government

conversation

A conversation with Harold Cárdenas

por Roberto Veiga González
escrito por Roberto Veiga González

Harold Cárdenas responds in a conversation to essential questions about the Cuban present. He’s a political analyst and has been a founder and editor of La Joven Cuba. He tries to find the key to the challenges we cannot postpone: economic dissatisfaction, the legitimacy of the current government, the necessary democracy, and the necessary maturity for stable relations with the United States.

1) What are the main economic difficulties in Cuba? How does that affect society? How much does that damage the social legitimacy of the authorities? Would that create any sort of social tension? Does the government foresee that?

The history of economic difficulties in Cuba is long, and it extends beyond the revolutionary period. In the last 60 years, one could highlight the effect of the American embargo on the island and the subordination of the national budget to political decision-makers with very little economic experience. Also, the different exchange rates, a mostly informal economy, limited access to foreign currency and the pandemic of the last few months make economic planning and growth in the island complicated. But perhaps the greatest source of social frustration isn’t the state of the domestic economy, but the delaying of economic reforms announced over a decade ago.

The optimism and relative consensus reached by Raúl Castro in his first years of government have been followed by a growing skepticism regarding the political will to effect deep changes in the country. This scenario of internal disillusionment, fueled by the policy of maximum pressure on the island applied by the Trump administration, has little chance of causing a civil uprising, but it can easily multiply episodes of confrontation between sectors of civil society and the Cuban opposition, with the use of the repressive forces.

Until now, evidence indicates that the Communist Party is delegating to the Ministry of the Interior the handling of tense situations with the citizens, which in previous decades were resolved politically and with the leadership of the Party. If this trend continues, the legitimacy of Cuban institutions will be further damaged.

2) The modifications the Cuban social model needs require the existence of an active civil society. However, it wouldn’t be able to take on that role without certain previous reforms that may empower it. Could this society effectively manage said prominence without access to the right of association, to the public sphere, to power institutions? What concessions in that sense could the government offer to it out its own initiative?

Two factors may be highlighted in the limits of Cuban civil society: its use by successive US administrations as a tool for regime change in the island, and the government’s ill will towards all kinds of organizations that are not subordinated to its interests. A relaxation or elimination of sanctions against Cuba would contribute to that favorable context for the civil society-State relationship, but that’s an external factor which depends on the internal dynamics of another nation.

One positive step that’s in the hands of the Cuban government is creating incentives so that the organizations which today operate in illegality (and non-legality) become inserted in national legality, seek forms of sustainability not linked to foreign funding with political objectives in Cuba, and participate with full guarantees in their role as social actors.

Another necessary sign which may serve as an incentive for civil society and the country in general, is that the Cuban government explain its vision of how a democratic peace would work in Cuba in the absence of the American embargo; how they would insert marginalized political sectors and guarantee the normal development of civil society. The absence of incentives like these, which are totally within the reach of the Cuban authorities, generates mistrust and it obstructs national dialog.

3) Does the current dynamic of State institutions attain an adequate relationship with society? Does the manner of occupying their public offices (the authorities) guarantee their due legitimacy? Do the citizens have the instruments to turn social will into the State’s political will?

If the base of a modern state is the solidity of its institutions, then Cuba has a lot to worry about. Beyond the imperatives generated by running a country affected by sanctions, the island has seen a mix of customs inherited from the colonial period and the republic in the early 20th century, with mechanisms and practices imported from the Soviet Union. Neither of those deserves praise.

A country with an authoritarian legacy that’s hard to admit socially, with traits of corruption and administration problems going back centuries, must make a significant effort to build solid institutions irrespective of the prevailing government and ideology. That hasn’t been the case. The centuries of colonial government, the decades of dictatorship and corrupt governments (with notable exceptions) followed by Fidel Castro’s model of charismatic leadership, prevented an appreciation of the value of Cuban institutions and the promotion of a competent bureaucracy in the country. As a result, we have a government in which accountability is something exceptional and public opinion has no way to check the work of its institutions. The official-citizen relationship continues to be vertical, and legality protects the former more than the latter.

Cuban voters also have a very limited capacity to impose their will or their preferences regarding their leaders and the way institutions are managed. Any model of a future Cuba must not only provide for the participation of all of the country’s political factors, but also for a profound restructuring of national institutions and their relationship with the citizens.

4) Cuba needs full insertion into the ‘world system’. For that, evidently, it would be fundamental to have positive relations with the United States. However, the possibilities of that happening would seemingly depend on the logic that the US might be willing to do so, but only if the island presents realities that are somehow compatible with its interests and/or visions. This would require that Cuba make wide-ranging transformations so that a concrete arrangement with the northern neighbor may be realistic. What would those changes be? What would the Cuban government do about that? What seems possible in this regard?

Cuba has two basic options in its asymmetric relationship with the United States: to be allied with another nation that protects its interests or to align itself with the US, acknowledging its weakness with respect to the regional power. The latter choice seems particularly difficult for an island traumatized by the history of American military intervention and meddling in its domestic affairs, with a single communist party model, with a foreign policy forged during the Cold War with alliances radically opposed to the US, an exile community ready to recover assets that became public property six decades ago and an American transition plan that includes the political exclusion of the current party and government.

The first option has been the norm in the bilateral relation, seeking alliances first with the Soviet Union and then more modestly with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Both have been imperfect and risk-filled experiences. These two options, respectively defined in Stephen Walt’s balance of power theory as balancing and bandwagoning, do not offer the island many options if the current bilateral relation maintains its course. However, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Regardless of the political and ideological preferences of Cuban decision-makers, a hostile relation with the United States isn’t sustainable in the long term and does not benefit the national interest, and this also applies to the American side.

For Cuba to change its strategy and build a new relationship with the United States, incentives and concessions on both sides are necessary, while avoiding irreconcilable stances. Demanding internal changes in Cuba in a context of emergency, without the US starting to eliminate the system of sanctions on the island, would not only be morally reprehensible, but would also be interpreted as another violation of its national sovereignty.

The first step could be to restore the normalization process started by former Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, and then to make the rapprochement progress towards a scenario in which the embargo is eliminated, while democratic guarantees are required concerning the political participation of citizens and other debts predating the revolutionary period. Both governments can explore areas of joint collaboration, beginning with the handling of the global pandemic and then moving on to agreements that guarantee regional prosperity and stability.

In short, the construction of a democratic peace in Cuba is impossible without respect for its sovereignty by the United States and without overcoming a Cold War mentality in the Cuban leadership. These processes must happen simultaneously.

Taken from: El Poder de las Ideas

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celia

The exclusion of Celia Cruz in Cuba

por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés
escrito por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

On October 4, 2009, the day Mercedes Sosa died, the producers at Radio Granma faced an odd dilemma. The printed press published the news, but in the record libraries or music departments of every local radio station in the country, there was a list of artists whose broadcasting was forbidden or limited, and the Argentinean singer was on it.

We didn’t know the reason. Actually, the reason was never important. Sometimes the director of the radio station got a phone call: ‘Pablo Milanés started criticizing the Revolution and it’s been decided to limit his broadcasting’, as it happened during the public controversy between him and Silvio Rodríguez. Fortunately, good sense prevailed on that occasion, and a few hours later Juan Salvador Guevara – then vice-president of the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) in Granma – called to explain that the supposed limitation of the Bayamo-born singer had been an ideological overreaction by someone and that Abel Prieto himself had clarified the issue.

When Buena Fe’s album Catalejo came out, the then director of Radio Granma and I participated in an event in Caibarién gathering radio stations from coastal municipalities. A different wind of renovation was apparently blowing. Several broadcasters believed it was ‘a very harsh album’, and that started an informal and engaging debate in which some of us spoke about the cultural inconsistency of the prohibitions and limitations, to which Guillermo Pavón – who had recently been appointed vice-president of radio broadcasting at the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) – replied: ‘It’s being studied, it’s being studied.’

The poet, researcher, and editor Julio Sánchez Chang, whose executive secretary I was at the Municipal Committee of UNEAC in Manzanillo, told me a few months before passing away that at a meeting of that organization in Camagüey, a producer asked about the list of forbidden and limited artists in Cuban radio, and the ICRT representative responded: ‘I don’t know what list you’re talking about here. The Revolution’s policy has never been to exclude anybody.’ Then the producer, saying nothing and apparently satisfied with the answer, went back to Radio Agramonte, tore the list, and brought it to the meeting.

A few months after that meeting in Camagüey, the ICRT sent an email explaining that all the previous lists were invalid. Some producers, a small minority, like Orestes Ernesto Remón at Radio Granma, started to include Celia Cruz in their musical productions, as well as music by Annia Linares, Mirtha Medina, Oscar d’ León, Rubén Blades, Maggie Carlés, and others.

In spite of that, in late 2012, another general director of Radio Granma took me to be analyzed at the Supervisory Board because I had broadcasted the songs ‘Miedos’ by Buena Fe and Los Aldeanos, and ‘Lucha tu yuca, Taíno’ by Ray Fernández. Two years ago, at the Manzanillo local channel, Golfovisión, there was an attempt to apply sanctions, and a media coordinator lost her bonus pay because, in a visual support clip for a program, she let slip a shot from the ICAIC co-production Yo soy del son a la salsa, by Rigoberto López, which showed Celia Cruz.

The question is, why does Celia Cruz appear now in the TV program La Pupila Asombrada?

Apparently, for the same reason that the list of censored artists was eliminated: so that those who accuse us of being totalitarian and authoritarian aren’t right. It’s in Miami and not in Cuba where people publicly smash artists’ records for performing in Havana, cyberbully Laura Pausini for singing with President Díaz-Canel in the audience, start a campaign to boycott Buena Fe performances in the United States, and demonize Israel Rojas.

It’s not the Cuban government either the one who applies a law preventing the best Cuban artists who have decided to live in the island from being promoted in international circuits or from signing with American labels, or that Juan Formell y Los Van Van travel to receive a Grammy award. That’s all true. But there’s one detail: we’re not the US government; our government is not the imperialist one. Our politicians speak of building a better world and of attaining all possible justice. Here we say that ‘Revolution is never to lie or violate ethical principles.’

Therefore, so as not to violate ethical principles, if you’re going to include Celia Cruz in a TV program with a marked ideological and political outlook, like La Pupila Asombrada, the honorable thing would be to tell the whole story, not only that the singer hated the Cuban Revolution – as she did –, but also that we were in the wrong for 50 years in the treatment our media gave to any artist who decided to migrate to the US or who didn’t agree with the policies of the Revolution, or to those who, without being Cuban, expressed any sort of public criticism of the Revolution or any of its leaders.

We were in the wrong to the point that, at the Manzanillo Theater, there are paintings of great personalities who stepped onto its stage, from Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to Rosita Fornés, but Ernesto Lecuona is missing. He’s not there because they had him removed and they replaced him with Capablanca, who was in Manzanillo, but never at the theater. According to what they told us, the pianist and composer from Guanabacoa had said that while Fidel was in power, he didn’t want his remains to rest in Cuba. How could there be a painting of him at a place which, as was thought back in 2002, Fidel himself might reinaugurate?

That’s the type of mentality we should set out to change for our own good as a nation. As I’ve said before: you can’t overcome it with more exclusion and isolation, when exclusion and isolation are what they want to impose on us. You can’t beat hatred with hatred. You can’t defeat the intention of dividing us Cubans with more divisions. And you can’t overpower the slanting views and the crude manipulation applied to the cultural history of this country with more slanting views and more crude manipulation. You win by uniting forces and by wielding the truth in hand.

Translated from the original 

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dollarization

Annals of a Cuban-style Dollarization

por Mario Valdés Navia
escrito por Mario Valdés Navia

The package of measures announced in the Mesa Redonda of last July 16 filled a sizable part of the people with expectations. Although it was based on the effects of COVID-19 and the tightening of the blockade, the prevailing view is that the country returns to the path of the Updating of the model, put almost entirely on hold in the last few years. I like to think that’s the case, and not that everything will go back to the way it was as soon as the epidemic-related crisis is overcome, or a new US government retracts its claws.

Of the many measures made public, most require a waiting time that’s yet to be defined. Only one is made effective immediately: the re-dollarization of a significant part of the commercial circulation, not in the form of cash, but through the use of bank cards in FCC (Freely Convertible Currency): dollarization in plastic. Its immediate goal is understandable. Income in FCC has seriously dropped, and there’s no indication that it’ll come back to normal in the short term.

The expenses of facing the pandemic, the payments of foreign debt, and the purchases of basic supplies cannot wait for the economy to prosper, and the most expedite source of financing is within the country. That’s why the US dollars, zealously treasured by distrustful savers in jugs, supposed toolboxes, mattresses, and double-bottomed furniture, have been summoned to manifest themselves with urgency, like supernatural entities in a séance.

Seeing the lines forming in the first days of the shops –suddenly very well stocked, by the way– for that middle- and top-range market, the decision can be described as effective. Meanwhile, those without international cards or accounts in US dollars in Cuban banks are rushing to open them or put away reserves in CUC or CUP –the ones who can– in order to purchase the new products in those shops in the black market.

Those at the bottom of the food chain always suffer the most.

But the presence of the US dollar in the Cuban market is cyclical in our history, and its last occurrence, in the 1990s, never really ended, it only morphed behind a nationalist mask: the CUC. Let’s look grosso modo at the annals how we got to this point.

Already in colonial times, the US dollar circulated in Cuba without restriction, in correspondence with the high volume of imports from and exports to the US, and the movement of people who came and went for various reasons. With the First Occupation and the establishment of the Republic, it gradually imposed itself in a market it shared with weaker currencies. That’s why, in February 1907, during the Second Occupation, the Currency Strike broke out, led by tobacco workers in Havana who demanded they be paid in US dollars. It lasted for 145 days, other labor sectors joined and it enjoyed the veiled support of interventionist governor Charles Magoon. It was the first success of the Cuban workers’ movement.

Although during the government of José Miguel Gómez (1909-1913) its Secretary of the Treasury and native of Sancti Spiritus, Marcelino Díaz de Villegas, made the first proposal of creating a Cuban currency, it would be in the boom years, during the government of Mario García Menocal (1913-1921), when a man from the same region, economist Leopoldo Cancio Luna, would turn into a reality the aspiration of establishing our national currency: the Cuban peso, with a value pegged to the dollars. It would come to be officially in force as the single currency on December 1, 1915, but the circulation of foreign currency would be banned throughout the country since September.

The peso remained a strong currency for a long time. Even after the devaluation of the dollar in the 1970s, and by then freed from its dependency of its American counterpart by the Revolution, it retained a high purchasing power. Its debacle arrived with the inflationary spiral of the Special Period when its value dropped so much that one US dollar, which was informally worth 7 pesos in 1990, got to fetch 150 in 1993.

As part of the anti-crisis strategy, in August 1993 the legal circulation of the dollar was reestablished as the decriminalization of the foreign currency and monetary duality were passed. Additionally, the reception of remittances was allowed, which increased the income of approximately 25% of the island’s inhabitants. The economy began to rise. In 2003, the brand-new Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) replaced the US dollar in transactions between state-owned companies, at the same time that the mechanisms for assigning and using foreign currencies were highly centralized.

At the end of 2004, in response to US pressures on Cuban transactions in their currency, the Central Bank of Cuba (BCC) extended its exclusion to transactions carried out with the population. Therefore, although the possession of foreign currency or the maintaining of savings accounts in FCC was not re-criminalized, their exchange was made obligatory for internal circulation. Likewise, in order to discourage the arrival of remittances and other flows of US dollars, a 10% tax was imposed on the enemy’s currency in its exchange to CUCs.

We’ve spent more than fifteen years with two Cuban currencies, at least apparently.

In reality, the CUC has always been a stand-in for the US dollar inside Cuba. In the beginning, it was like a revalued avatar of the dollar, but in time it seemed to acquire a life of its own. It’s minting without the backing of US dollars made it devalue so much that it lost its original meaning. That’s why important companies first (2015), and now the population, have been forced to go back to a partial circulation of FCC.

Now, more than ever before, monetary reunification and the arrival of remittances in US dollars become necessary, because when this first wave of currency treasured by private citizens dries out, how will the Cuban accounts in foreign currency be recharged? If US dollar remittances are exchanged by the CADECA (Cuban government-run bureau de change) into CUCs –by now doomed to extinction– and the dollarized mules and international tourists cannot come because there are no flights yet, where will Cubans obtain more dollars? If the markets in CUP and CUC are now almost empty, will there be supplies to keep them stocked and prevent FCC-purchased products from starting to circulate in the black market, in an endless inflationary spiral that would lead the poor majority of consumers without US dollars to desperation?

Let’s hope –paraphrasing the sign at the entrance to Varadero– that every dollar collected by this exclusive market, in a foreign currency, will clearly be to the benefit of all the people.

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jurist

How Can a Jurist Maintain Dignity in the Pandemic?

por Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada
escrito por Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada

Jurists have a bad reputation. A good part of that notoriety comes from the constant and decades-long promotion by TV series and movies of a carnivore and ruthless version of the work carried out by those in the legal profession, especially lawyers.

To make things worse, the legal life we mostly see in Cuba is that of the United States, which creates in the Cuban population an image of jurists with attitudes that are sometimes alien to our legal system, not because we’re fairer, but because we’re different.

Law is a science, but it’s also a political and technical practice, which seems to be only about the moment when oral trials are staged, but which encompasses a lot more than that. It gathers more than two thousand years of learning, of text output about its institutions, of professional work by its specialists, of accumulation of experiences in forums and courts, which means that it also amasses a large history of justice and its opposite.

The image of jurists deciding over the lives of people in cold negotiations, brought to us above all by TV shows, where important lawyers from private American firms win cases and millions of dollars along with them, creates in the public the perception that jurists are bandits or vultures, though it’s a reality that there might be cheating, mischievous and immoral jurists anywhere, same as it happens with doctors, political leaders, sportspeople, artists or scientists.

The profession of those of us who study Law doesn’t make us more honest, or more just, or more fraudulent, or more heartless. It just so happens that in the world of Law it is legal, legitimate and necessary that killers be defended, that those caught red-handed have an impartial trial, that self-confessed offenders may be absolved, and that apparently won cases be lost on a procedural technicality.

The very existence of Law does not guarantee the presence of justice. Roman jurists in imperial times used to say that Law was the art of what’s good and fair, that Law should attempt to make men good, and not only by means of sanctions, but also by means of rewards, that justice was the constant will to give to each what is due them, that jurists should be treated as priests, and that the Law brought to the extreme of literal interpretation can sometimes be unjust.

For those reasons, those very jurists created equity, the justice of the specific case, that which in the hands of those who may interpret each case can help the least adequate law yield required and healing justice.

The very Roman magistrates who had jurisdictional authority, at the time in which judges were private citizens and not legal professionals, gradually established the practice of defending the weakest, of the presumption of good faith in cases of patrimonial nature, of benefits for debtors who already bear the burden of an obligation to comply. Therefore, Law was born at the base of our judicial system, to defend the needy and not to enrich those who already own all the wealth.

In Cuba the Law is written down, we do not accept custom as a source of law nor we allow judges to create legal precedent in the act of judging, so it is fundamental for judges to be independent, and for the prosecutors and magistrates tasked with interpreting the norms which only the people can legalize to exercise wisdom, sound judgment and ethics.

There’s no private practice of the legal profession here either, so the lawyers who must represent private individuals in litigations or other kinds of processes, must be hired by Collective Practices which work within the technical framework of the Ministry of Justice and are a non-governmental organization, and in which specialists in civil, penal, labor, administrative and family matters earn salaries thousands of times lower than those of their private firm counterparts almost everywhere.

The popular wisdom in Cuba is sometimes not that wise, like when it believes and repeats that every law has a loophole, or when it despairs faced with the horrible truth that everything here is forbidden, or when it believes that Cuban notaries line their pockets and are a band of thieves worse than those in One Thousand and One Nights, when in reality the Law in Cuba is written by the legislators in the National Assembly, and they have no way to cheat. Some things are just forbidden because of our self-censorship, and notaries are public officials with government-assigned salaries and significant possibilities of going to jail for the slightest mistake.

Cuban jurists, men and women of the Law, are as necessary in the Republic as equality, dignity, democracy and lemonade, all of these indispensable in my opinion.

In times of pandemic, contrary to what many believe and repeat –that what’s important isn’t norms or legality or the measures taken by the government–, Law is an urgent necessity to preserve the decency of society, tolerance, respect for our fellow people, solidarity –even if imposed–, peace, harmony, safety and the justice that appeases the demons stirred up by isolation.

Jurists know about legal norms, but they must be helped by the justice of the social system in behaving as agents of truth and equality, because otherwise they’d become gendarmes of corruption and arbitrariness.

Today I want to pay homage to my father, who taught me both the virtues and defects of Law. He used to say that one can spend life in ill health, fighting an ailment or a condition over a lifetime, but one cannot endure existence without justice.

For justice, the sun of our moral universe and the crystalline lake where we quench our civic thirst, we must sacrifice our peace and awaken the jurist within us all.

Translated from the original

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realities

Uncomfortable realities

por Alina Bárbara López Hernández
escrito por Alina Bárbara López Hernández

I’ve been writing for La Joven Cuba blog for two years. Nearly all of my articles, except for some rare exceptions, are devoted to internal analyses about Cuba. There are too many international analysts among us. That’s on one hand. On the other, internal contradictions are the ones that determine the course of processes.

I flatly reject the idea that, in order to approach certain topics, I must carry out what we historians call comparative studies, and add a restriction which reminds that the same happens in other contexts; or worse, accept that we be asked —required— to show caution and restraint, since denouncing certain facts may give ‘ammunition to the enemy’ and discredit the image of a Cuba that marches down paths of dreamed-of ‘normality’.

The old demand emerges strongly every time something brings about uncomfortable criticism of the Cuban government and is spread with that added force that the Internet gives to information. I’m not naïve; I understand perfectly that everything that happens in Cuba is politicized. Our government also politicizes everything which, in other contexts, has the potential to show some superiority on this side.

The Cuban press —that is, those who run it— is greatly at fault for the advantage the social networks have today. For years we listened to the speeches of the leaders asking for a more critical press and a change of mentality. It was a stage in which Internet access was still scarce, and which could have been used, in the absence of troublesome competitors, for the modification of the outdated media paradigm, closely controlled by the Ideological Department of the Party and therefore slow, ineffective and lacking in transparency.

But they failed to take advantage of the interval, and now they must deal with a mediatization of daily life which happens in real time, on platforms where every citizen —well-intentioned or not, with expertise or without it, with ethics and civility or deprived of both— can compete with the media, and they do so with an advantage.

When some complain that the dramatic case of three Havana girls who died due to a collapsing balcony has been politicized, and they argue that the avalanche of pictures of run-down buildings circulating in the Internet plays along with the enemy, I wonder why they don’t focus on a deeper reading of what’s happening right in front of us, and of which this case is proof: the deep social differences that exist in Cuba regarding families, neighborhoods and skin color.

These inequalities are even more obvious in Havana, since it’s an overcrowded capital, but they are evident throughout the country, and they disagree with one of the accepted victories of the Revolution, for which generations of compatriots have made sacrifices.

The texts by Mónica Baró and Alexei Padilla are, in my opinion, the ones which have approached the topic with more depth and civility. She has long been devoted to the subject of vulnerable neighborhoods and communities in Havana, and she writes very deep and objective investigative journalism —something that’s virtually inexistent in our context—, in which she presents all the possible viewpoints and thus earns great credibility. Alexei, in his article for LJC, focused on the issue of the role of the law in this situation.

In another context, journalists would be offering information about how many parties responsible for the incident have been indicted, or at least about the progress of investigations. That would put the citizens at ease, and would make them less likely to search the Internet for the news they can’t find in Granma or the TV news bulletin, or that they would find online, but while having truthful, official information at their disposal.

Yet, let’s not deceive ourselves. There are too many culprits in this event. From the ones we all know: a Minister of Construction who must demand and control the list of buildings in imminent danger of collapsing so they may be demolished or propped up; the government of the capital, and specifically of Centro Habana, for the vulnerability of its residents; and the municipality’s delegates in the National Assembly, who hopefully live in it and not in others with better constructions. But there are other guilty parties, from the director and all the teachers of the elementary school across the street from the site of the disaster to each parent who didn’t do what needed doing: whether write a letter of protest or stage a walkout to stop sending their children to a place which, eventually, killed three of them.

Poverty in some Havana neighborhoods is already a matter of national security, and it’s ceased to be a social issue to become a political one, although, in truth, the economic and the social are always spheres of the political, whether the leaders like that or not.

Zuleica Romay, one of the voices who better deals with the topic of ethnicity and racism in Cuba —and from whom I learned a lot while editing her book Cepos de la memoria. Impronta de la esclavitud en el imaginario social cubano (Stocks of Memory. The Imprint of Slavery in the Cuban Social Imagination)—, develops, as a doctoral thesis, a sociological study about racial distribution in Havana neighborhoods. Hopefully she will finish it, and we’ll be able to have a precise idea, from science, of the magnitude of the inequality and its relation to the racial issue. However, there already are scientific questions we may ask without so much effort. Here’s one: what’s the relation between poverty in neighborhoods with a large black population and the obvious presence of people of that ethnicity in active opposition groups in Cuba? I know it’s an uncomfortable question. Reality always is.

The 15,000 apples sold at a market in Miramar and the swift discovery and public punishment of the offenders got more coverage in some media than three children who died across the street from their school. Such reactions discredit those platforms, which claim to defend Cuban socialism, when they apparently only defend the government. They protect the power, not the project.

Media actors in Cuba —professional or not, and whether from official or alternative platforms, including simple Facebook or Twitter users— should strive for greater depth when analyzing the serious problems we have. But in order to do that, it should be understood that the current fight —apparently for cultural issues, and having actors, symbols and songs at the center, sometimes tinged with rudeness, disrespect and shows of intolerance, egos and rivalries on both shores, ideological and geographical— is only managing to cover up the dramatic realities of Cuban life.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci well said that, in times when the political horizon closes up, contradictions tend to emerge in the various manifestations of national culture. And that’s how we are, blind in the face of an apparent reality, which keeps us from moving past the anecdote, the specific case and the momentary situation in order to ask the questions that need asking. Here and now.

(Translated from the original)

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impunity

The Path to Impunity

por Harold Cardenas Lema
escrito por Harold Cardenas Lema

On Thursday, January 16, a Cuban government official published in his blog a list of independent media he accused of being ‘platforms for the restoration of capitalism in Cuba’. On the first day, only a few denounced the publication. On the second day, several of the mentioned sites faced difficulties while being accessed from the island. On the third day, the Facebook profile of the state-run radio station Radio Progreso reproduced the list in question for the ‘naïve’ and the ‘uninformed’, clarifying that these were only ‘the more reactionary sites’. Apparently, they left some out, but the list is a work in progress.

Today is the fourth day and the signals are still chaotic. Radio Progreso published with what perhaps was excessive enthusiasm, but they soon took it down from their profile. The strategy by a handful of well-positioned censors in the Ideological Department of the Communist Party and other institutions is still the one of insulting their targets by using expendable people and spaces, not involving institutions if possible. Of course, when the public debate moves beyond their capabilities to impose a specific narrative, they resort to the digital version of pounding the table, which is publishing their opinion in the mass media without allowing others the same opportunity.

Similarly, during the campaign against ‘centrism’ in the summer of 2017, the readers of Cubadebate and Granma knew the opinions of Enrique Ubieta and Elier Ramírez Cañedo, not the ones of Silvio Rodríguez, Carlos Alzugaray or Israel Rojas. Subservience to leaders and a ‘firm hand’, in the style of the former Soviet Union, are still professionally advantageous, unlike taking risks and changing obsolete dynamics.

How did we come to have a political environment where officials make accusations without producing evidence and institutions seem to have a bipolar nature? The origins can be traced back several decades, or to a date as recent as 2017, with the promotion of people with radical agendas to spheres of influence, but there are more immediate antecedents. The person who published the original list of ‘pro-capitalist’ media (which greatly differ among themselves) is the director of CubaSí, Manuel H. Lagarde. It’s not the first time this official is involved in an act of digital bullying. In the summer of 2017, together with Iroel Sánchez, he was one of the leading figures of the digital persecution they now seek to normalize in Cuba. Thanks to that, his influence was on the rise.

Only a year ago, a striking thing happened: the President publicly endorsed the inquisitors within the Cuban government. For years, and even during the most sensitive moments of 2017, Raúl Castro had refrained from taking sides in the public debate between officials and intellectuals on what the limits of the national debate should be. On July 15, 2018, the recently invested President Miguel Díaz-Canel closed the 10th Congress of UPEC (the Union of Cuban Journalists) with a speech in which he didn’t mention any active journalists, but did mention an official: Lagarde.

Making reference to a text in which the director of CubaSí also made ambiguous accusations, the President said in a praising tone: ‘M. H. Lagarde has described with irony, but without euphemisms, the new class of leaders that we’re being sold from those spaces. I recommend a thorough reading of “The New Revolutionaries”’. He went on to read aloud the most visceral fragment of the text. This happened in a few short minutes, but it was shown that day in the National TV News Bulletin, in the Granma newspaper and in any provincial media that follow the Party guidelines. I am far from being an impartial participant in this issue, because I immediately understood I was one of the people being judged, and I published a response. Lagarde confirmed his accusation of me several days later. Being a ‘new revolutionary’ must be the highest praise I’ve ever gotten.

But, how can the director of a national medium stoke smear campaigns and compose a list of official enemies? Why do we still not know the reason for the difficulties in consulting those media on Saturday? How is it possible to operate with such impunity in Cuba? Well, by rewarding and providing fuel for those who light fires in times that require unity. That sort of people is useful for internal purges, but they fragment society and generate wounds that endure in time. This impunity was reached through the arrogance of some, the indifference of others and the mistakes of the President. It doesn’t mean there’s no solution. Whoever empowered that group can also put a stop to it. This time the ball is in the presidential court.

(Translated from the original)

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political will

A non-existent political will

por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés
escrito por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

At the gym you burn energy, you sweat, and you laugh at the remarks of the two or three typical funny guys who get Messi fans and Cristiano fans arguing. We heard the commotion down at the street corner, in front of a family doctor’s office. The contending dogs weren’t even growling; they glared at each other, ready to tear the opponent apart. One of them is brown; the other one is black, with a white streak on the neck. At the corner, the space was delimited by a few dozen people of all ages. Some were encouraging the fight and having fun with the rage and the pain of the dogs, and some muttered their distaste.

‘They should lock the owners in a cage with a rabid mastiff’, a medical student commented.

That afternoon, three years ago, I noticed the owner of one of the fighting dogs. A young man of about 25, with whom I’d talked several times at that very gym. He was a very respectful young man, who had always addressed me politely. He once told me about his drama during the military service, and I didn’t get the impression then that he could be involved in these dogfights. It looked like his dog was the black one with the white streak, which was now howling as the other one bit it. The young man pulled its leg while the opponent’s owners tried to pry open the victor’s jaw, until they got them loose.

An old man passes by: ‘I once called the police, and they said they’d come right away, but they never showed up’, he whispers as if apologizing to himself. ‘Old man, you should’ve told them it was a cow-fight and they would’ve sent the Special Brigade’, the winning dog’s owner scoffs as he walks away. Now, in the 62nd year of the Revolution that would make us better human beings, I witness a similar scene in a city neighborhood, on dirt roads and surrounded by shanties. Someone points out we have a beautiful view of the bay, and that ‘this would be a nice place if it was more or less developed, with good houses and cultural options. If they had a good standard of living, they wouldn’t do these atrocities’. But I’m not so sure. Three years ago I saw the dogfight in a corner of the populous and paved Golden Neighborhood, half a mile from the central police station, one block away from where a Granma PCC official lived, less than three blocks from a high school, a combat sports gym and a so-called ‘cultural’ square.

‘It’s hard to clamp down on that’, a retired police chief tells me. ‘You know there’s no law against animal abuse. If there’s no evidence or testimony of gambling –and there almost never is because they have a code of silence– the most we can do is fine them for social indiscipline or get the courts to impose a minor sanction if they reoffend.’

A few weeks ago, Cubans for the Defense of Animals (CEDA) denounced cockfights at a tourist center in the middle of Havana. Surely those who visit the place, and amuse themselves watching the birds tear each other apart, are not people from poorer areas with shanties and dirt roads.

Years ago I met a breeder of fighting cocks in Yara, a Granma municipality. He was a former biology teacher at a high-school; a founder of that boarding school plan in Las Veguitas which combined studies and work. The former professor prided himself on training the birds for state-run cockpits, at which some of the historical fighters for the revolutionary triumph enjoyed themselves. There was no betting, the breeder told me. He wasn’t short of feed for the birds, or of resources of all kinds to do what he did and live comfortably either. I never knew where he got the funding from if it wasn’t from betting, as he maintained.

Therefore, the issues related with abuse and cruelty against animals in Cuba deserve an approach which goes beyond the reductionist view associating marginality with violence and maliciousness. That’s confirmed by the testimony of a fighting dog trainer who graduated as a veterinarian in a Cuban university. This is someone who, at one point, received that humane, altruistic and caring instruction which is supposed to cultivate all Cubans as they move through our educational system, all the way up to university. It puts the spotlight on the social background of the people who train the animals, and pit them against each other and/or bet in those carnages. Are they poor? Is it always people with low economic income? Are these people outside the influence of the ideological apparatus of the State?

The answers to these questions lead us to wonder if it’s enough to have the President of the Republic acknowledge, in his speech to the National Assembly, the need to have a Law against Animal Abuse or for Animal Welfare. Will this law be applicable and effective with a police force lacking a body specialized in crimes against animal welfare? Will this law be applicable and effective if our educational system doesn’t incorporate topics and practices related to animal protection?

In any case: Will we have to wait for the passing of the law so that the ministries of Education, Higher Education, Culture, Agriculture, Tourism, the Interior, Public Health and the media begin to apply coordinated actions from their respective areas of influence, in order to change the anthropocentric perception of our relation with animals? Of course not. The long institutional road for the promotion of an animal-friendly education in Cuba, beyond the enormous and self-sacrificing efforts of CEDA, depends on the political will of the PCC and the Government. A political will which cannot be worked out in a speech or a phrase by the President of the Republic. A political will I fail to see. A political will which, despite games of chance and gambling being forbidden in Cuba since 1959, has never been able to stop them.

(Translated from the original)

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yourself

Bringing it on yourself

por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés
escrito por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

For the Night of Broken Glass there was a thorough psychosocial preparation supported from the communication platforms at the Nazi regime’s disposal. Radio, cinema, popular theater performances and graphic design, skillfully handled by Joseph Goebbels, maximized anti-Semite prejudices while reinforcing the traditional values of the German people, and modulated the feeling of frustration stemming from the defeat in the Great War.

How did German Nazis do that? How had the National Socialist metanarrative managed to fool the German people in such a way that it brought them to the edge of barbarity and reduced any critical approach to almost nothing?

Answering these questions, and generating applications of their own, was the great mission of the Mass Communications Research (MCR), which began to be carried out in the United States from the 1940s with government funding allotted to public and private universities. The MCR is methodologically grounded in the application of a mechanistic stimulus-response model, and it overvalues the role of the media with respect to other anthropological and socioeconomic variables. However, it allows imperialist power centers to accumulate and codify for decades —in addition to analyzing, modeling and mathematically simulate— the procedures for the induction of certain behaviors in groups or communities through the use of artificial intelligence and the reduction of communicative distances by means of the social networks.

It’s no coincidence that the belligerent discourse of Donald Trump against the new socialist ‘axis of evil’, that is: Cuba Venezuela and Nicaragua, is imbued with a psychosocial hostility against the national values of their peoples. In the case of Cuba, for example, one look at the social networks shows us a difference between Cubans ‘from the island’, who live ‘subjugated by the communist tyranny of Castro’ and the ‘Cubans of the free world’. The ones in the island, according to this matrix, are cowardly because we don’t rise against the regime. We are lazy and conformist because we intend to live off the remittances our family and friends send us from the ‘free world’. We are culturally inferior because we remain isolated.

According to that supremacist matrix, migrants in transit to the United States begin to be criminalized or associated with all kinds of excesses. Doctors collaborating in Latin America are accused of being either slave labor or destabilizing agents. They stigmatize enterprising people who, because of the often absurd limitations imposed by our government, go to other countries to try to buy what they need to do their work. The anti-values listed by the Western tradition: heartlessness, lack of respect for life, professional incompetence, are commonly and vulgarly deployed for the purpose of demonizing Cubans, from among the tapestry of similar occurrences which are a simply signs of modern times.

Both traditional media and the social networks are useful in this demonizing of the ‘Cubans in the island’ or the ‘Cubans coming from the island’, as a mechanism to, first, degrade to a symbolic scale the nation’s values through the mistakes and excesses (real or made up) of its citizens —mistakes and excesses any citizen of any country may partake in—, and prospectively justify the economic siege implemented by the Helms-Burton Act, and maybe even a direct aggression. This is not a problem of the communication platforms themselves —as some run-down local might suggest—, but rather a combination of the imperialist hegemonic intention and the blunders, absurdities and abuses, in quite a few cases, committed by the island’s ideologues and decision-makers.

That’s how, for example, the legal and administrative abandonment in which the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations leaves our legal or illegal migrants facilitates the purpose of that demonizing process. When the Ecuadorian police, in the midst of protests against Lenín Moreno, arrest a Cuban national at the airport in Quito under suspicion that he may be monitoring the activities of that country’s President, and the Cuban consulate takes several days to go and represent him and show concern for its citizen, it is nourishing with its idleness the idea that Cuba has destabilizing agents planted throughout Latin America. This also happens when our government speaks against any injustice or cruelty against migrants in transit anywhere in the world, and at the same time overlooks their own, who are right now being abused and subjected to violence in American detention centers, or are surviving in precarious conditions in any Latin American country; or when the all-powerful head of a medical mission blackmails and represses any instance of criticism or any of his workers’ demands for rights, resorting to ideo-political rhetoric to mask their own inefficiency, so that the worker has to either do what he’s told or be sent back to Cuba. This phenomenon is more frequent than would be ethically acceptable, and it fuels the myth of the slavery of our doctors.

And what won’t be done by a person who, for whatever reason, leaves in search of a dream and is driven to the edge of a nightmare? And why did they decide to go abroad in search of that dream? Was it just a material ambition? Or were there also spiritual aspirations associated to the material ones? And what is the responsibility of our State under the Rule of Socialist Law in that decision to migrate? And when will it finally implement that responsibility?

The bias and the semantic reductionism typical of the traditional media and the social networks —which is based on an adaptation of the way in which we neuro-psychologically turn signals into stimuli, thought and language— becomes a weapon for the destruction of the values of a nation, a human community or any given entity, from the imperialist power centers, with the regrettable complicity, in our case, of the very victims and their representatives. It’s as if the Jews, by intensifying usury and proselytism, had enabled the intentions of Hitler and Goebbels.

(Translated from the original)

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