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. The work of art is about a peasant uprising in a medieval Spanish town.
Translated by Raul G.
5 January 2011
Cuban Blogographia / Regina Coyula
Cuban Blogographia / Regina CoyulaRegina Coyula, Translator: Unstated
Well, yes. A Cuban blogosphere has come out with blog graphs. I have just read the works of the Spaniard Josep Calvet which appear in La Joven Cuba. It is patient work to scrutinize evidently diverse and diverse material on the Network.
Calvet commits an often repeated error that seems intentional which is to identify Cuba with the government. Cuba is all Cubans, wherever they are. No law, and of course no research monograph will change this truth: Cubans are Buddhists, gays, communists, vegetarians or any other of the countless personal decisions.
Although the author has repeatedly denied having an obsession with the author of the blog "Generation Y," it's rare that his text doesn't appear. In it, he says he is suspicious of the absence of a visit-counter in "Generation Y," suggesting that the blog's figures are inflated. He doesn't note the several thousand comments that accompany each new entry. They don't seem to note the number of translations. They don't seem to notice the hundreds of links to each post. Here I have to declare that I don't know the importance of "Alexa" that the author is always mentioning.
"We don't believe there is any blog coming from someone who pretends to do citizen journalism merits the adjective 'independent'."
Given that statement, the author should clarify what he understands by "independent" because the term is simple to explain: Everyone who express their views in a sovereign manner and does not receive payment for it. The author prefers the arguments of the libelous TV show "Cyberwar" to a field investigation or a healthy silence.
We find assertions in the statement like the following:
"… currently to be a 100% Cuban blogger, is to be 100% Combative."
Naturally, Mr. Calvert is referring to a pro-government blogger.
So punctilious with the titles of journalism, which is not decisive, because a good journalist may not ever have spent time in the classrooms of journalism; Iroel Sanchez graduated in technical sciences.
Another thing Mr. Calvert seems to ignore is that the bloggers attached to the official canon never have an "enemy" among their links, despite the fact that among the rules of good practice is that if you are going to criticize the work of others, the least you should do is link to it, and if it is an author you customarily tear to pieces, then you should include them in your blogroll. In contrast, among the alternative bloggers, they list blogs "from the other neighborhood," will that be for independent opinions?
As if his active participation in the Cuban blogs is insufficient, Calvet needed to take part in work with an aspiration of research, which he discounts.
The lack of real spaces (not virtual) to freely issue an opinion independent of the government, has resulted in the polarization of the most visible blogs made in Cuba. They reflect the social dichotomy that runs like an underground river. And attacks do nothing to establish what we need which is a culture of dialogue.
Finally, I offer the bad news. For now, there is no cable from Venezuela.
November 7 2011
The Pope’s Visit to Cuba: Expectations and Possibilities / Intramuros
The Pope's Visit to Cuba: Expectations and Possibilities / IntramurosIntraMuros
Editorial 24The Catholic Church and the official press have announced that His Holiness the Pope Benedict XVI "is considering visiting Mexico and Cuba during the spring of the year 2012". At the same time, the spokesman of the Holy See has declared that the State Department of the Supreme Pontiff has told the Papal Nuncios in each one of these countries to inform the respective ecclesiastical and civilian authorities about the expected visit.This news which was published at the beginning of November has aroused numerous expectations and possibilities. More than a half of the Catholic Church one thousand million members live in Latin America so the visit of the Supreme Pastor of the Catholic Church is always a momentous event that does not leave indifferent either the visited Church or the civilian authorities or a great part of the people that declares itself a believer from a Christian matrix.It's about two things at the same time which are inseparably mixed in one person: the visit of the head of one church and the head of a small State which symbolizes the sovereignty of this religious denomination to be able to exercise its evangelizing mission, without interference or manipulation. That is why whether we want it or not, every visit of one Pope has a religious dimension and another political and social dimension. For this reason it brings spiritual and political expectations in a wide sense though his visit is essentially religious.However, the visit of a head of State should not be compared or likened to the visit of the Pope; if we do that we would be making a mistake in perspective, in interpretation and expectations.Cuba already had a papal visit 14 years ago. His Holiness the Pope John Paul II who has been declared blessed and has been venerated as a saint by millions of persons around the world, carried out an unforgettable pastoral visit to our Island which lasted five days, from the 21st to the 25th of January 1998. It's impossible not to bear this in mind and it's very probable that some try to make comparisons with the announced pilgrimage of Benedict XVI. Though it is natural that we remember and evoke that historic event the best thing we should do is to be aware of the fact that any visit of this kind can't be likened to another one because they are different Pontiffs, because this is a different time and because Cuba in 1998 was a different one in many aspects compared to the Cuba of 2012.THE RESULTS OF A PONTIFICAL VISIT DEPEND ON THE PROTAGONISTS.However, we wish to be participants in this stage of preparation of the possible Pope's visit so we wish to tell some expectations and possibilities shared by some Cubans, women and men, not necessarily Catholics. There is an old Latin saying though it's not always exact and it goes: "what goes to Rome comes from Rome". This generally means that the expectations of the Church are very important and so are the expectations of the rest of the Nation that the Pope will visit; the view of the local reality that will be informed to the Pope and the characteristics of his pastoral pilgrimage as desired by both parties.That is why it is logical and good that the Holy Father should listen to what the Church and the people wish from his visit. But it is also logical and good that the Pope should wish to convey his message without distorting his mission and being at the service of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his only paradigm and source of inspiration. The results of a Pontifical visit depend essentially on the smooth communication and the consistence with the identity and the mission of all the protagonists of such event: the Church, the people and the authorities.The president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Cuba who is Dionisio García, Archbishop from Santiago de Cuba has stated that the Pope will come mainly to participate, as a pilgrim, in the celebrations of the discovery of the Virgin of Charity image from El Cobre: the mother, queen and patron of the Republic of Cuba. Thus the center of the Pope's presence in Cuba will be the visit and the Eucharist that will be held in the National Sanctuary-Basilica of El Cobre. And though the itinerary has not been announced, and it appears to be short, we expect he will visit the Capital too in order to have another religious celebration and pay his greetings to the authorities of the country. We cannot either rule out that the Pontiff would have encounters with more specific sectors of the Church, for example, young people, laics, bishops, priests and nuns.SOME EXPECTATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES.It is a responsibility and a duty of each citizen not to stay indifferent toward the national events. The preparation of a papal visit does not belong exclusively to the Church; it is a civic and religious task. All of us should express our opinion, suggest things and show what we feel inside us. We should show our souls because above all it is the visit of a spiritual leader and we all have a soul and we all share the Nation's soul. Here are some of our expectations and opinions:1. Charity unites us. Unity is inclusion."Charity unites us". This is the slogan that summarizes the spirit of the celebrations of the 400 years of the discovery of the Virgin of Charity image which is at the same time, the end and the center of the papal visit. Then charity is the Christian name for love that makes us give ourselves to the others so it should unite all Cubans and that's why our expectation in that sense is that this unity will not be uniformity in thinking, believing in options and in acts. We believe that this unity should not exclude the different ones and the ones that upset the government or the Church. We believe that this unity is not unanimity or unity around one only option. Any way, in only one phrase which is, at the same time, our main expectation regarding this topic: Unity is inclusion. Thus the Pope's visit should include all the representatives of the Cuban nation, all of us children of the Virgin of Charity: the believers, the non-believers, the government, the opposition and the civil society, the ones who live in the Island and the ones who live in the Diaspora. If any of these groups is left out of the papal visit and out of the life in Cuba the unity in charity would not be possible. The degree of inclusion before, during and after the visit could be one of the expectations and opportunities for the preparation and the evaluation of the visit.2. The spirit that will promote the pacific and gradual structural changes.The pacific and gradual structural changes in the political, economic, social, cultural and anthropologic environments are not the purposes of the Pope's visit but they are an urgent need of the people that the Pope will visit and a need of the Church that will receive him. These changes are not a task that the Pope should carry out or a task that should be carried out by the Church in Cuba exclusively but each substantial reform has its foundation in the soul of the people and in the spirit of the citizens. Thus, everything that strengthens the spirit of Cubans, men and women; everything that nurtures the Nation's soul; everything that opens up the nation to the best motions of the Spirit of Truth, Good and Beauty will revitalize the changes that have been patiently expected for a long time. The degree of spiritual depth before, during and after this visit can be one of the expectations and opportunities to prepare the visit, to experience it and evaluate it.3. The promotion of the sovereignty of citizens and a national inclusive dialogue about essential topics.The people that the Pope will visit and even the Catholic Church that is preparing his visit which is a part of that people have had a deficit in citizen education and ethical education to live in freedom, responsibility, participative democracy and fraternity during more than half a century. This civic and moral illiteracy is one of the greatest shortages of the people and the Church the Pope will visit. It's a pastoral and evangelizing duty of the Church to contribute, with its educative mission, to the education for citizen sovereignty, responsible civic participation and the inseparable coherence between ethics and politics without choosing any ideology or partisan political option. One of the expectations and opportunities to prepare this visit, to experience it and evaluate it is the endeavour for an ethical and civic education that may be present before, during and after the visit. This education would lead to an authentic national dialogue without exclusions in order to deal with every essential topic.4. The reconstruction of the sovereign fabric of civil society.The reconstruction of the sovereign fabric of civil society is a long-term task and a consequence of the education of each person as a citizen, of the ethical responsibility and a spiritual mystique in order to achieve that the discouragement, the human miseries and the materialist and hedonistic interests do not destroy this task for the present and the future of Cuba. The Pope's visit, the way of life and work of the very Church as a paradigm of one of the communities in civil society could be a view, a motion and a possibility of work on the occasion of the Pontiff's visit. The preparation, the carrying out and the ecclesial style that the Pope's visit to Cuba will leave can be a testimonial and prophetic school for the reconstruction of a sound civil society. At the same time that life school for civil society can be an expectation and an opportunity to prepare the visit, to experience it and to evaluate it before, during and after the visit.5 The decriminalization of discrepancy.Cuba needs, above all, to live in the respect and the agreement of diversity which is natural and desirable in a sound society. Cuba needs to decriminalize discrepancy, such as a relevant journalist in Camagüey has said. The mission of Christianity is, according to the Gospel of Saint Luke in its chapter 4, 18-21: To preach the Gospel to the poor; to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord".That's to mark the visit of the Pastor of the Church we can expect: an amnesty for all the political prisoners or prisoners of conscience, rather than pardon; the cessation of all repression and to change the climate of exasperation we find in the media and on the streets: an environment of war, conspiracy and espionage that harms the Nation's soul and the spirit of Cubanhood: to change all that toward an atmosphere of confidence and fraternity. This good news, guaranteed and consolidated by the complete decriminalization of discrepancy, before, during and after the pontifical visit can be one of the expectations and opportunities to prepare the visit, to experience it and evaluate it.6. Toward a true religious freedom.The true religious freedom in a modern laic State is not "the permit" for each action or work by the churches and it is not having a special office to control their activities or to exclude some works, persons and groups from the Church in order to obtain "the normalization" of the relations between the Church and the State. These relations will only be normal when the Churches enjoy a true religious freedom guaranteed by law or Concordat, by the renewal of mentality and by a social environment of freedom and respect for all the believers. The religious freedom is not a privilege for the ecclesiastic institutions but a right of each citizen and each community of believers. To take care of this right is a responsibility of the Hierarchy of the Church and the civil Authority as well. There cannot be religious freedom if only one of the believers is pursued, discriminated, excluded or repressed for his faith and for the consequences of his faith regarding his political, economic and social options. The purposes of the Gospel are not exclusively the good relations between the Church and the State but and above all, the good relations among all citizens and the State. To promote this more holistic concept of religious freedom can be a support and a source, inspiration and complement of all the other liberties, human rights and expectations regarding the life of the Churches and the Pope's visit. The degree of true religious freedom achieved before, during and after this visit and for each Cuban can be one of the expectations and opportunities to prepare this visit, to experience it and evaluate it.7. National reconciliation: truth, justice, amnesty and magnanimity.Another expectation about the papal visit is that it should contribute to the long and necessary process of national reconciliation. For more than five decades confrontation among Cubans that think and act differently has been stimulated. Persons that love Cuba and work pacifically for it have been unfairly called "warms", mercenaries, traitors and all kinds of degrading damaging remarks. Informers and oppressors have done a lot of physical and psychological harm. The pontifical visit should use a strong spiritual and ethical motivation to make this mania of discrediting the person instead of disagreeing with serenity about his ideas stop. Weak must be the arguments against these ideas when discredit is used against this person. The people that the Pope will visit needs a deep process of national reconciliation that necessarily should include these four steps: a commission of truth, legal processes with all the guarantees, an amnesty without amnesia not to fall in the same hole ever again and a spirit of magnanimity which is the mix of forgiveness and fraternity. The degree in which the preparation of the papal visit, the visit itself and what comes afterwards contribute to the process of national reconciliation can be one of the expectations and opportunities to prepare the visit, to experience it and evaluate it.8. The opening-up to the world strengthens the cultural identity and the national sovereignty."May Cuba open- up to the world and may the world open-up to Cuba" was one of the most stunning messages of the visit paid by John Paul II to Cuba 14 years ago. Quickly, many of us in Cuba added that together with those two openings and as a consequence of them the government should open-up mainly to the very Cubans so that all of us can enjoy all the rights. Unfortunately the three openings are still unresolved, some are not started, and some are not completed. The world has changed since 14 years ago: it is more independent, more supportive, more conscious and sensitive to the violations of the Human Rights and to the use of violence in any ways and places. The opening up and the interdependence do not degrade or harm but strengthen the cultural identity and the national sovereignty if the citizens have an ethical and civic education to start a dialogue with other cultures and other nations. Paternalism thinks that by locking up their children at home as if they were little and by giving them a simplified version of the world will result in the children's fidelity and purity. The very life denies the efficiency of being so enclosed regarding information, media, interpersonal relations, travel and interchange among countries. The degree of opening to the world, to Cubans and to all of human rights for all achieved before, during and after this visit can be one of the expectations and opportunities to prepare this visit, to experience it and evaluate it.9. The transition from fear to hope and from hope to the reconstruction of the Country.Cuba needs a deep transition but not only a political and economic transition. Cuba needs, above all and first of all, to transit from fear to hope. This indicator of the situation in our country and the life quality we have in this Island is indeed measurable by all of us: Cuba will not really change if you find fear around you. If television threatens and attacks; if the newspapers are libels that denigrate the different ones; if your neighbourhood is a nest of distrust and informers; if your job is a pack of envy and corruption. If all this happens then something is wrong in Cuba and it must change. There is no life quality where fear is present. If there is no hope the future moves away from each one of us and from the country. A country where the hope of persons lies in the possibility to travel to any other country in order to improve has to change substantially. The Pope's visit, its preparation and its continuity can be evaluated by the concrete steps in this urgent itinerary of transition from fear to hope and from hope to the reconstruction of the Country with freedom and responsibility.10. We Cubans, women and men are and should be the protagonists of our own personal and national history.Another unfinished legacy of the visit paid by John Paul II is that message three times repeated by the venerated Pontiff: "You are and should be the protagonists of your own personal and national history". This is maybe the foundation, the key and the guarantee of all the expectations and possibilities related to the visit of Benedict XVI: Only if we Cubans, women and men accept our personal and civic responsibility the changes in Cuba will be implemented with depth and peace. The Pope will not turn all of our expectations into realities but the prominence and the responsibility of all Cubans will do it; and we will be able to do it and we should do it counting on the supplement of the soul that religions can give through their mystique, their spirituality, their ethics and their liberating and holistic view of reality.The visit of every religious leader is always a call and a spiritual encouragement for all who want to listen and accept the Pope's wise suggestions and advices. That is why the visit of His Holiness Benedict XVI can be a magnificent catalyst in this gradual but irreversible process in which each Cuban, woman and man should accept our responsibility, our social and historic prominence to implement, all of us without exclusion or violence, the changes that only we Cubans should do for Cubans.This will depend on each one of us but very especially on the authorities and the faithful of the Catholic Church and also on the authorities and followers of the Country's government. It will also depend on the contribution of those Cubans, women and men who have decided to exercise their citizen sovereignty in the every day national events.This is the time for every one to contribute what he thinks, what he expects, what he will decide to do on the occasion of the Pope's visit during the next spring in Cuba.Pinar del Río, November 20th 201122nd Anniversary of Father Varela's Birth.
Translation from the Convivencia website.
December 1 2011
Lady in White Elizabeth Linda Kawoya Toca Summoned by State Security / Katia Sonia
Lady in White Elizabeth Linda Kawoya Toca Summoned by State Security / Katia SoniaKatia Sonia, Translator: Unstated
Elizabeth Linda Nanyonga Kawooya Toca, a member of the Laura Pollan Ladies in White Movement, was summoned by State Security for 2:00 pm on November 4th at the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) station at Infanta and Amenidad in Cerro municipality.
Elizabeth Linda, who is a Ugandan citizen, declared that a young man in plain clothes — who said he was an official of State Security and called himself Marcos — said that with the death of Laura Pollan and the release of the prisoners they had terminated the activities of the Movement and that he had orders from above to block the activities of the Ladies in White.
Kawooya Toca told the official that there was an official and clear commitment to the struggle and support of the Cuba Independent and Democratic Party (CID) to the Laura Pollan Ladies in White Movement as long as a single political prisoner existed in Cuba and there is no guarantee of the fundamental rights of Cubans and that she, as a deputy delegate of the CID in the Centro Habana municipality, made clear her position of support and membership in the Ladies in White. The official responded that she should leave that to the old women, that she was younger than all the women because she is 22.
Elizabeth Linda Nanyonga Kawooya Toca is a resident in Cuba and says she feels a connection to the fate of the Cuban people, she is married to the independent journalist and director of the CID Lisbán Hernández Sánchez.
Translator: Unstated
November 7 2011
Allow us a word… / Jeovany J. Vega
Allow us a word… / Jeovany J. VegaJeovany J. Vega, Translator: Unstated
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
Cuban Dissident Freed Hours After Violent Arrest
Cuban Dissident Freed Hours After Violent Arrest
HAVANA – Prominent Cuban dissident Guillermo Fariñas was released without charges several hours after his "violent" arrest in the central city of Santa Clara, his family and colleagues said Monday.
Fariñas was headed for church on Sunday together with a group of 10 opposition members when "three (police) patrol cars blocked their way and the cops began to push and shove them inside," Ramon Jimenez, spokesman for the dissident group United Anti-Totalitarian Forum, told Efe.
"The police were violent with them and Guillermo was treated worst of all," Jimenez said.
Fariñas' mother Alicia Hernandez confirmed Monday the account of her son's detention and said that, after returning home around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, he had to go to the doctor "because he was in a lot of pain."
The 49-year-old psychologist and independent journalist went on a hunger strike last year for more than four months following the death of opposition prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, to demand the release of political prisoners suffering severe illnesses.
Guillermo Fariñas, recipient of the European Parliament's 2010 Sakharov Prize for the defense of human rights, was arrested briefly on several occasions this year, the last time in mid-September during a wave of detentions of dissidents in Santa Clara and other towns in central Cuba.
According to the opposition Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, the Communist government has intensified the "interior repression" against dissidence over the last month, and estimates that 380 people were arrested for political reasons in December. EFE
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=456174&CategoryId=14510
Production Line for Cuban Robots / Angel Santiesteban
Production Line for Cuban Robots / Angel SantiestebanAngel Santiesteban, Translator: Regina Anavy
Cuban Television puts forth, in its horrible primetime schedule, another program of manipulated news coming from Telesur, with a Venezuelan ideologue-manipulator-agent-"journalist," Walter Martinez, who has forgotten ethics and the first rule for a reporter: to report news without adding his personal opinion, which in all cases is linked to an ideology that he represents and that pays him, and therefore has a particular interest (like a pirate without a hook he appears every night on Cuban screens sniffing the rear ends of Chávez and Castro).
I would have to ask how much is the monetary gain in this matter, and the advertising benefit received by the president of his country, to lend his face and impudence to defend a socialism that, be it either from the 20th or the 21st century, is the same scam. Like a virus, it ruins the economy of our nations, and if Venezuelans want to be sure, go for a ride around the island, but not by those hospital-hotels that make it easier for their treatments, which I have nothing against, let alone healing a human being from any country, but the mass-media function for which they later are used. Let them go out on the streets, visit homes, hospitals almost in ruins, without doctors, medicine or surgical tools, etc.
To make matters worse for the Cuban people, in trying to educate us across generations like automatons, remember that there are dozens of programs that daily accommodate the official news chosen for political censorship, with the exact narration for all media information, and which are repeated as a torture for the rest of our existence. With two hours a day, deploying the best technology and the highest production costs, the inadvertent Roundtable show, which goes about building a militarized anti-logic, attacking everything that smacks of capitalism, its star attraction being the United States, then the right-wing presidents. Before it was Aznar, now Sarkozy and Berlusconi, among so many, while defending the Latin American Presidents who have allied themselves with Chávez.
To this we must add the three newscasts, the kings of media disinformation, who also go about justifying the international disasters of their ideological peers. The ineptitude and excesses of the abysmal administration of the Castro brothers of the weak national economy for half a century. The constant radio news. The famous Radio Reloj, which from minute to minute puts out the most incredible and unjustifiably manipulated news. The written press: read six pages of one and you've read all the rest. The daily Rebel Youth, which is no more than the journal of the oldies in rebellion who are in power. The publication of Workers, which is nothing other than the voice of betrayal of the Cuban working class in the service of the tyrannical masters.
Throw in the printed organ of the Communist Party of Cuba (the only party), the mother of all news, which picks and chooses what the people of Cuba should know. The magazine Bohemia, that not in the worst moments of past dictatorships was submissive or official. The provincial papers governed and monitored by the regional Communist parties. The digital news bulletins, also like parrots, copying what is accepted at the request of political superiors.
It's as if they put speakers in our ears and shouted at us again and again what we should think, memorize and perform, and, as an exercise in boredom, start counting from 1 to 53, the years of dictatorship, to corroborate the emptiness that lights up that space. And last but not least, this Mr. Official Walter Martínez appears, and with each image, chosen also for its censorship, he gives us pre-processed news, underestimating the intelligence of viewers, and all this does is guarantee that we have the worst news program, not even the "Democratic" Republic of North Korea has a worst one.
There is a reporter who is not silent for a minute, with a know-it-all air of God Almighty, who will hang posters, use nicknames, with the constant irony of always rowing toward the benefit of Chavez' and Castro's shore. In the past he would come to Cuba to record an interview with Fidel Castro, which was nothing more than an ode to the old Comandante, a chorus of criticism of his political enemies, a suck-up to the great leader. The only thing this man has achieved, is that in Cuba we have silent movies again. The viewers, with the volume at the minimum, guarantee the elimination of the interruption of his submissive voice so they can enjoy the images that the Cuban government censors of the national news. What he doesn't know, or perhaps does and doesn't mind, is that his program is also reviewed and edited before being aired, so that after censorship, there is another more refined Cuba where he at times appears to be too much of a "journalist "and becomes a spokesperson at the service of the enemy. Not even he, an official voice for both countries, has emerged unscathed from the arrogant and extremist ideology of Fidel.
And as usual, the mouthpiece Walter Martinez, when he comes to the end of his journalistic farce, says "You may turn off the camera, Mr. Director," and he removes himself. The camera, before going dark, takes in his image, and with the gallantry of the frustrated official he wished he had been, he walks down the aisle to get closer to the screen as a symbol of the nightmare and the danger it represents, and then with greater impudence and cynicism makes a military salute to the camera that reaffirms what we already know, which is that he is at the service of the military in Venezuela and Cuba.
One day, I'm sure very soon, Mr. Walter, you will lose the benefits with which you have been bought and hopefully won't find yourself on the roster that hands out paychecks for spies.
Translated by Regina Anavy
November 23 2011
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