To Silent the Different

http://www.hsn.com/

My appreciated usual accomplices and visitors:

On May 15th my husband’s laptop just died. It blinked when I was working on it and the monitor turned itself off forever. It was the family computer, a practical tool that, like housing and multiple personal articles in Cuba have to shared with sons, their girlfriends and friends. It was six years old and we’d had it repaired on several occasions, but this time it decided to rest from the overwork and heat we submitted it to for years.

Just when we are engaged in the promotion of the “360 Cuba” Project, we published here, the sudden loss of this instrument central to the methodological and sustainable deployment of the program and the rhythm of publication of opinions in the blog.

The lack of support in resources — I’m one of the bloggers who doesn’t have a PC — makes me think that perhaps there has been a sustained move by the Cuban political police to obstruct our development — my husband is an opposition leader and also has a blog — stopping our development or better still, killing us through the media.

Of course that will reduce my writing output, but would not give up my right to continue broadcasting my opinions, because I consider it a duty of every citizen with their time, history and homeland, charting the reality that surrounds him with words and complaints, especially when it involves, as in the case of Cuba, a dictatorship.

This inconvenience has paralyzed us for now, but circumstances sometimes impose challenges on us which, while closing a door open windows and lead us to creativity. I looked for possible alternatives because I refuse to passively accept the situation which gives another victory to the Cuban dictatorship, and although small, a defeat to those of us who push for and defend democracy.

21 May 2013

Conspiring With Impunity

“Corrupt lawyer and judge. Raúl Castro, help me. Unjust eviction.”

Unfortunately, in Cuba anybody with a Communist Party ID, a title that gives them a substantial amount of power, and personality disorders that will predispose them to abuse their authority, can conspire against any defenseless citizens and strip them of their property. If there are economic or monetary interests involved, these become incentives that speed up such acts.

I found out about the case of Yamile Bargías Hurtado (YBH) in November, and it moved me to write “If it is not rotten, why does it smell bad?.” In it I tactfully tackle a thorny subject of which I do not know all the sides of, as I have not participated in all the hearings nor heard all the plaintiff’s allegations, her defense attorney’s, the affected family’s or any other attorney’s statements. However, as the process to evict Yamile from the apartment that she owns, and into which she moved ten years ago as a result of a house swap with the previous owner, has become traumatic and has extended for five years, it allows us to find out about contradictions, convenient omissions and timely obstructions that stain its adequate transparency and good execution.

Recapitulation

Baltazar Toledo Rodriguez was the manager of the building located at 3rd Street, #355, between Paseo and 2nd and was married to Teresa Luisa Rivero Domínguez. It was assigned to them or they assigned it to themselves, but that is irrelevant, a mini-room in a space adjacent to the building’s garage for this reason. Other apartments have garages, one each beneath them, but it seems that no one cared then for them. With the passage of time, the couple created better housing conditions; the apartment got bigger, as expected, with the expansion of the garage and it ended up being a “modest and miniscule apartment” and I place quotation marks in order to emphasize that I speak of a limited space, not a  property that with the years the necessary institutions recognized as legal and made the couple title holders. Upon the death of Toledo Rodriguez in 1998, grandfather of the plaintiff Eleazar Yosvany Rivero Toledo, his wife who was co-owner, updated her status before the Municipal Directory of Housing and the property was awarded to her as only owner. In 2003 Yamile swapped apartments with the widower and remodeled and expanded her new home with enormous efforts and costs in order to create a bedroom for their daughter. She did it all, tells me the plaintiff, applying for the required construction permits and adding the new space to the property title at the corresponding organization: Municipal Directory of Housing in Plaza. While all the construction activity progressed, the litigant who claims the property as “former heir”, was an eyewitness to the renovations, as he regularly visited the home on top of Yamile’s apartment, considered by those affected as the bank of credit of the process, whose aged protagonists have three children abroad and huge desires to obtain the space for their parents. It was not until 2008 that YBH found out that her house was in dispute since 2002 and her house swap was cancelled in 2009.

“Raúl, I ask for justice”

It is true that at the time  of the home exchange, and according to his identification card, the plaintiff resided, with his grandfather’s widower.  Some witnesses allege that he tricked her into allowing him to stay and register as a co-inhabitant of the dwelling using as an excuse the fact that he had separated from his wife, and had no place to live. If he did not have where to live why he did not sleep under the same roof as his grandmother? Why did he not go to live with her at the Bahia neighborhood? She was the new property owner after Baltazar Toledo’s death and his heiress by right.

In August, YBH tells me, she painted the banner shown in the image on the right, and carried it to the State Council to ask Cuban President Raul Castro to intercede in the injustice against her! She was arrested in the vicinity of the Plaza of the revolution, they removed the rough banner and took her to a police station in which she was kept for several hours.

From November on

In November of 2012, due to the silence of the “deft” national authorities which she had approached, and their immovability, YBH made her cause public and started writing letters to international personalities and institutions. At the same time she approached me and other members of the civil society in Cuba. However the despair and insecurity she has experienced during  these 5 years of unjust and undeserved conflict, have not diminish her sympathy for the system led by the younger of the Castro brothers although she hasn’t received an answer to her letters from their offices.

On December 6,2012 a hearing was scheduled to hear all parties, and to “make it a transparent process.” After the supreme court had already handed down its ruling and the threat of eviction hung over the stability of two families?? I write transparent in bold letters because the close relationship between the plaintiff’s lawyer, the ruling judge and the family that lives upstairs, taints with suspicion any unprejudiced attitude that one would like to have about the case. At the hearing she was told that eviction was to be carried out. Then, why the hearing? To calm things down?

Yamilé withdrew from that circus that ironically sought to legitimize the crooked attitudes of some lawyers. Neither then nor now, was she the object of any reprisal or much less a fine for being in contempt of court for leaving the court without being authorized, and without finishing that judicial theater. Some experts consulted on the case, were scandalized over so much arbitrariness, mishandling, coercion, opportune omissions and convenient obstructions which have stained the safekeeping of the rights of the living and the dead.

The following days brought them closer to despair and helplessness to what in Cuba they call, using a legal euphemism, “forced extraction” to minimize the impact that such methods could have on society. The terminology is made up to avoid the comparison with evictions in other countries — used by Cuban authorities in political campaigns — and to differentiate them from those of which the new regime has historically accused the previous one in their overly exploited propaganda. The one when farmers were evicted from their hovels with all their belongings and families.  Beyond any legal and professional definitions, this legal figure is the sum of all manipulations.

Parenthesis

Convinced that the lawsuit would go nowhere, Teresa Rivero Dominguez’s heirs, allowed things to follow their course thinking that it was just a matter of time until the laws were applied correctly.  However, seeing that the courts appeared biased against them and Yamile, and that they had ruled against her, they decided to take action to avoid any further injustice.

In April of 2012, the heirs from the Bahia neighborhood hired a legal professional to begin a process called “The Inheritance Flow” to determine who has rights over the house left behind by the late Rivero Dominguez. It is possible that Eleazar Yosvany may have rights over the property, and be entitled to monetary compensation, but not to the property itself.  The lawyer they hired, violated their contract by transferring the case to another lawyer who presented her case on December 20th, 2012.  For the defendants, this was just another link in the chain of obstacles that prove fraud in the proceedings.  Why does it look like someone has ordered to stop the parallel processed initiated by the heirs? Naturally, if it is demonstrated that Eleazar Yosvany has no rights over the dwelling, the case no longer makes sense, and everything goes back to normal.

 The Day of the Ultimatum

After five years of trying to rob two families of their homes, and after the Supreme Court ruling against YBH, the authorities announced that they would carry out the eviction of Yamile, her daughter and the family from the Bahia neighborhood on February 5th.  The authorities showed up in front of Bargia Hurtado’s house that now shown a message painted on the wall accusing of corruption all the lawyers involved, and asked the — in this case — deaf president of Cuba.

A local apparatchik sent two workers to pain the wall to cover the graffiti that had no anti-government message at all (and even if it did, it is her right to paint it) but in support of justice for the two families. Who sent them?  Why sabotage the work and time invested in creating it, not to mention the cost of the paint that YBH’s family had bought with their own resources?

In the same fashion, the lawyers accused of corruption and present during the “forced extraction,” went upstairs to the home of the ones thought to be moving (green) papers to make a move of which Eleazar Yosvany is only the facilitating pawn. If there were any doubts about their link, that day their relationship with the upstairs neighbors (the lady of the house came out in defense of the lawyers) was made evident. The incredibly passive attitudes of the attorneys were even more suspicious since they did not react at all to the accusations of corruption from those involved. Why?

The interested parties who live upstairs are elderly, but have money and time to think about expanding their dwelling. They already did by taking over the roof, and now they want YBH’s, and in time who knows what else they will want. In their favor they have a letter that states that the old man fought in Sierra Maestra for the revolution. Although no one knows if it is real or not, it empowers them to do harm to others, scare them and trample their rights.

For a while now, YBH and her daughter who studies at university, wonder if the Cuban Lady Justice uses her scale to weigh wads of cash and if she covers her eyes to avoid looking at the problem that affects them.  The two of them sleep, but never really rest, keeping an eye open and an ear alert to try to prevent the authorities breaking into their place at night, as if it were “an organized crime action,” to evict them under cover of night, and without an audience. It is not a baseless fear since they have been told that in similar situations a committee arrives with a locksmith, break into the house even if the owner is not in, put the furniture on a truck, and commit the abuse with impunity.

The malpractice of some of the jurists involved in this case has been denounced in multiple collateral lawsuits and complaints, and there have been calls for others authorities to investigate and intervene to no avail.  The sword of eviction continues to hang over the security and the emotional and physical stability of two Cuban families, and over the prestige and respectability of the laws and civil legal proceedings in Cuba.

Translated by Ernesto Ariel Suarez

1 March 2013

Repair or Replace?

From http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/

The eighth and final page of the tabloid Granma hesitantly tells us the story. It’s about the Conrado Benitez Cancer Hospital in Santiago de Cuba, which completed its first capital repair, after the passage of the destructive Hurricane Sandy and fifty-nine years of existence. That hospital, which in addition to serving Santiago, serves the population of Guantánamo, Granma and other eastern provinces, had only “enjoyed” cosmetic and insufficient maintenance, in the “emergency room, observation room, surgery and chemotherapy.”

How did they understand the concept of Cuba as “medical superpower” born of the highest echelons of the Cuban government? Obviously, the top leaders of the country, who are native to the region, inflated one of the many balloons have gone flat since 2006, the year that the historic leader abdicated due to illness in favor of his brother. If Santiago de Cuba is located 540 miles from Havana: will the 148 beds be enough to serve tens of thousands of patients a year in that and other neighboring provinces? Why didn’t this regime build a new cancer hospital for the region?

The main photo accompanying the article shows us the facade of a very nice center that resembles Joaquin Albarran Hospital in Havana hospital and quotes, from the lips of Dr. Rafael Neyra, that “for the first time in the hospital’s history they can count on basic measures and specialized personal to care for patients with major surgery or complications.” What range of care and services did they pay for before? Did they send these cases to Havana, far from their families and usual environment? What type and generation of equipment did they have?

All of the good now, of the health center, and the excellence of the final product that the commentary speaks of, passes through the timidity of the concept of journalism and Cubans in general, about what should be the comfort and quality of services they can expect from a hospital. The so-called free public health is a falsehood that we pay for with decades of inadequate salaries and with the appropriation by the government of the output of the workers; and still they offer us bad medical care — many times in ruined buildings with material shortages of every kind — bad hygiene and inadequate medications for the recovery of the health and quality of life of many patients.

To assess if, indeed, the installation offers proper comfort and primary care, as advocated in the report, we would have to know, by way of contrast, the hospital facilities where the leaders of the country and their family and friends and foreigners are cared for; or better yet, to enjoy the same benefits — why not? — as those who plan our lives with a false paternalistic mentality.

We need new government and general administrative visions and projections and this is achieved by abandoning the old conceptions and structures that led to the financial ruin that is now Cuba. To achieve this we must go to the root of the problems without hesitation or fears, with political pluralism, with freedom of speech and of the press, and a set of laws that protect, defend and guarantee. We will achieve this with changes, not with simple structural restorations that represent on a mocking smile at an inefficient and unproductive dictatorship.

14 May 2013

The Sound of Silence

Miguel Diaz-Canel criticized the information silence imposed on us by the authorities and called it an “impossible dream” to maintain it due to the circulation of news that circulated among people who surf the internet or who have email, and the avidity of our compatriots to have alternative sources of knowledge of the news.

In the National Seminar in Preparation of the 2013-2014 School Year, held in Havana, the Cuban government’s second in command acknowledged publicly and tacitly — even without saying it — that the authorities have violated the rights of a society to free information have imposed an incidental ignorance, biased information, and an obligatory official and irresponsible journalism.

Which authorities is he referring to? Evidently, the number two Cuban is alluding to the “gray quarantine” of the mandate of Raul Castro.

We all know that in Cuba people use the internet at their workplaces — those who have it — to be able to communicate with family and friends living abroad, and consume a little information about what is happening in the world from an alternative perspective to the classical posture of the unconditional government journalists.

A great part of the population is fed up with the visions and versions aligned with the party and the high command offered by the professionals of the national press, so distant from the Cuban reality that suffers daily lines to buy meager food for the day, who have to face full buses to get to work, and who at night consume super-politicized television programming, mediocre and outmoded, that seem anchored in the decade of the seventies.

The Cuban Vice President did not speak, however, about the cable that, under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez, we have had in Cuba since February 2011, which those in power tried to hide with all kinds of misinformation and rumors, and the growing demand of the computerized Cuban society to have their free access to information through the Internet be respected.

This silent but progressive demand, which is imposing a renewed conception of the information paradigms that should be established and rule in modern society. There is no point in insisting on a lifting of the so-called secrecy of the Cuban press unless the authorities take the first step to greater transparency and information freedom, if there is censorship, if they do not allow alternative news agencies, and if they harass and condemn independent journalism.

The so-called socialist models that have been imposed in Latin America, also have their share of influence in the new directions that should guide our destiny towards greater social justice. What are called the new systems of the continental left, have pulled the rug out from under the Cuban regime with their multiparty system, with their social programs, housing and technological development, among many others to cajole their people.

When thinking about the development of their countries and giving them greater benefits, they have left their Cuban ideological benefactor and sponsor as the hemispheric “ugly duckling” with regards to freedoms and rights.

But it seems that the day “is coming” when “the silence of the innocents and the lambs” that the powerful has so greatly mocked and abused, will break the wall of cyber censorship and begin at least to walk along the highways of information and communication. New times dictate this, but we expect more, much more that they owe to Cuba, to our people and our history.

11 May 2013

Between Delirium and Distance

Cesar Portillo de la Luz (La Habana, October 31, 1922), one of the kings of Cuban music, has died. He departed this world but he left behind his songs and a guitar widowed from arpeggios and creative harmonies. He crossed the threshold of “feeling” into the light of immortality alongside other greats such as Jose Antonio Mendez, Frank Dominguez, Nico Rojas, Frank Emilio, and Aida Diestro, through Elena Burke’s voice. His art converged the melancholic equilibrium of guitars with emotions born from the genre, which marked a time of renovation in Cuban music. Our Cesar, one of the creators of “filin,” took Rebeca, his first stringed wife, and taught a generation and many musicians that one could compose and accompany the feminine instrument – evoking its forms – and he left behind to the history of Cuban music great hits such as Tu, Mi Delirio, and Contigo en la Distancia, or Realidad y Fantasia, works that earned him international fame.

His bohemian soul knew full well his (our) nocturnal Habana that he sculpted and immortalized in the notes of Noche Cubana. I know that he has not hung up his guitar, as some might think, but rather he left her waiting, hung in the walls of all the nightclubs in the capital city, through the multiple voices of interpreters from all regions and cultures and through all the phonographs that play his songs. Just in case, and in honor of our teacher, I will leave his melodies playing in my sonorous memory so that every time I come back to his raspy, fresh voice and his sober, serious image to delight myself with, I can imagine him there, in the eternal international musical scenery of the great.

9 May 2013

The Little Room is Just the Same

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The phrase is attributed to the old Bolero; I’ve only heard part of the chorus and it says that everything will be the same when one of the members of a loving couple returns to the marital nest. It’s also used in colloquial speech in Cuba to emphasize that something remains, monotonous or not, immovable.

In recent days the old melody has been running through my mind on seeing Nicolas Maduro arrive in Cuba on his first visit as president, and the agreements they he signed with the Antillean government.

He came just for that? Like on a vinyl record with its “technological scratchiness,” the tonality more or less new — and noisy — for Venezuelans, seems to me coughed up by an outdated jukebox from the 1950s. I don’t know about Venezuela, but here the longevity script of the totalitarian regime constitutes a verbal rather than an ideological splash, and everyone knows it’s the same rhetoric from forever to guarantee the continuity of the leaders and the group in power.

Imagine the fabrication of mental medals and diplomas that they are sowing in the conscience of Venezuelans to be able to continue manipulating with a populism of false recognitions. The biggest and best medal that can be given to a person or to a people is that of true respect and consideration, with a sober management and conduct, responsible and democratic that represent the genuine interests of a country and they are truly at the service of the nation.

The democratic “bad company” and the immobility of the Castro totalitarianism makes many look with suspicion on all those who come to the presidency of their respective countries and call themselves friends of the old Cuban model. They can’t not create new paradigms with decrepit mental structures and policies.

The world turns and Cuba looks like a stationary satellite almost as old as the almendrones – the old American cars — that roam our streets. And speaking of a satellite, a few days ago we heard the news of the launching of the Ecuadorian satellite Pegasus.

My ancestors from Spain exterminated the aboriginal population of our soil and we see how over the space of fifty-four years, a family also descended from Spaniards — from Galicia, the land of my grandfather — makes us travel on the back of technological development, while other governments of our continent initiate the take of with their “first compatriots” toward a more humanistic track and take flight to modernity. At least they try, the Cuban government doesn’t even try.

2 May 2013

Break the Fence and Raise the Hemoglobin

Image: http://www.animalesextincion.es/

Cuban TV fed us some “red and juicy” information on the 8 pm news Wednesday, April 24. It was about some water buffaloes that “escaped” from a state farm and were grazing on the side of the road or wherever they liked, with the related danger that these animals posed for the vehicles on the road.

The author of the article interviewed the director of the site, who defended himself against the criticism he’d received earlier for the same situation, but claimed to have fixed the fence and that the cattle broke it again to escape.

My kids, who are 30 and 26 and only eat pork — beef is so expensive that generally is eaten by government elite and international tourists — laugh about it and I can only join in the amusement. Their mischievous looks leave the caustic question in the air: “How well was the fence fixed?”

In my house, as most likely as in many others, we thought that perhaps to expose a cattle trampling is the only way they can find some directors to eat the meat, and above all, so that they can take a piece to their family.

These water buffaloes were imported from Vietnam and have caused problems for the Cuban livestock industry being wild herds away from state control. In that country they live in swampy areas, and because of their ability to move through the water they use them to plow in pairs — like oxen in our fields — in the rice fields. Who would ever think bring them to Cuba and drop them into our  non-flooded lands to form a herd and run freely?

I imagine the joy of the rural collective when because of an accident they can taste the meat that is prohibited to them even at a party at the center, even more so when they know that some higher up sends the meat to privileged elite events. As an old friend of mine used to joke, “the wind of the Special Period” used to satirize that “the wind of the special period” took Cuba: some are ’more equal than others.’ But equal to whom?

30 April 2013