This ASCE Service Has Been Established As an Additional

ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 1 ______

ASCE Newsclippings

This ASCE service has been established as an additional benefit exclusively for those members who provide us with their e-mail addresses. It is not available in the Webpage and it is forwarded to you via blind copy in order to preserve your privacy. And, of course, at any time you can request our stopping the service. Every week we select news related to Cuba’s economy that usually are not carried in mainstream media and forward them to member e-mails. This will spare you the need to pursue the information in the various media by digging it out by yourself, while at the same time, as an ASCE member, you will be well informed of relevant economic trends and events in relation to the sugar crop, tourism, corruption or whatever. We limit our selections to economic, social and political events, trends and commentaries from sources such as The Economist, El Nuevo Herald, Cubaencuentro, Cubanet and other Cuban publications. ASCE does not endorse positions taken by the individual authors; they are reproduced so that readers can be informed and reach their own conclusions. Your comments and suggestions are welcome. Please send them to the Editor at the e-mail address below. ______

Encourage your friends and colleagues interested in knowing more about what is happening in Cuba to join ASCE and enjoy the benefits of membership in our association (see www.ascecuba.org). It is very easy. You can get an application sent to you via e- mail right now by contacting the Editor, Joaquin Pujol, at [email protected]

1 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 2 ______For information about ASCE go to www.ascecuba.org

RELEASE CLIPPINGS LISTING #578

06-03-13 04 Havana Times, Cuba Announces Cuts in Arts Education 06-06-13 04 Havana Times, Pedro Campos, Cuba: Internet Access for the Nouveaux Riche and Dissidents 06-14-12 07 Havana Times, Pedro Campos, Cuba’s Salary/Productivity Dilemma 07-01-13 10 Havana Times, Cuba: Tearing Down Schools, Putting Up Hotels 07-04-13 12 Jornal do USP, Sobre a importação de médicos cubanos 07-08-13 13 Havana Times, Cuba’s Secretive Public Health Policies Criticized in Medical Journal 07-08-13 16 Havana Times, Pedro Campos, Cuba’s Burning Economic Contradictions 07-12-13 21 Havana Times, Pedro Campos, Who Should Lead Cuba’s Communist Party 07-23-13 23 Cuba Study Group, Juan Triana Cordoví, Microfinancing and Microloans for Cuba 07-26-13 26 Havana Times, Pedro Campos, The Cuban People’s Peaceful Resistance Continues. A reply to Raul Castro’s July 7th address to the Cuban Parliament 08-01-13 32 Miami Herald, Cuba’s economic reforms debated at Miami conference 08-03-13 33 Cuba Libre Digital, Jorge Hernandez Fonseca, Tráfico de armas a Norcorea: Una historia muy mal contada 08-05-13 37 UPI.com, Amnesty Int'l designates 5 Cuban inmates 'prisoners of conscience' 08-06-13 38 Generacion Y, Yoani Sanchez, Sindicalismo por cuenta propia 08-07-13 39 Havana Times, Life goes on the same for Cuba’s disabled… or worse 08-08-13 42 Miami Herald, Cuban dissident Antúnez says women, blacks, provincial residents joining movement 08-08-13 44 UOL Blogosphera, Professor cubano da USP esmiúça em artigo o modelo de ‘exportação’ de médicos de Havana 08-09-13 45 Havana Times, Cuba’s New, Disquieting Labor Law 08-09-12 48 Miami Herald, Cuban dissident: opposition may eventually spark a work stoppage 08-10-13 49 Juventud Rebelde, La caña es más que azúcar. La obsolescencia tecnológica y el incumplimiento de planes, entre otras contrariedades, golpearon duramente la imagen de esa industria. Pero la que por siglos fuera columna vertebral de la economía criolla no acepta el nocaut. No pocos fundamentan que es todavía un sector estratégico y prometedor 08-11-13 56 Miami Herald, Are self-employed Cubans really budding entrepreneurs 08-12-13 59 Havana Times, Pedro Campos, Cuba and the High Cost of Political Apathy 08-12-13 63 Revista Bohemia, INDISCIPLINA SOCIAL: ¿Un asunto de pi? 08-12-13 69 Reuters, Fidel Castro's role in Cuba is chiefly offstage as he turns 87

2 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 3 ______08-12-13 72 AP, Panama ending search of N. Korean ship from Cuba 08-12-13 72 ICCAS, Focus on Cuba No. 198, The Illusion of Cuban Reform: Castro Strikes Out 08-12-13 77 Cuaderno de Cuba, Alejandro Armengol, Malos pagos, altos precios 08-12-13 79 Diario Las Americas, La insoportable lucha cotidiana de una familia cubana 08-12-13 80 Roberto Veiga Gonzalez, Cuba today: walking new roads? 08-12-13 83 http://CUBASIKASTRONO-4.blogspot.ca, Hugo J. Byrne , El Fracaso de Washington en Cuba 08-12-13 86 Polioro, El William Soler donde llevaste a tu pequeña ya estaba ahí 08-12-13 89 The Washington Post Editorial: 08-13-13 90 Polioro, El regalo de cumpleaños del Washington Post al Clan Castro 08-13-13 91 Democracy Digest, Risk of doing business in Cuba: Raul Castro’s empty talk on civility, ‘cosmetic’ reforms 08-13-13 94 Revista Bohemia-ACN, Realiza ONDI registro de diseñadores para proteger y desarrollar la profesión. Las empresas y demás entidades con necesidades deberán contratar a quienes estén debidamente inscriptos como diseñadores en tal documento 08-13-13 95 Cubaencuentro/ Infolatan, La Ventana de Carlos Malamud, El jardinero Fidel no se quiere retirar 08-14-13 97 Diario de Cuba, TURISMO: Menos visitantes extranjeros en el primer semestre de 2013 08-14-13 98 Fox News Latino, Fidel Castro: North Korea Provided Us With Free Weapons In The 1980s

3 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 4 ______Cuba Announces Cuts in Arts Education Havana Times, June 3, 2013-08-13

A sculpture of Jose Marti at the Superior Arts Institute (ISA).

HAVANA TIMES – A new policy to “restructure” the network of professional art schools Cuba, geared to “optimizing available resources”, was presented on Friday to the Council of Ministers, in Havana, reported the official press.

Leonardo Andollo, second in command of the Permanent Commission for Implementation and Development, announced that from 2013 to 2015 the network of art education centers will be restructured “on a regional basis”, and taking into account “the economic possibilities of the country.”

“Structures and pay rolls will be restructured in order to achieve greater rationality, said the official. He added that an investment program is programmed through 2019, in the infrastructure and equipment of the art education system.

The extensive Cuban art education system has been presented for decades by the government as one of the most important achievements of the Cuban revolution. ------Cuba: Internet Access for the Nouveaux Riche and Dissidents Havana Times, June 6, 2013 | Pedro Campos

HAVANA TIMES — With a great song and dance, the Cuban government haughtily announced the broadening of Internet access on the island by opening 118 cybercafés across the country and lowering web navigation rates to 4.50 CUC (or US $ 5.20) an hour. It has also, clearly declared that there are no plans of taking Internet services to Cuban homes for the time being.

4 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 5 ______Since the matter has already been addressed by a number of analysts and journalists, I will limit myself to commenting on some elements that seem to me of considerable importance.

Photo: ain.cu

The measure does, undeniably, expand the Internet services hitherto available in Cuba and lowers navigation rates. It is also true, as a friend of mine says that you have to start somewhere. It is another small, very small step taken by Cuba’s current administration, which has gradually, and unhurriedly, been eliminating the absurd regulations and restrictions that had been imposed on the Cuban people in the name of “socialism and the struggle against imperialism.”

We have to acknowledge that Raul Castro has worked to dismantle, partially or totally, some of the absurd regulations set up when his brother was at the helm, at a time when he was second-in-command.

But the most significant prohibitions and restrictions of the rights of Cuban citizens, on freedom of expression and association, on free and democratic elections and on the possibility of entering into free associations in the production sector are still to be eliminated, as are the absurd monopolies over the economy, politics, the press and other sectors which the Cuban State maintains.

The fact is that such barbarities have been carried out in the name of “socialism” and that any tiny thing done by Raul Castro’s government might strike us as a great gesture of liberalization.

It would be quite deluded, however, to think that this measure will spell any concrete benefits for the vast majority of the population, as the average Cuban will never be able to afford 4.50 CUC (US $ 5.20) for an hour of Internet use, not when their average salary is a measly 20 dollars a month.

No, the measures implemented by the state capitalist government, which is more interested in securing revenues than in eliminating restrictions imposed on the population, will chiefly benefit those who can afford the high prices established by the government’s

5 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 6 ______monopolistic apparatus, such as the nouveaux riche spawned by State corruption and the exploitation of salaried workers in the city and countryside, and those who receive remittances from relatives or friends abroad.

Photo: cubadebate.cu

As most of the other timid government measures implemented, this one will benefit only a small percentage and, in political terms, the people who will ultimately be better off will be precisely those who have always been able to access the Internet from hotels.

What we see here is a very concrete illustration of what many already acknowledge: that the extremes become confused and help one another. For, who stand to benefit the most from this expansion of Internet services on the island?

In addition to the nouveaux riche, no one other than the dissidents who receive aid from abroad to advance their political programs, in Cuba and elsewhere.

We may thus categorically affirm that the state capitalist government of Cuba has broadened access to the Internet for the nouveaux riche and, yes, for the dissidents. It seems that the dissidents did manage to get something out of their recent tours after all.

A contradiction? No. Since filling the State’s coffers with money is what matters, building mansions, yacht wharfs or golf fields for North American millionaires, or facilitating access to the Internet by the dissidents it combats so furiously, is all the same to the government.

Of course, what is most disquieting is not the fact dissidents will have less restricted access to the Internet – one would want everyone to have this privilege – but, rather, the corrupt and corrupting nature of the state centered model, of its duplicity, that this measure evinces.

It transformed the U.S. blockade and imperialist aggression into a justification for the economic disaster it brought about and for its total control over the country’s political life. It turned emigration into a source of revenues (remittances, trips, tourism, high processing fees for immigration applications). Now, it seems that the Cuban State also

6 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 7 ______wants the millions that the NED destines to financing internal dissidents to end up in the government’s coffers.

This is, for the time being, what State pragmatism has led to.

Renowned Cuban journalist Reynaldo Taladrid suggests that, in order to find the paths tread by Miami’s reactionary ultra-Right, one need only follow “the money trail.” If we were to follow this trail today, we might soon run into a rather unpleasant surprise…

Neither the workers, nor the common Cuban, nor the socialist and democratic Left, will see any benefits from this “liberalization.” We demand and will continue to demand unrestricted Internet access in Cuba, at rates everyone can afford. —– Pedro Campos: [email protected] ------Cuba’s Salary/Productivity Dilemma Havana Times, June 14, 2013 | By Pedro Campos

Photo: Caridad

HAVANA TIMES — An article published by Cuba’s Granma newspaper on June 11, maintains that several State companies in the province of Las Tunas are paying wages that are well above what the actual, productive performance of its employees would dictate. The article states that the cause of this is to be found in administrative mismanagement.

While the State-Party-Proprietor, the government, the press and central bureaucratic apparatus continue to blame company managers for low production indices, the economic disaster caught sight of in State companies – for which they have only themselves to blame – will also continue.

They don’t understand, don’t want to understand or aren’t interested in understanding that, at root, the problem is to be found in the social relations of production that currently

7 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 8 ______exist between Capital and labor, between the owners of Capital and the owners of labor power, between the owners of the means of production and workers.

In Cuba, this would be the relations that exist between the State, which controls the nation’s capital and its means of production, and the workers it continues to exploit through wage labor.

In the State model economy, companies belong to the State. The State, which controls the means of production, the country’s capital, continues to pay its workers their wages – wages, to be sure, which are ever more an insult to the workers’ dignity.

This concept of “social” property, property owned by the people, stems from Stalinist theories about socialism which have failed everywhere they have been implemented. However, they continue to prevail in Cuba.

The perpetuation of the wage relation between Capital and labor, embodied by State property, is the reason we democratic socialists refer to this system, which calls itself socialist, State monopoly capitalism.

In private enterprise capitalism, the different owners of the means of production directly monitor the productivity of their wage slaves through overseers or through various technical means. They are very interested in maintaining high levels of productivity, as their capital depends on it, and pay their wage laborers for the use of their labor power.

It is in the interests of the owners of private enterprise that their wage laborers be able to reproduce their labor power. Hence the existence of differentiated salaries that guarantee their reproduction, calculated on the basis of the general average wage required for the reproduction of a manual laborer, a technician or a professional in a given society.

Photo: Caridad

To maintain wages as low as possible, capitalists rely on an army of unemployed persons that brings constant pressure to bear on employed workers, as per the law of offer and demand.

8 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 9 ______In a system where the boss is the State, a kind of imaginary entity made up by a huge number of bureaucrats, managers do not own anything and their positions and salaries do not depend of what is produced by the companies they direct, but on the decisions of the bureaucrats at the top, who appoint them and only demand personal and “political” loyalty to the Party and government – and, in many cases, to the bureaucrats themselves.

Under private enterprise capitalism, workers have compelling reasons to be “productive.” Their wages depend on the quantity and quality of what they produce. They are not the owners of the means of production, but depend on the capitalists to survive.

The Cuban State that became the owner of the means of production, which also relies on the exploitation of wage labor, which did not alter the social relations between Capital (now owned but it) and labor, simply maintained the wage form as a means of payment.

But now, it doesn’t pay salaries in accordance with its use of labor power but on the basis of bureaucratically-determined standards, keeping, not only the surplus value produced by labor, but also everything it deems necessary to maintain its enormous economic, political and military bureaucracy afloat and to cover its social expenses, all of which are the basis of its power.

In addition, managerial bureaucrats aren’t much interested in the productivity of their wage laborers, but, rather, in the perks they secure in exchange for their loyalty to the high bureaucrats who appoint them. Therefore, neither managers nor workers have any compelling reasons to produce efficiently, no matter what bureaucratic slogans proclaim.

This situation cannot and has never been improved by demanding more of workers, increased supervision, replacing inefficient bureaucrats, or appealing to the consciences of managers and workers. All such measures have failed in Cuba for over fifty years, just as they failed in “Real Socialism” in Europe and Asia.

There are only two alternatives: either you: a) Advance towards private enterprise capitalism, that is, relinquish companies to private domestic or foreign Capital, as China has done and, apparently, Cuba’s current administration intends to do, or… b) You intensify the revolutionary process towards socialism, as democratic socialists demand, allowing companies to be co-managed or self-managed or to become cooperatives, where the workers, as owners or usufructuaries, manage the companies themselves, elect their representatives and make decisions on management issues and where and how to look for investments and distribute part of the profits equitably.

I will discuss these two options in greater depth in my next article.

Today, it is evident that the Cuban government’s economic policies tend to favor the first alternative, in the midst of a struggle where “State socialists” continue to cling to the

9 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 10 ______traditional way of doing things, as we see in the abovementioned article published by Granma. The “pragmatic capitalist” innovators of the “restructuring” process are gaining more and more ground and the socialist option is being increasingly marginalized by those in power.

Foto: Caridad

As proponents of a participative and democratic form of socialism, we will continue in our political struggle and will not cease to condemn the course towards private enterprise capitalism set by Cuba’s current government, and in our battle to place real economic and political power in the hands of workers.

We know that defending socialism, in a country where the term has been so thoroughly besmirched, is something of an epic undertaking. But we are also aware that an immense majority has no interest in continuing to be exploited, by neither the State nor by new or old wealthy elites.

We also know that, in order to reach our goals, we require freedom of speech and association, unrestricted Internet access, a parliament and government elected through truly democratic processes, a legally constituted State and, as such, the democratization of political power.

We are absolutely certain of this: without democracy, no form of socialism is possible. —– Pedro Campos: pedrocampos [email protected] ------Cuba: Tearing Down Schools, Putting Up Hotels Havana Times, July 1, 2013 | Rogelio Manuel Díaz Moreno

10 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 11 ______

The Manzana de Gomez building in Old Havana. Photo: www.ohch.cu

HAVANA TIMES — The first time I ever set foot in the Manzana de Gomez walkway in Havana’s old town, it wasn’t to buy anything at one of its ground-floor shops. I couldn’t have done that even if I’d wanted to at the time, the height of Cuba’s interminable “Special Period” (economic crisis of the 90s). If memory serves me right, even holding hard currency was still illegal in the country.

The first time I ever set foot in the Manzana de Gomez, it was to take part in a school competition (probably having to do with Physics), of the kind organized by the educational system around the country.

For many years, the building housed a number of schools, theatres, editorial offices and other cultural establishments, such as the Latin American Culture Institute, chaired by renowned intellectual Fernando Ortiz.

The building was constructed over a broad span of time, between 1890 and 1918, and was primarily financed by the wealthy Gomez-Mena family. Since its completion, it has been one of Havana’s emblematic public sites. The passage of time and lack of maintenance have resulted in serious structural damage.

Thanks to a dispatch published by Prensa Latina, I have just found out that the building is going to be turned into a 500-bedroom hotel. I suspect they’re going to conserve the building’s façade, out of respect for the city’s architectural heritage, history and all that, which historian and entrepreneur Eusebio Leal Spengler knows how to manage so well. It’s rather painful to think that, to do this, they will have to relocate the schools there.

To tell the truth, the building has been in such a deplorable state for so long that the schools may have been closed, and the students relocated to other institutions in the area some time ago. Ultimately, this was also the fate of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Havana, and of thousands of other buildings – schools, residences, medical centers and factories that deteriorated to the point of becoming uninhabitable, deadly traps where no few souls perished.

11 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 12 ______The resources needed to repair them never did turn up, while no shortage of these was squandered in other places of dubious social usefulness.

Now, if it’s a hotel we’re talking about, then there’s plenty of money to spend. Every good capitalist knows that, in order to make money, you need to invest money. Perhaps the University of Havana steps will one day lead to the entrance of another pretty hotel, which will prove more profitable than a place where Maxwell’s equations are taught. Perhaps the Pedro Borras Hospital will someday be made into a golf resort, who knows.

I doubt anyone consulted with the community, with the parents, teachers or workers of the Manzana de Gomez, before deciding the building’s new destiny. In any event, if someone has any information in this connection, do share it. Though no one will be left without an education, the boys and girls of these schools, who are to continue their Math, Spanish and History studies elsewhere, will walk away with a slightly bitter lesson: that a place of learning is ultimately expendable. ------Sobre a importação de médicos cubanos Jornal do USP, Publicado por admin - Thursday, 4 July 2013

JUAN LÓPEZ LINARES A proposta da importação de médicos cubanos parece não ser de contratos individuais com eles e sim um “pacote” em que um dos contratantes seria o governo cubano. Isso significa, na prática, que mais de 50% do salário pago pelas autoridades brasileiras aos galenos iria não para o bolso deles, e sim para alimentar a ditadura cubana. Essa situação já acontece em menor escala no Brasil e em maior escala em outros países como a Venezuela. Nesse tipo de contrato do governo cubano, os médicos não têm as liberdades usuais dos profissionais do Brasil. Eles não são autorizados a viajar, participar de congressos ou fazer manifestações políticas contra o sistema de saúde do Brasil e muito menos de Cuba. Qualquer desvio no cumprimento desse “pacto de bom comportamento” implica o retorno imediato do médico a Cuba e outras represálias posteriores. A experiência mostra que uma parte não desprezível dos médicos termina “fugindo” dessa situação mediante o casamento com um cidadão local ou a emigração para um terceiro país. Para a grande maioria dos médicos cubanos, viajar para trabalhar em outro país (mesmo nos países mais pobres da África) é um sacrifício desejável. O salário mensal de um profissional da saúde em Cuba não supera os R$ 100,00. Mais de seis vezes abaixo do salário-mínimo brasileiro. Mesmo no caso em que o governo brasileiro pagasse um décimo do que paga a um análogo local, ainda assim haveria uma infinidade de galenos cubanos interessados.

Quanto à qualidade, existem em Cuba, como em quase todos os países, médicos excelentes e médicos ruins. Talvez o diferencial seja quanto ao número. Quando eu fiz as provas do vestibular para entrar na universidade em Havana, a carreira menos concorrida era a de medicina. Os candidatos que queriam garantir não ficar fora da universidade colocavam medicina como última opção (ao contrário do que acontece no Brasil e em boa parte do mundo). Isso foi resultado de uma política populista da ditadura, a formação de médicos em grandes quantidades. Todo professor sabe que não é a mesma coisa ministrar uma aula para 20 estudantes e para 50. Considerando os custos da educação médica e o nível de vida paupérrimo em Cuba, não é de estranhar que a qualidade, em média, tenha sido comprometida pela quantidade dos mesmos. Entendo que os Conselhos de Medicina brasileiros possam se sentir ameaçados diante do possível aumento da concorrência. Dou razão a eles quando exigem que os médicos cubanos não sejam tratados como exceção e passem pelas mesmas provas por que passa todo profissional formado no estrangeiro. Segundo as estatísticas do Revalida, exame atual, somente 20% dos médicos formados em Cuba (incluídos os brasileiros) passam nas provas.

Devo dizer também que a “escola latino-americana” de medicina em Cuba somente aceita, sem pagar os custos do curso, candidatos indicados pelos partidos políticos favoráveis ao regime dos Castros. Sou a favor, sim, da vinda de médicos cubanos ou de qualquer outra parte do mundo para cuidar da saúde dos brasileiros, mas não na forma de “pacote” firmado entre governos com interesses espúrios e que restringem explícita ou implicitamente as liberdades individuais. Juan López Linares, cubano naturalizado brasileiro, é professor da Faculdade de Zootecnia e Engenharia de Alimentos (FZEA) da USP ------Cuba’s Secretive Public Health Policies Criticized in Medical Journal Havana Times, July 8, 2013 | Rogelio M. Díaz Moreno

HAVANA TIMES — An article titled “Secret Epidemics: Cuba’s Public Health Ethics” (“El silencio epidemiológico y la ética de la Salud Pública cubana”) appears in the most recent issue of Cuba’s quarterly Public Health Journal (Revista Cubana de Salud Publica). Written by National School of Medicine physician Luis Suarez Rosas, the work criticizes the Cuban government’s information policies in the area of public health.

As almost everyone knows, official Cuban newspapers showed themselves immensely reluctant to publicly acknowledge the different epidemics that broke out around the country in recent years. Whenever there is an outbreak of dengue, for instance, major and local papers seem to turn their backs on the problem or show more interest in the misfortunes of distant nations. The massive campaigns launched by the country’s public health system are evident for most citizens, save government journalists.

Unsatisfied with this state of affairs (as many of us are), Dr. Suarez Rosas elucidates the disadvantages inherent to such secretive practices. In his article, he points out that there is no shortage of scientific knowledge about and experience in the management of epidemics, in Cuba and abroad. This, which should help reduce the number of such outbreaks and their impact on the population, is only undermined by concealing information from the public, a practice which encourages the spread of every imaginable rumor.

Cloaking the reality of an epidemic with a veil of silence, Suarez argues, in no way contributes to reducing the incidence of the disease, for an uninformed population can never attain a realistic perception of the risk of contagion or the gravity of an illness. It isn’t hard to see how such questionable practices hinder the social mobilization needed to combat such means of disease transfer as the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is a carrier of dengue. Suarez asks:

“Does the fact that doubt exists as to whether a dengue epidemic is currently being concealed from the public in Cuba in keeping with the ethical standards reached by Cuba’s public health system?”

14 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 15 ______According to the author, the common strain of dengue was first introduced into Cuba in 1977. Despite concerted efforts to eradicate the carrier of this disease, a considerable part of the island’s population was infected. As of the tragic epidemic of 1981, this insidious virus would become one of Cuba’s most persistent epidemiological problems.

In the 80s, Cuba’s national public health system was given considerable financial impetus and sought to become an internationally renowned healthcare model. Deprived of East European subsidies starting the 90s, the system invariably deteriorated, despite different government plans and initiatives of varying success.

Fumigation campaign worker. Photo: Caridad

New dengue epidemics have since broken out across Cuba’s public health panorama, most intensely between 2000 and 2002 and in 2006. Suarez was unable to find official mention of the dengue cases reported in 2012, though less secrecy surrounds the cholera outbreak experienced this year. In this connection, the author explains that “in the Pan- American Health Organization report on dengue cases in Latin America, submitted on epidemiological week 36 (last updated on September 25, 2012), we find no reports from Cuba. In the row for the country, what you read is: ‘Without reports’.”

As for me, I don’t need an official report to know there’s dengue in Cuba. My two parents caught the infection and had to be admitted, simultaneously. I can therefore echo the author’s opinions when he writes that:

“Whether cases of a particular disease have been detected, or not, is the kind of public health information and issue that demands a very thorough ethical consideration, and which requires a responsibly transparent means of informing individuals and population groups that does not distort, conceal or hijack any information. In many cases, such practices are a matter of life and death.”

In the author’s opinion, secretive practices, and the questionable ethics behind them, are totally at odds with a legacy of Cuban health professionals which spans hundreds of years. Cuba’s health system, he adds, constitutes one of the country’s treasures and an immensely valuable resource for the island and other countries around the world.

15 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 16 ______In view of this, he argues that re-establishing health practices that are more in keeping with the humanistic principles and the respect for truth shown by earlier generations of Cuban health workers must become a priority in the process of addressing the sector’s problems.

Most articles published by Cuba’s Public Health Journal are characterized by unconditional praise of the government. It is also evident the journal has a limited readership, confined to small, professional circles. It is therefore encouraging to see that individuals calling for greater respect towards citizens begin to be published in the journal, and that more and more voices are demanding the right to access accurate information about vital issues, through the newspapers that supposedly belong to the people. ------Cuba’s Burning Economic Contradictions Havana Times, July 8, 2013 | by Pedro Campos

Havana’s Galiano Street

HAVANA TIMES – The now chronic disaster in the Cuban economy has led the leadership to try out a series of measures known as “la actualización” (updating), aimed at reducing State subsidies, raising taxes, lowering real wages, eliminating excess personnel on the State payroll and creating a more efficient bureaucratic structure, while at the same time strengthening the role of national and foreign capitalism. All of this without making any substantive changes in the political system.

It’s an eclectic mix that proposes the continuation of economic domination by the State, flirts with national and foreign capital and merely flashes a smile at the cooperative system without offering any real openings for developing independent worker-controlled forms of production.

“Free the productive forces!” cry the spokespeople for the new measures. But – who is responsible for keeping these forces boxed up and tied down? None other than the very

16 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 17 ______same little group identified as the historic national leadership that decides everything. Grab the thief!

According to declarations of the national economic “managers” themselves, at this stage of the game, the “updating” decrees are not yielding the expected results.

In truth, the issue is clear: once we accept that the so-called “State socialism” model has failed, the only thing left for the Cuban economy is to advance decidedly towards privatization, as in China and Russia; or towards the socialization of property and full appropriation of the economy by the people – true socialism as demanded by the democratic socialists.

But the evolution in either direction is being blocked by the central bureaucratic apparatus, determined to maintain absolute control over the country’s economic and political system. As a result, the “updating” is neither consistent with the needs of private capitalism, nor with a true socialist economy in which freely associated forms of production predominate.

A move towards capitalism? Historic obstacles block the path

A number of countries in Europe and Asia formerly considered socialist ended by reestablishing private capitalism, with States and governments that range from democratic to authoritarian. The classic cases of Russia and China speak for themselves.

There, national and international private capital were allowed to take over the economies little by little until they predominated, although some branches of the economy remained in the hands of the state, with the goal of guaranteeing the optimal functioning of those private capitals.

But here in Cuba, the chosen “pragmatic” road of warming up to capitalism – the true meaning of the “updating” measures – comes up against not only the old neo-Stalinist bureaucracy, which wants to continue being called “socialist”, but also against another difficulty no less important: the source of that private capital couldn’t conceivably be anything other than the big neighbor to the North and the Cuban community that has settled there.

And that’s where the great contradiction of the new Platt* era arises: it’s clear that the current Cuban leaders are betting on the North’s help to pull out of the current hole, thinking that they’ll be able to count on the income from more than a million US visitors to the Cuban tourist areas each year and from the eventual large volume of trade around the Mariel Port mega-project. But it’s impossible for these plans to succeed unless the US blockade is lifted.

In China and Vietnam, foreign investment, particularly from the US and from residents living overseas, was successfully recruited without a previous process of political democratization. It seems to me that this was because there was not the level of

17 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 18 ______animosity that persists between Cuba and the US, and the Chinese and Vietnamese communities living in the United States never attained the political influence of the Cuban community.

Havana apartments.

Further, the traditional economic, social and cultural ties between the United States and those countries never had the historic significance of the relations between Cuba and the US, marked by special ties for centuries.

Some analysts of relations between the US and Cuba believe that the Mariel project could offer such important economic benefits to the US that it could in itself represent an important impetus towards lifting the embargo-blockade.

Nonetheless, though it may present many economic benefits, it seems improbable that any US administration would decide to do so before substantial democratic changes had taken place in Cuba, due to the high political costs that a move to lift the blockade would imply internally and the oft-maintained US rejection of the current Cuban political leadership.

So, the Chinese road towards the dominance of private national and foreign capital doesn’t appear viable in Cuba unless the imperialist blockade were lifted; and this doesn’t seem like it could become a reality until a process of democratization were to take place in the current political system in Cuba, and the principal historic leaders were to really leave power.

In synthesis, these two capitalist forces – imperialism and the traditional Cuban wealthy class – openly confront the ruling bureaucratic bourgeoisie who nonetheless is relying on them to make their modernization effective. However, the contradictions between the two seem irreconcilable.

Since the Cuban government wants to continue being called “socialist” and their party to continue being called “communist” so that the international left will continue to offer them every type of consideration, they can’t openly adopt any measures that would allow

18 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 19 ______them to lure private capitalism, such as a full opening to foreign investment and to the Cuban community outside the country, or a complete liberation of the marketplace from the state monopoly policies. That is one of the most flagrant contradictions of the updating plan.

Towards democratic socialism? A smile…and nothing more

As far as the true socialist path that the socialist and democratic left demand, it has by now been clearly demonstrated that the historic leadership, lord and master of the Cuban state, has no interest in taking that road.

The agricultural cooperatives that have proven their effectiveness continue functioning with many regulations and state limitations; the presence of cooperatives in other areas is left to the mercy of trial runs “with no hurry” carried out under state control.

There is no ample cooperative law that would make it possible for workers to form a free and voluntary productive union, much less are there state stimuli available for this. Regarding worker self-management within the state enterprises…silence. In brief, concrete measures to strengthen the socialist area of the economy are completely lacking.

Can imperialism be blamed for the fact that the government has been historically incapable of eliminating the absurd state controls, passing a broad cooperative law, supporting free associations for workers, allowing self-employment to function openly and without deviations, designing a tax structure that stimulates production instead of holding it back, facilitating the entry of resources that could help stimulate the popular economy? In short, there has been no effort to democratize the economy and move away from the bureaucratic state salary system.

Off to school.

Of course it’s not prepared to advance towards a true socialization of the economy because that would imply giving real power to the workers to the detriment of the bureaucracy.

19 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 20 ______It is difficult and painful to say this, but that same leadership which at one time was the hope of the Cuban people has today become the worst obstacle in the way of a socialist advance in Cuba.

A new kind of class confrontation

The new social composition of classes that the “updating” process is creating presents at one extreme the “unanticipated” bureaucratic political and military class that believes itself to be the legitimate owner of the country’s entire economy. At the other extreme is the dispossessed and badly paid class of salaried workers that the state exploits.

The new small and medium capitalists who exploit their own salaried workers represent a kind of nouveau riche class, benefitted by the updating measures but still held down by the State’s strictures. The salaried workers exploited by these newly wealthy live better than the State salaried workers and as such prefer private capitalism.

Then there are the true self-employed workers who don’t exploit outside labor – from the intellectuals and artists with large incomes right down to the elderly peanut sellers – all of them burdened by abusive state taxes. The state throws the new capitalists and their salaried workers into the same sack as the authentic self-employed, all under the label of “cuentapropistas” [self-employed].

And finally there are the cooperative members, formally organized or not, who work together and divide the profits; they are also smothered by state regulations.

Apart from all these, there is a class that’s not present in Cuba but which continues to push its agenda: the true wealthy capitalist class with large businesses, settled fundamentally in Miami. This class, exiled from power, has always aspired to return and today continues to plot its comeback on the heels of large international capital.

The bureaucratic bourgeoisie now finds itself confronting all of these other classes and national groupings because it lives off of them exploiting all of them directly through salaried work or via abusive taxes and monopoly control of the economy, trade, finances and the dual monetary system. They are the class that is impeding the development of all the others, be it the wealthy classes or the germinating socialist class.

Only themselves to blame

There’s no doubt about it: the productive forces in Cuba, be it for the development of private capitalism or to socialize the economy, are facing a common obstacle: the centralized state system and its bureaucracy determined to maintain itself in power indefinitely.

I don’t intend to sharpen contradictions that require peaceful and democratic solutions, but objectively the tendency of the class composition of Cuban society and an analysis of its interests presents the bureaucratic bourgeoisie created by State socialism as a kind of

20 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 21 ______class that stands in opposition to social and economic advance in Cuba in any direction other than its own strengthening as a hegemonic group. In this way, they have positioned themselves against the entire Cuban people, against all of their classes and current social groupings.

According to Carlos Marx, when the productive forces are held back by the relations of production – in this case the salaried State workers – revolutions appear. Later, let them not blame the imperialists, the “counterrevolutionary” forces, the Miami “mafia”, the new technologies, nor much less the peaceful democratic and socialist left who have done everything possible to help find the road that they have blocked. Instead they should seek the causes from within, in their own self-interest, limitations and befuddlement. —– Pedro Campos: [email protected] * The Platt Amendment was a 1901 treaty between the US and Cuba to “protect” Cuba from foreign intervention. It permitted extensive US involvement in Cuban international and domestic affairs. ------Who Should Lead Cuba’s Communist Party Havana Times, July 12, 2013 | Pedro Campos

The two top leaders of the Cuban Communist Party, Raul Castro (r) and Jose Ramón Machado Ventura

HAVANA TIMES — During a recent meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee President Raul Castro stated that “Party leaders must be capable of recognizing the country’s problems and looking towards the future”, an article published in Granma, Cuba’s major official newspaper, reported on July 3. I will limit myself to commenting on this particular remark.

21 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 22 ______It should be the other way around, Mr. President: those who are capable of identifying today’s problems, those who look for and find solutions to these problems and are able to look towards the future, should be the ones selected to head the Party. But no: you continue to appoint those who are loyal to you, even if they’re incapable of seeing, solving or identifying anything.

The way Party leaders are appointed – on the basis of intelligence gathered or produced by various State Security organs –, a mechanism imposed on the Party by the “founding leadership” of the Cuban revolution, in violation of bottom-up democratic election principles, is what robs Cuba of leaders able to identify and solve problems.

The solution is simple: do not appoint any more leaders, do not make any more proposals for new Central Committee members, provincial or municipal officials and do not even let these different Party institutions impose the “instructors” at the grassroots level of the Party. Let the members make these proposals and elect who they see fit.

The problem faced by the Communist Party is the same problem Cuba’s entire economy and society faces: excessive centralization, top-down decision-making processes, and a general lack of democracy. Democratic centralism has two main components, but you have neglected the second one, as you have neglected all of the proposals advanced by the socialist and democratic left you have worked to silence.

As I have expounded on elsewhere, until you acknowledge the failure of the political, economic and social conceptions that could be grouped under the “Marxist-Leninist” school of thought, or, rather, the dogmatic, Soviet-Stalinist version of Marx’s and Lenin’s main ideas, a true rectification of the mistakes made thus far, and a true renewal of socialism, will not be possible.

In the meantime, we will have more of the same, disguised with new words and impelled by old and exhausted schemes, structures, methods, slogans and the word “socialism”, ever more divested of meaning and besmirched by failure, in short: more malaise, isolation and contempt.

Those of us who try and rescue the concept of socialism will continue to climb up a slippery slope, full of promontories and, of course, plagued with dangers.

The veiled persecution of democratic socialists continues in Cuba. After the Party, Armed Forces and Ministry of the Interior were “purged” of “perestroikists and left-wingers”, in a clean-up operation which began with the trials of General Ochoa and Minister of the Interior Abrantes, our comrades continue to be “visited” and denigrating articles and comments about us continue to appear in online publications and blogs.

In recent days, I attempted to leave several comments on Cubadebate, an online publication of the PCC. Though these were written in a respectful tone and showed the utmost moderation, they were all immediately rejected.

22 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 23 ______So be it. This is the time it was our lot to live in and it is better to live with dignity, to take up the struggle, than to live on our knees before the Empire and the new masters.

We continue to struggle for true socialism, for life. Pedro Campos: [email protected] ------Microfinancing and Microloans for Cuba JUAN TRIANA CORDOVÍ JULY 23, 2013 , Cuba Study Group, From the Island Issue No. 18

A “credit culture” has barely been developed in Cuba over the past fifty years, and has primarily been focused on state enterprises and, to a much lesser extent, private farmers and agricultural cooperatives. As of in 2007, 70% of financing had been concentrated in state enterprises, while private farmers received only about 1.5% of the total financing. Micro finance and microloan institutions have been widely used throughout the world but not in Cuba, which has recently begun to embrace them. In Cuba, this type of financing is generally identified with financial products and services primarily geared toward micro and small businesses, their owners and employees.1

DIFFERENCES WITH LATIN AMERICA Athought different from the characteristics of a typical microlending institution in Latin America, from conceptualization to mode of operation, in Cuba such an institution is created by the state, which follows and is framed in a process of “relative acceptance” of market forces, under a state-owned banking system and where possible defaults by loans recipients would be assumed by the state.

Table 1. Characteristics of microloans. Comparison Cuba-Latin America Source: Own. Based on data from the Microfinance Information Exchange Market and Banco Metropolitano de Cuba.

Rate of Interests Guarantees Amount of the Loan

Latin America Up to 195%2 More than 50% of the Open amount Cuba 4.25% and 9% More than 80% of the 3000 CUP— amount for loans Undetermined higher than 5 000 CUP 1 These are generally: microloans, micro-savings, micro-health and life insurance, money transfers and solidarity group lending requirements, pre-loan savings, micro-leasing, new and modern instruments and payment systems. Microloans in very small amounts (less than 100 USD) without legal commitments to be returned to individuals mostly women micro-entrepreneurs.

2 Rate used by Banco Compartamos, in México.

The most evident differences are those of different interest rates and guarantees. In fact, the differences in interest rates which seem to favor Cuba, might suggest a rapid expansion of the loan portfolio. There are also institutional differences (in Cuba only the banking sector is involved, but in Latin America, the state and non-government and non- regulated institutions participate).

23 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 24 ______Due to the absence of specialized microfinance institutions on the island, such activities are carried out solely by the Banco Central de Cuba (BCC) through two of its subordinate units, Banco Metropolitano (BANMET) for clients from the capital city of Havana, and Banco de Desarrollo (BANDES) for customers from the rest of the country.

THE “SUBJECTS” OF MICROLOANS IN CUBA The expansion and evolution of self-employment, which has already reached over 400,000 participants, suggests that this is a relatively consolidated process. Although limited by several reasons, from conceptual issues related to their possible impact on the actual macroeconomic performance of the country as a whole (which is starting to clear in terms of its ability to provide employment opportunities), to the real obstacles associated with logistical weaknesses and restrictions that hinder its own greater dynamism.

Chart 1. Evolution of Self-employment Source: ONEI, AEC 2011.

It is also true that we are facing an institutional learning process and there have been regulatory changes and “incremental upgrades” of the legal framework (for example, transactions between state companies and the self-employed) that consolidate the guarantees for the future of the sector and stimulate individual growth of these new businesses. There has also been some degree of “sophistication” of the services generated by the private sector, and the growth of business in this sector, along with emerging service and product chains—also private—mainly in the nation’s capital, but not just limited to it. We should also add the recently born real estate market, which last year recorded more than 45,000 home sales with prices ranging from 5,000 to half a million CUC, and the used car market, with a high demand for cars to be used as “taxis,” and the high rate of return of such “small businesses.” Finally, the recently announced decision to create a non-agricultural cooperative sector should also contribute to new business, even if that creation process is still limited in number. The creation of 220 non-agricultural cooperatives was announced with the first 126 already created, 110 of which are agricultural markets that have become cooperatives, five are transport cooperatives, and the rest are cooperatives for construction and remodeling. This combination of new realities is a factor that should increase “demand” for products and microfinancing services, of which microloans have been the first to appear in the national economy, hand in hand with the new transformations being made.

THE FACTS It is unquestionable that the microfinancing initiative in the Cuban economy is a step in the development of financial institutions in the country, and above all a very positive step to promote the private sector, given its growing needs. The results of these first steps, however, are far removed from the expectations. Less than a hundred loans for small businesses, for working capital or investment in equipment, have been awarded across the country. While it is true that the credit culture is weak, and that there are difficulties in obtaining guarantees and for these to be accepted by the banks, the fact remains that there is a surprising low demand for credit in Cuba, even more if we consider that the average

24 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 25 ______income of the Cuban population (in pesos) is significantly low. The country’s capital offers the best example.

Chart 2. Microloans in the Province of Havana.

Behavior of Financing in the April 2012 January 2013 province of Havana. Total applications received 1235 1812 by banking institutions Including: from independent 7 13 workers Approved by Loan 933 1015 Committees Including: from independent 2 3 workers Loans under execution by 2 3 independent workers

What are the reasons for this low preference for financing, under significantly favorable conditions such as those offered currently by the banking system to independent workers? Research carried out in the city of Habana, home to 25% (about 110,000 microentrepreneurs) of all self-employed individuals across the country, reveals several shortcomings. Institutional: underdevelopment of microfinancing services and inadequacy of the institutional structure, which are reasons undeniably linked to the “youth” of the sector. Associated to the underdevelopment of the credit culture: polls show that more than 85% of members of the self-employed sector are not aware of the existence of microloans, while the rest of the industry that could have information related to financing, completely ignores the requirements and conditions to be met to request credit. The lack of an economic culture within the population results in over 90% of the independent workers in Havana having no intention of submitting their financial statements to the banking authorities, although this could also be due to the fact that some of the products needed to carry out activities are provided by the informal market. Monetary distortion problems: the loans offered by the banks are only granted in CUP and up to 5,000 CUP without collateral, while most of the supplies needed to carry out most activities related to food and many others must be purchased legally in CUC. Therefore, given that the current exchange rate is 24 CUP to 1 CUC, businesses with costs higher than 200 CUC would need to present collateral backed loans, increasing the cost of loans for the self-employed. It should be noted that 95% of the sector has to apply for credit guarantees. A macroeconomic analysis would find other reasons, and not just for the country’s capital.

GROWING PROCESS OF CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH:

25 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 26 ______The average salary in 2011 amounted to 455 Cuban pesos (CUP). However, even if it seems contradictory, there has been a substantial increase in deposits to savings accounts.

Chart 3. Evolution of salary and savings. Source: ONEI, AEC 2011.

Chart 3. Evolution of salary and savings.

Source: ONEI, AEC 2011. While the average salary grew by only 17% in the last five years, savings accounts have increased by 55%, which indicates a growing process of wealth concentration in the country. To this we must add “foreign” funding. The Havana Consulting Group estimates total remittances received in Cuba during 2012 at $2.605 billion in cash, an increase of 13.5% over 2012. Add revenues from shipments of packages and food, medicines, appliances and other inputs from abroad (remittances in kind), and the total is estimated at $5.105 million. Beyond the accuracy of the figures, it is a fact that some of the financing of new businesses (in cash or in kind) comes from outside sources (migrant or not), at a lower cost than those offered by the Cuban banking system or very lower collateral requirements, since they are part of a “family survival strategy.” Relatively low capital requirements “investments:” basically associated with the “quality” of the authorized business, which except for certain cases will not require a considerable investment. This combination of factors would explain why more than 16 months after Cuba launched its microloan program, “demand” has been significantly low. A larger aperture to this sector, an increase in “jobs” and the emergence of a true sector of small and medium enterprises that occupies a significant place in production chains, in combination with state enterprises, could substantially change the demand for loans.

JUAN TRIANA

Juan Publio Triana Cordoví (1954), Professor of the Centro de Estudios de la Economía Cubana, Master in Cuban and Latin American Studies and PhD in Economics. Obtained undergraduate degree in Economics in 1977. Has taught at the School of Economics of the University of Habana since 1977. From 1995 to 2004 he was Director of the Center for Studies on the Cuban Economy . Dr. Triana has written more than twenty books as author and co-author on issues related to the Cuban Economy and Economic thought. He has published more than 40 articles in books and magazines edited in Cuba and abroad and he has participated in numerous national and international events related to the Economic Development of the Cuban Economy. He has been travelling professor and US, Canada, British universities, as well as in other countries in Europe. He has received the following recognitions for his scientific work: National prize in Social Sciences in 1996 from the Ministerio de Ciencias, Tecnología y Medio Ambiente de Cuba, as co-author. National prize in Economics “Raúl León Torras” 2002, Asociación Nacional de Economistas de Cuba. ------The Cuban People’s Peaceful Resistance Continues A reply to Raul Castro’s July 7th address to the Cuban Parliament By Pedro Campos Havana Times, July 26, 2013 |

Foto: Juan Suarez

HAVANA TIMES — It is true, Mr. President, that all of the problems you described in your last speech continue to affect Cuban society and that these problems are on the rise. We, the proponents of participative and democratic socialism, have been emphasizing this in our writings for a number of years now.

For us, however, these problems do not have the connotations you give them; they stem from other causes and, of course, call for solutions that aren’t stricter order, discipline and demands.

According to you, the cause of all these problems is the “nobleness of the revolution”, the fact that authorities lack a firm hand, that they do not exercise enough repression.

To you, they have nothing to do with the economic, political, social and moral disaster that more than fifty years of State monopoly capitalism, disguised as socialism, as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, has brought us, with the one-man, single-party system that controls most property and decision-making processes, under which citizens have been entitled only to “work gratefully and faithfully, in honor of those who gave it all and freed Cuba from the tyranny of Batista and imperialist exploitation.”

You in power fail to see you are playing with fire. Perhaps you are deliberately fueling the flames, but I prefer to think, Mr. President, that you are among those who do not realize what is taking place – though, for all practical purposes, it’s all the same.

Your government-Party-State, by your own admission, is facing a growing wave of social disobedience, a rise in acts of peaceful insurgency by the people, varying forms of non- violent resistance, as a result of a generalized dissatisfaction with the economic, social and civil policies of your corrupt and corrupting State.

All you can see there, however, is a cursed, ungrateful, ill-mannered, criminal and apish population that has been unable to appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made to ensure their

27 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 28 ______happiness. Accordingly, you blame the people for the consequences of the mistakes you’ve made and threaten them from high up, from your position of absolute power: either you accept our system, or we reprimand you.

How inconsiderate, how disrespectful towards the people who gave you their unconditional support! How wrong you are! The government does not judge the people. It’s the other way around.

We’ll always need a system, but that system ought to be chosen by all, in a democratic fashion, not imposed upon the people, not established by force.

You yourself confirm, perhaps unwittingly, something we have pointed out elsewhere: the political, military and entrepreneurial bureau-bourgeoisie that wields Cuba’s economic and political power and uses it for its own benefit is not only set against the salaried workers it mercilessly exploits, but also against all other strata and classes of Cuban society, against the entire Cuban people.

Let us go over a number of things addressed in your speech and what we have argued elsewhere.

From your perspective, the people are stealing from the State. From our perspective, it is the Cuban State which has been robbing the people, getting the most out of the sweat of wage laborers, farmers, the self-employed, professionals, intellectuals, artists and others through measly salaries, abusive taxes and the two-currency system, the basic, minimum free services that are still offered today notwithstanding. And those who produce the country’s wealth are simply applying the “just compensation” law: they are taking back what you unjustly take away from them.

Where you see illegal housing, we catch sight of self- initiative, undertaken by people trying to put a roof over their heads, in view of the absence of any effective official policy that can create the needed number of homes.

28 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 29 ______Photo: Juan Suarez

When you mention the theft and illicit slaughter of livestock, we cannot help but recall all of the State regulations and laws which have hindered beef and milk production; the drastic drop in livestock that the State’s monopoly over the sale of beef brought about and, above all, the unsatisfied needs of Cuba’s population, which today is twice what it was in 1959, but with half the heads of cattle at its disposal.

What you describe as acts of vandalism in public spaces, against payphones, electrical and telephone installations, sewage systems, traffic lights and metallic road bumpers, we see as signs of civic discontent, as the expression of an “every man for himself” mentality, of an uncertain, precarious life, of disappointment, abandonment, of the chaos you yourselves have created.

In short, different degrees and levels of the discontent and rebelliousness that throbs in the veins of the people, who have been left to their own resources and without legal and democratic mechanisms with which to fight for their rights.

Need we remind you that, in Batista’s time, the 26th of July movement also sabotaged electrical installations and sewage systems, through much more violent and destructive actions, in fact?

What you see as a people who evade the payment of public transportation fares and a general abuse of buses and trains, we see as the prelude of a potentially extreme and massive outburst by the people, driven to the ends of impatience and despair by the inability to satisfy basic needs such as transportation, a problem your government has been unable to solve, and not for a lack of suggestions.

You say the school and family aren’t playing the roles they ought to in our society. But, who created these schools, who have been our ministers of education, who have established educational systems that forsook good manners as well as human and civil rights, rejected morals, ethics and democracy as “bourgeois” and exalted violent methods as a means of getting things done?

What, if not State policies that encouraged hatred towards those who left the country, the “internationalist missions” that kept family members apart for years and the creation of brigades that sent people to work in other provinces for extended periods of time.

How about the destruction of family inheritances, the Manichean division of Cubans into revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, discrimination on the basis of political affiliation, race, sexual or religious orientation, the use of violence against peaceful opposition and homosexuals, practiced with greater of lesser degrees of intensity at different moments in Cuban history.

What, if not all this, is responsible for the disastrous divisions that cleave Cuban families apart today?

29 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 30 ______We could respond very similarly to each and every one of the accusations you hurl at the Cuban people. You, and you alone, the so-called “historical leadership” of the revolution, on whom the people placed their trust, unreservedly, you, who razed the country to the ground in the name of “socialism”, are to blame.

Photo: Juan Suarez

We are not defending shoddiness, vulgarity, bad habits and behaviors; we are merely saying they are the natural outcome of the many prohibitions, regulations, exceptions and impositions that the Cuban people have had to endure. Were the people born this way, do they do these things because they are genetically predisposed to be bad? Or have you already forgotten one of Marx’s maxims, that people think as they live? Wretchedness engenders wretches. Hatred begets hateful people, violence begets violence.

Are you not aware of the fact that the great majority of those people you criticize were born after you came to power? Are the people you raised suddenly no good? Or are you the ones who haven’t been good to the people, and the people are simply demanding another government, another model? Think about it.

If we had kept quiet, if we hadn’t pointed out these problems before they reached their current state, analyzed their causes and proposed solutions – something we have been doing, from the inside, for many years, on the basis of thorough studies and ever more concrete socialist proposals as of the 4th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) held in 1991 – we would not have the moral authority to say these things to your face.

But the worst thing about this speech is that it reveals that you continue wanting to solve these problems by imposing order, discipline and stricter demands on people, through a deliberate call to intensify the repression of a humble people who merely seeks to survive whichever way it can, that you believe the problem is that the “revolution”, which you wrongly identify with those who have created this mess, has been too soft.

The broad socialist and democratic Left which you insist on ignoring has said it many times: it is a question of changing Cuba’s absurd, bureaucratic State-command system, democratizing its political structures, freeing the economy, domestic and foreign trade of all State restrictions and monopolies.

30 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 31 ______It’s also about socializing property through company self and co-management, promoting the extensive development of cooperatives, giving the self-employed and small and mid- sized companies true opportunities to grow, freeing farmers of all abusive regulations, approving a new tax law that incentivizes production, eliminating the two-currency system, and implementing a whole series of other measures that would make this list far too long – measures we have described in our programs and articles.

I could well keep quiet and leave you be without warning you that you are heading down the wrong path, a terrifying path that leads to an inevitable confrontation with the vast majority of the people, a confrontation whose consequences cannot be predicted. But, out of principle, I reject all violence and hope to see the serious problems faced by the Cuban nation today resolved peacefully and democratically.

It is almost unquestionable that some members of the revolutionary leadership are willing to run such risks, including the risk of an eventual foreign intervention (which would avail itself in the mass repression of the population), before acknowledging the failure of their centralized, State-command “model” and handing power over to the people and workers.

They would rather provoke an act of foreign aggression, so that history will remember that “imperialism prevented the definitive triumph of their socialist revolution”, not their own limitations. Can one conceive of a more annexationist attitude? Would the high command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces take part in such a barbarous act?

They remind me of the Spanish, back in the day of Cuba’s wars of independence: they preferred to surrender to the United States, than to the Cuban people, who had defeated them in the countryside.

But enough of that. Few people place any stock in what those extremists have to say, and history is already revealing the obvious: that they aren’t interested in socialism or in helping the people at all, that all they follow are their whims. And no more Cubans are going to die because of their whims.

You will have to acknowledge your ineptitude and open up new spaces to democratize and socialize Cuba’s political and economic system, faced as you are by different forms of continuing, peaceful popular resistance.

Contrary to your wishes, the bulk of the Armed Forces and Ministry of the Interior, who are a part of the suffering people, will not take part in your sinister, treacherous and backward scheme of massive repression.

I thank you for your informative speech, Mr. President, and apologize for singling you out, but it is, after all, your speech. —– To contact Pedro Campos write: [email protected]

31 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 32 ______------Cuba’s economic reforms debated at Miami conference By MIMI WHITEFIELD [email protected] Miami Herald, Posted on Thu, Aug. 01, 2013

As Cuba struggles to reform its faltering economy, it has engaged in a delicate balancing act of trying to spur growth while maintaining control and keeping market forces from getting out of hand.

That was the quandary under discussion Thursday as economists, political scientists, business executives, lawyers and scholars from the United States, Latin America, and Europe came together in Miami to discuss the theme “Reforming Cuba?” at the 23rd annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

“The Cuban government functions like a broken enterprise,’’ propped up by support from Venezuela and remittances from Cubans living abroad, said Emilio Morales, president of The Havana Consulting Group during the opening session of the three-day meeting.

A recent study by the Havana Consulting Group estimates that 600,000 American citizens and Cuban-Americans are expected to travel to Cuba this year — carrying with them an estimated $2.2 billion in cash.

That’s in addition to the clothing, food, medicine and household items that Cuban-Americans send or take to their families, said Morales, who now lives in Miami but is the former marketing director of CIMEX, Cuba’s largest commercial corporation.

Meanwhile, he said emigration from Cuba reached a peak last year with more than 56,000 Cubans leaving the country.

This year’s conference at the Hilton Miami Downtown Hotel also includes 10 speakers from Cuba and five other participants from Cuba, said Ted Henken, a professor at Baruch College and ASCE president.

In past years, Cuban scholars have sometimes been unable to obtain exit visas from the Cuban government to participate in the event or haven’t been able to get visas from the U.S. government. Cuba did away with the exit visa requirement in January.

“This year no one got turned down,’’ said Henken, although he said that some Cuban scholars who had expressed a desire to attend were unable to get permission from their universities.

There was a consensus among many conference participants that the pace of reforms in Cuba is too slow and they are not far-reaching enough, but speakers said the jury is still out on the impact of the reforms.

Among the reforms announced so far are allowing self-employment as the government seeks to remove workers from bloated government payrolls, allowing Cubans to buy and sell homes and cars, increased private and cooperative farming, and allowing workers at formerly state-run hair salons, barber shops and restaurants to run them independently and rent the facilities from the state.

32 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 33 ______Economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, said there are still some missing ingredients if the goal is to transform the Cuban economy. Cuba, he said, needs banking reform, the unification of its dual-currency system, a realistic exchange rate and tax system and more far-reaching agricultural reform.

“The success of the reforms is made more difficult by excessive regulation and control,’’ he said. But Mesa-Lago added, “The biggest obstacle for reform is the Cuban model itself.’’

Among other reasons that creation of small businesses and self-employment hasn’t produced the desired advances, said Morales, is the lack of financing and loans for private enterprises, no system for home mortgages and the failure to include professionals in self-employment initiatives.

Marino Murillo, Cuba’s economic czar, said in July that the most complex part of President Raúl Castro’s reform program will come over the next 18 months. Among the changes that will be implemented will be the decentralization of state-run businesses, allowing them to keep 50 percent of their revenue to reinvest instead of sending it all to the government.

At this point 124 non-farm cooperatives — most former state-run produce markets — are operating and 71 others in areas ranging from light manufacturing to food services have been approved.

The non-agricultural cooperatives have potential and could lead to a “hybrid mixed economy’’ if they come to fruition, said Archibald Ritter, an expert on the Cuban economy who teaches at Carleton University in Ottawa.

When the decree law that established the legal framework for the cooperatives was announced last December, there were no restrictions placed on the number of employees a cooperative could have or on what activities it could engage in, Ritter said. In theory, he said, there could be manufacturing cooperatives, a cooperative of building tradesmen, or even a group of accountants.

It remains to be seen whether cooperatives of professionals will be permitted, how the initiative will be implemented and whether the Communist Party will try to control or influence the governance of the cooperatives. But, he said, if the cooperative system is “implemented fully,’’ it could lead to a significant degree of “economy democracy for Cuba.” ------Tráfico de armas a Norcorea: Una historia muy mal contada Cuba Libre Digital Sábado, 03 de Agosto de 2013 00:24 Por Jorge Hernández Fonseca.-

No por casualidad aparecieron en la prensa opositora cubana hipótesis de analistas políticos del exilio relacionadas al posible intercambio de cierto número de armas y aviones cubanos, por el apoyo norcoreano al desarrollo de determinadas armas nucleares, no necesariamente una bomba atómica. Es el caso de la llamada “bomba sucia”, o de otros tipos de armas de rayos ganma, para lo cual Norcorea podría dar el apoyo y asistencia necesaria, dinamizando la existencia de un acuerdo Cuba-Irán, también en el sensible punto de la

33 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 34 ______tecnología nuclear.

Tráfico de armas Cuba-Corea del Norte: Una historia muy mal contada

Jorge Hernández Fonseca

2 de Agosto de 2013

Los desdoblamientos del descubrimiento en el Canal de Panamá de un barco Norcoreano con “armas y aviones” de guerra cubanos no declarados y escondidos bajo un cargamento de azúcar son cada vez más sensacionales, si comparados con la propia noticia original, asociada al descubrimiento del tráfico de armas. No voy a referirme a hechos que todo el mundo conoce y que tienen que ver con una de las noticias internacionales más destacadas de estos días. Mi intención en este caso es analizar las posiciones y actitudes políticas asociadas al hecho.

En primer lugar la participación --incluso como fotógrafo de las armas cubanas-- del presidente de la República de Panamá, Ricardo Martinelli en persona, revisando el buque Norcoreano como un policía más, que nos induce a pensar en intereses individuales de Martinelli en un caso explosivo, que envuelve al castrismo internacional, a Estados Unidos --que tiene una base militar en la zona del Canal-- a las Naciones Unidas, que vela por el cumplimiento de una Resolución de su Consejo de Seguridad prohibiendo el envío de armas a Norcorea. Es evidente que algo buscaba Martinelli, que ahora acaba de pronunciarse por un “vamos a dejar eso así”.

No es mi intención profundizar en los posibles intereses del presidente Martinelli al tener atrapado entre sus manos al castrismo internacional, con peso relativo importante en la política interna panameña. Es parte del juego interno-internacional de los gobiernos del hemisferio con los hermanos Castro, que continuamente, para conseguir neutralizar al castrismo internamente, pasan por encima de los intereses democráticos del sufrido pueblo cubano, como un “episodio más”, en la larga cadena de “intercambios” inmorales con la poderosa dictadura cubana.

Otro hecho destacado fue la declaración casi inmediata del los Estados Unidos diciendo que “no era un problema bilateral Cuba-EUA”, lo que es una frase estrictamente verdadera, si nos atenemos a la declaración (tardía) de la dictadura cubana, diciendo que el contrabando era de “armas obsoletas, que iban a ser reparadas en Norcorea, para después ser devueltas a manos

34 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 35 ______castristas”, declaración poco creíble que intenta ocultar los verdaderos (y desconocidos) objetivos reales detrás del contrabando hacia un país que ya ha desarrollado armas nucleares.

Un tercer elemento no descartable de la cadena de desdoblamientos de este contrabando, es la declaración del dictador mayor, diciendo que “se trató de denigrar a su hermano Raúl Castro” al descubrirse las armas en el barco que atravesaría el Canal de Panamá. Como “quien no quiere las cosas”, el dictador mayor hace una alusión fuera de contexto a la tenencia, o a la renuncia, por parte de Cuba de armas nucleares. Esa alusión ya había sido hecha en la Nota de la dictadura, que asumía la culpa por el contrabando. Son menciones “nucleares” muy extrañas.

No por casualidad aparecieron en la prensa opositora cubana hipótesis de analistas políticos del exilio relacionadas al posible intercambio de cierto número de armas y aviones cubanos, por el apoyo norcoreano al desarrollo de determinadas armas nucleares, no necesariamente una bomba atómica. Es el caso de la llamada “bomba sucia”, o de otros tipos de armas de rayos ganma, para lo cual Norcorea podría dar el apoyo y asistencia necesaria, dinamizando la existencia de un acuerdo Cuba-Irán, también en el sensible punto de la tecnología nuclear.

El tema anterior tampoco es un asunto “bilateral” entre Cuba y EUA (como tampoco lo fue el acuerdo Cuba-URSS para colocar misiles con cargas nucleares en la isla en 1962) pero que evidentemente representa un peligro potencial para Norteamérica. Sin embargo, Estados Unidos nada ha hecho (en apariencias) para “pedir explicaciones” claras a la Cuba castrista, por un hecho que podría representar un peligro real para Norteamérica y sus ciudadanos.

Actualmente hay una política norteamericana en andamiento para intentar contrarrestar los efectos del castrismo en la arena internacional, incluso, según se manifiesta vivamente, para jerarquizar los valores democráticos en Cuba incentivando los contactos “pueblo a pueblo”, entre los ciudadanos de la isla y de los Estados Unidos. Es notorio que en medio del escándalo de contrabando cubano-norcoreano, EUA acaba de conceder a los cubanos el derecho a obtener visas múltiples de parte de EUA, lo que pudiera explicar el silencio de Estados Unidos en un tema, que si bien no es “bilateral”, es un tema que les compete y ha sido mal explicado.

Si el presidente Martinelli participa inicialmente como “actor principal” del descubrimiento del contrabando de armas cubanas hacia Norcorea y acto

35 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 36 ______seguido autoriza la firma de un “Convenio Comercial Cuba-Panamá”, y además ahora, quiere “dejar eso así”, es claro que detrás de esa nueva posición presidencial hay ‘alguna cosa’ que no ha sido bien explicada. Si EUA declara que ese contrabando no es nada “bilateral” Cuba-EUA y los objetivos del contrabando conducen a potencialmente afectar su seguridad nacional (las armas nucleares mencionada por el anciano dictador y mencionadas también en la nota oficial castrista, sin nadie haber hablado de ello) ¿por qué entonces Estados Unidos no toma una posición definida en un tema que sí le compete? Esta, según mi óptica, es la pregunta correcta a ser respondida.

Una hipótesis es que el tema fue abordado a profundidad en el contacto de alto nivel que tuvieron delegaciones de la isla y EUA con motivo de la reanudación de “conversaciones migratorias” y EUA quedó perfectamente informado de todos los detalles. En este caso, salta una duda: ¿por qué no se hicieron declaraciones al respecto? Si esas aclaraciones castristas se dieron en otro contexto, ¿por qué no se dijo nada? Si en paralelo con estas dudas, Martinelli cambia radicalmente de posición y quiere liberar el barco norcoreano, devolverle el azúcar a sus “legítimos dueños” y además, demora la descarga del azúcar para retardar que los inspectores de la ONU lleguen a inspeccionar las armas cubanas, es lógico que se generen dudas.

Una segunda hipótesis es que el afán de acercamiento entre EUA y Cuba, con vistas a implantar la política “pueblo a pueblo”, como intento de EUA influir democráticamente en la transición que se lleva a cabo por Raúl Castro, esto compense con creces la dudas que surgen de esta historia. Una tercera hipótesis estaría relacionada con un probable sabotaje que Fidel Castro y sus hombres han querido hacer preparando este episodio contra Raúl, sus generales y su planes reformistas, de todo lo cual EUA tiene pleno conocimiento, quiere apoyar los “cambios” que Raúl lleva adelante y las dudas con este contrabando se ventilaron en privado.

Sean cuales fueran las “verdades” asociadas a este historia, algo queda muy claro como consecuencia de este episodio de silencio público de EUA ante una historia tan mal contada: las relaciones entre la Cuba de Raúl Castro y los Estados Unidos es de mucha más amplitud y profundidad que aquella que se habla oficialmente. Habría que saber sin embargo si los interese de EUA están asociados sólo a intereses económicos con Cuba (aspecto plenamente comprensible) o si además hay intereses democráticos con la isla, a tono con la erradicación total del castrismo por un lado, o en sintonía con Raúl, sus generales y sus familiares, por otro.

Así como las hipótesis mencionadas son probables versiones de la realidad, hay otro cúmulo de análisis que se ventilan sin una explicación clara, que llene todos los espacios vacíos de este raro incidente. En cualquier caso, los cubanos opositores, carentes de derechos en la isla, así como los cubanos exiliados, también carentes de derechos en la isla, --incluyendo aparentemente a los congresistas cubano-americanos de ambos partidos-- hemos sido tratados por todos los actores de este episodio como “ciudadanos de segunda” con un historieta muy mal contada.

Sin embargo, también “hay vida inteligente” fuera de EUA y del think-tank castrista.

Artículos de este autor pueden ser encontrados en http://www.cubalibredigital.com Última actualización el Viernes, 09 de Agosto de 2013 21:03 Amnesty Int'l designates 5 Cuban inmates 'prisoners of conscience' Published: Aug. 4, 2013 at 9:58 PM

HAVANA, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- Amnesty International has called on the Cuban government to immediately release five inmates it has designated prisoners of conscience.

AI, which has its headquarters in New York, said in a release posted on its website Friday, that the cases of Rafael Matos Montes de Oca, Emilio Planas Robert, and brothers Alexeis, Diango and Vianco Vargas Martin are indicative of ongoing repression of freedom of expression on the Communist-controlled Caribbean island.

"The only progress made by the Cuban government has been the reform of the Migration Law earlier this year," the organization said in calling for their unconditional release. "It allowed many people, including human rights defenders and government critics, to travel abroad. Much more needs to be done to guarantee civil and political liberties in the country."

AI said Planas Robert and Montes de Oca were found guilty of being dangerous or having a "special proclivity to commit crimes," even though the group said no evidence was presented against them in court.

"The use of this particular legislation, which allows the government to jail its citizens on the slightest evidence because it believes they may commit a crime in the future, is a flagrant violation of international standards and must be immediately repealed," AI's Javier Zuniga said.

"This Orwellian law is being used as a pretext to jail government critics."

Both men are members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, which advocates for wider civil liberties on the island.

The Vargas Martins are members of UNPACU and are accused by police of using violence or intimidation against a state official, but have not been formally charged.

"Repression of independent journalists, opposition leaders and human rights activists increased last year in Cuba, and show no sign of abating," Zuniga said.

"In recent months, we have received scores of reports of people who were arbitrarily arrested and even imprisoned on ludicrous charges that violate international standards."

AI says as of June 30, 2,143 people were reportedly being held on short-term arrests in Cuba.

Topics: Amnesty International

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/08/04/Amnesty-Intl-designates-5- Cuban-inmates-prisoners-of-conscience/UPI-46171375667913/#ixzz2bo90LPLd ------Sindicalismo por cuenta propia Generacion Y Martes, 06 de Agosto de 2013 09:20 Por Yoani Sánchez.- La Oficina Nacional de la Administración Tributaria (ONAT) abre sus puertas y hay decenas de personas aguardando desde muy temprano. Una empleada explica a gritos dónde debe ubicarse la cola para cada trámite, aunque pasados breves minutos la confusión volverá a reinar. En un buró, sin un ordenador, otra funcionaria escribe a mano los detalles de cada caso atendido. La pared tras sus espaldas está manchada de humedad, el calor es insoportable y a cada rato alguien la interrumpe para pedirle unas planillas. Una institución que recauda anualmente millones de pesos en impuestos, sigue con los pies de barro de la precariedad material y la mala organización. Locales congestionados, trámites interminables y falta de información, son sólo algunos de los problemas que lastran su gestión. Sin embargo, los tropiezos no terminan ahí. La inexistencia de mercados mayoristas estables y con productos diversificados, frenan también al sector privado. Los inspectores llueven sobre las cafeterías, restaurantes y demás negocios autónomos. La huelga o cualquier demostración pública para que se reduzcan los gravámenes, siguen terminantemente prohibidas. De los

38 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 39 ______cuentapropistas se espera que contribuyamos al presupuesto nacional, pero no que nos comportemos como ciudadanos dispuestos a reclamar. El único sindicato permitido, la Central de trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) intenta absorbernos en sus encorsetadas estructuras. Pagar una mensualidad, participar en esos congresos donde poco se logra y desfilar apoyando al mismo gobierno que despide a miles de empleados; a eso quieren reducir nuestras acciones colectivas. ¿Por qué no se crea y legaliza una organización propia, no manejada de forma gubernamental? Una entidad que no sea polea de transmisión desde el poder hacia los trabajadores, sino a la inversa. Lamentablemente la mayoría de los cuentapropistas no repara en que la independencia salarial y productiva, tiene que venir aparejada con la soberanía sindical. Muchos temen que al menor atisbo de exigencia se les retire la licencia o se tomen otras medidas contra ellos. Por eso callan y aceptan las ineficiencias de la ONAT, la incapacidad de importar materias primas desde el extranjero, los excesos de los inspectores y otros tantos obstáculos. Tampoco las organizaciones de la emergente sociedad civil han logrado capitalizar las necesidades de este sector y ayudarlo a alcanzar representatividad. La necesaria alianza entre grupos sociales que comparten inconformidades y demandas, no acaba de concretarse. Así que nuestra reivindicaciones laborales siguen postergadas, entre el miedo de algunos y el descuido de otros. Tomado de GENERACIÓN Y

Life goes on the same for Cuba’s disabled… or worse Havana Times, August 7, 2013 | Yusimí Rodríguez López

Obispo Street in Old Havana

39 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 40 ______HAVANA TIMES – I’m afraid to go to Old Havana. Not because the police might ask for my I.D., or the Cubans might take me for a tourist, but because of the disabled, the lame and the mutilated who have begun to form part of the landscape all along Obispo street.

I’m not frightened of what they could do to me; I don’t see rage, or anger, or any desire to take revenge on the world in their eyes (at least, in the eyes of those who can see). What I fear is growing accustomed to them – that from seeing them so often and in the face of the great impossibility of ever doing anything for them, my soul will harden and stop hurting me.

More than fear, I feel shame: not for anything I’ve done, but for what I can’t do.

Some of you may remember Jorge Luis Moreira, my interview subject in “This Government Cares for its People Part 3”. He was born with a congenital malformation that has caused him to live in a wheelchair and also to suffer from diabetes and incontinence.

But he’s not lying prostrate at home with his mouth open like a baby bird, waiting for someone to drop some food into it. That’s a luxury that not even the disabled can afford in this country.

I originally ran into him on Mercaderes St. He has a license to sell provisions from a cart, although now he can’t use it, and the products are expensive, he would have to go long distances to find them. But he goes to Old Havana to sell newspapers, and in hopes that some tourist or other, pained by his situation, might decide to give him some money…

In that interview, Jorge told me that the police have detained him for bothering the tourists. It would have seemed unbelievable to me that any police official would arrest someone in his condition if I hadn’t been witness days previously to one of our agents of order and security taking away a one-legged man who used a wheelchair.

40 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 41 ______I saw Jorge again last week, once again on Mercaderes St. where I met him the first time and where I have run into him again a couple times. His life is the same: a pension of 135 pesos ($7 USD) which isn’t even enough to eat badly.

When a tourist comes up to give him money, the guides try to dissuade them, assuring them that our government gives those with disabilities everything they need, and that these people are begging (although Jorge is not a beggar) because they want to. When the police appear, those who don’t have a license to sell anything but do have a good pair of legs, manage to escape, and he’s the one they haul off.

What did I expect when I published his interview? What did he expect? What could change? I gave him 30 cents in hard currency that I had in my pocket, more to salve my conscience than to palliate his misery. At any rate, it was like offering an aspirin against a cancer. He wouldn’t be in any less misery for my thirty cents (about 6 pesos in national currency) nor have I been able to stop thinking about him since that afternoon.

Is it the government’s fault that Jorge was born with a congenital malformation? No, it would be only stupid to blame the government; there are people like Jorge, or worse off than Jorge, in all parts of the world.

Jorge’s pension isn’t enough to live on, the same way that the pension for retired people isn’t enough to live on and whose well-earned rest after years of working consists of inventing new forms of subsistence (and they are fortunate to be able to invent them). Jorge’s pension isn’t enough to live on, just as Cuban workers’ wages aren’t enough to live on, and whose future can be seen in the lives of those who are retired.

Jorge Luis

41 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 42 ______The retired look for a way to sell plastic shopping bags or newspapers; they become messengers for the gas distribution agencies, or psychics who read the cards or the palms of your hands. They “struggle” as we say, and pay their taxes and their licenses – now that there’s a license for everything, including for letting yourself be photographed. What can Jorge and others like him do, except depend on others’ charity?

For years, our government promoted internationalism, solidarity aid for countries that had suffered a disaster, or where there were more basic necessities than in ours. Resources have been designated for these places, medical personnel and Cuban technical workers, educated under the umbrella of our state budgets, to alleviate the situation of people in other lands.

Why then impede these disabled Cubans from receiving the tourists’ solidarity or ours, their fellow citizens, since the government can’t cover all their necessities?

But could that be a solution, to have the disabled live by begging? And what if some brainiac decided to establish a license so that beggars had to pay taxes?

I keep feeling that something is wrong, that begging shouldn’t be the solution for these people. At the same time, if the cost of living in Cuba is such that the pensions they receive from the State are inadequate, what right is there to keep them from finding a way to make a living any way they can?

I haven’t heard of any person with a disability assaulting someone in broad daylight on Obispo St. It’s hard for me to imagine a blind person or a person without legs grabbing someone’s wallet.

Jorge has been consumed with new worries since I interviewed him in February. He says that there are rumors that the State is going to turn all of its establishments for the sale of agricultural products over to the self-employed workers. (With the supply and demand situation this would mean higher consumer prices).

Here, people have learned from experience to give some credence to the rumors that spread around the streets, no matter how far-fetched they sound; especially if it’s about something that could make their situation worse.

Jorge wonders beforehand, and hopefully unnecessarily, how he’s going to eat if you can only buy agricultural products and meats from the self-employed workers. I can’t do anything more than look at him: powerless to help, ashamed and certain that the next time I run into him things won’t have gotten any better for him. ------Cuban dissident Antúnez says women, blacks, provincial residents joining movement By Juan O. Tamayo [email protected] Jose A. Iglesias / El Nuevo Herald

42 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 43 ______Miami Herald, Posted on Thu, Aug. 08, 2013

Cuban dissident Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" speaks to the Miami Herald editorial board on Wednesday, August 7, 2013. Cuba’s dissident movement has been growing with the increased involvement of women, blacks and provincial residents, the opposition activist known as Antúnez said Wednesday during his first public appearance in Miami.

Jorge Luís García Pérez also said that although President Barack Obama’s decision to lift almost all restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island was well-intentioned, his administration also “broke a tradition of solidarity” with dissidents.

Cubans separated by decades of animosity have been able to see each other again, but “that’s not helped at all” to improve political conditions on the island, García said in a lengthy interview with El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald.

The 48-year-old García, regarded as one of Cuba’s more combative dissidents and best known as Antúnez, spent 17 years in prison after shouting anti-government slogans during a speech by then-Defense Minister Raúl Castro in 1990.

He landed in Miami on Sunday on his first-ever trip abroad even though he has had a U.S. visitors visa for the past six or seven years. The Cuban government previously told him that he could leave the island only if he agreed to stay out, he said.

García was the latest of the many dissidents allowed to travel abroad after Havana eased its migration restrictions in January. They include Guillermo Fariñas and Antonio Rodiles, blogger Yoani Sánchez and Ladies in White leader Berta Soler.

While Cuba’s dissident groups were traditionally led by older intellectuals, García said, they have been growing in recent years with the addition of blacks like himself, women like the Ladies in White and people who live outside of Havana.

The most aggressive resistance is currently in the provinces, he added, because people there know and trust each other while residents of Havana barely know their next-door neighbors. García lives in Placetas, a municipality of 50,000 people in central Cuba.

Proof of the growing resistance is in the number of anti-government signs that appear at sunrise, he told the newspapers, the rising rate of abstentions in elections and the complaints increasingly voiced by usually ultra-loyal military officers.

Castro, who succeeded ailing brother Fidel in 2006, has replied with increased harassments, threats and detentions after which activists are usually released in isolated rural roads, García said.

Like most Cuban dissidents, García also dismissed the economic reforms pushed by Castro for the past five years as an attempt to make only the minimum changes required to ensure the survival of the island’s communist political and economic system.

Although the reforms have brought about “some slight improvements in some sectors of the population,” García added, overall “the people see no improvement at all. The people see fraud.”

“The people want bread, but also freedom,” he said, adding that the opposition movement “will not settle for little changes.”

43 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 44 ______García also declared that the hierarchy of Cuba’s Catholic Church has been insensitive to the work of the dissident groups and that Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana, “does not enjoy credibility” among Cubans.

As for the foreign journalists based in Havana, he said that dissidents regularly send them news releases, photos and videos but they seldom publish the information. Cuba has expelled several foreign journalists whose coverage they deemed too negative.

Reporters in Havana are either “insensitive to the pain” of the opposition “or in clear complicity” with the government, he added.

García, who helped found the National Movement for Civic Resistance Pedro Luis Boitel, and his wife, Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, an activist in the Rosa Parks Movement for Civil Rights, plan to stay outside Cuba for about two months.

They are scheduled to meet Friday in Miami with Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz- Balart and former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, all Miami Republicans. It is not yet known if they will travel to Washington or other countries to speak about Cuba.

García said he had the impression that people outside the island sometimes view the allegations of human rights and other abuses reported by dissidents as likely exaggerations, although dissidents most often don’t report all they suffer.

Government agents once attacked his wife and other women dissidents with machetes, he said. And he added that a prison guard once threw a rope into his cell and said, “Look, black guy. So you can hang yourself.” ------Professor cubano da USP esmiúça em artigo o modelo de ‘exportação’ de médicos de Havana Josias de Souza 08/08/2013 06:27

Foi baixa, muito baixa, baixíssima a adesão à primeira chamada do programa ‘Mais Médicos’. Dos 15.460 profissionais que planeja contratar para atender à clientela do SUS nos fundões do Brasil, o governo só conseguiu atrair 938 brasileiros. Para o ministro Alexandre Padilha (Saúde), ficou entendido que a importação de profissionais será mesmo inevitável. De onde? Citou Espanha, Portugal, Argentina e… Cuba. Um artigo veiculado no mês passado no Jornal da USP esmiúça o modelo de exportação de médicos adotado por Cuba. Chama-se Juan López Linares o autor do texto, disponível aqui. Nascido e graduado na ilha dos irmãos Fidel e Raul Castro, Juan naturalizou-se brasileiro. Hoje, é professor da Faculdade de Zootecnia e Engenharia de Alimentos da

44 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 45 ______USP. Declara-se “a favor” da vinda de médicos cubanos ou de qualquer outra parte do mundo. Porém… Juan diz recear que um eventual acerto com Cuba inclua no “pacote” alguns “interesses espúrios” da ditadura dos irmãos Castro e ameaças às “liberdades individuais” dos médicos cubanos. Eis algumas das observações do professor:

1. Levando adiante o plano de importar médicos cubanos, o governo brasileiro teria de se entender com o regime de Havana, não com os profissionais. “Isso significa, na prática, que mais de 50% do salário pago pelas autoridades brasileiras” não chegaria aos bolsos dos médicos. Serviria “para alimentar a ditadura cubana.” 2. O salário mensal de um médico em Cuba, escreve o professor Juan, “não supera os R$ 100”. Por isso, eles consideram o trabalho no estrangeiro, mesmo quando prestado na África, “um sacrifício desejável.” 3. Cuba impõe aos médicos que envia ao estrangeiro um leque de suplícios baseados num vocábulo: não. Os doutores não podem viajar, não estão autorizados a participar de congressos, não podem tomar parte de movimentos políticos, não isso e não aquilo. O desrespeito às proibições sujeita os infratores a uma punição draconiana: retornar a Cuba. 4. “A experiência mostra que uma parte não desprezível dos médicos termina ‘fugindo’ dessa situação mediante o casamento com um cidadão local ou a emigração para um terceiro país”, escreveu o professor Juan. Para a grande maioria dos médicos cubanos, viajar para trabalhar em outro país (mesmo nos países mais pobres da África) é um sacrifício desejável. 5. O doutor Juan prossegue: “A experiência mostra que uma parte não desprezível dos médicos termina ‘fugindo’ dessa situação mediante o casamento com um cidadão local ou a emigração para um terceiro país.” 6. Juan diz dar razão às entidades médicas brasileiras quanto à exigência de submeter os médicos cubanos ao teste de conhecimentos profissionais, o Revalida. As estatísticas do exame, informa o doutor, indicam que “somente 20% dos médicos formados em Cuba passam nas provas” –a cifra inclui os brasileiros que estudam em Havana. Gente indicada “pelos partidos políticos favoráveis ao regime dos Castros.”

Considerando-se os alertas do professor, o governo brasileiro arrisca-se a importar mais problemas do que médicos se levar adiante o plano de incluir Cuba na equação. ------Cuba’s New, Disquieting Labor Law Havana Times, August 9, 2013 | Rogelio Manuel Diaz Moreno

45 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 46 ______The workers unanimously approve…

HAVANA TIMES — It took me a while, but I’ve finally finished my notes on the bill for the new Labor Law they’ll soon be forcing on Cubans. My impressions can be summed up with one word: yikes!

As written, the bill is unconstitutional, discriminatory and downright deceitful. When you make a claim of this nature, of course, you have to be able to prove it.

The bill’s very first article reads: “The right to employment (…) is guaranteed in conformity with the political, social and economic tenets laid out in the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba. The right to employment is regulated by the present Law and complementary legislation.”

The document in question, however, explicitly contradicts Cuba’s current Constitution on at least two accounts. To begin with, Article 14 of the Constitution – whose days are surely numbered, but hasn’t been revoked yet – prohibits any relations based on the exploitation of man by man in Cuba.

This doesn’t stop the bill from considering certain economic activities by local private enterprises acceptable. This, which may strike some as a positive development and others as a step backwards, is simply an incongruous law which violates the Constitution and, at the same time, claims to adhere to it.

Looking at how the bill is written, I’ve noticed that most of the obligations set down for employers seem to apply almost exclusively to the public or State sector. One doesn’t get a clear sense as to whether alternative employers, private capitalists, that is, have to grant their employees these same rights.

Secondly, the paragraphs devoted to public holidays and festivities include the 25th of December and Good Friday among the country’s non-working days. Though any day I can party instead of work is a good day for me, I can’t help but be aware that these two holidays stem from a specific religion – Christianity. Now, I have nothing against Christianity, but Article 8 of the Constitution establishes that, in Cuba, religious institutions are separate from the State and that the country’s different creeds and religions are considered equal before the law.

This means that the bill is in contradiction with the secular nature of the State and discriminates among religions, for one is accorded two holidays and the others none. For instance, practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions could demand that the 17th of December, when the divinity Babalu Aye is honored, be declared a national holiday. But no. It seems that, to get a holiday, you need to have someone as important as the Pope visit the country from time to time.

46 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 47 ______The bill, therefore, does not respect the Constitution, though it claims to do so. One of the ways in which it violates the Constitution is by discriminating among individuals with different religious beliefs. This is simply unconstitutional, discriminatory and deceitful.

The bill is at its most hypocritical point, however, when it claims to acknowledge and respect Cuba’s long-standing trade-union traditions. I wonder how many libertarian trade-unionists are offended by such nerve. I wonder how many workers (those who are Cuban, not extraterrestrial) believe that the government will authorize the existence of unions that do not respond to strict, centralized control and training.

I would now like to return to Cuba’s new private enterprises and their salaried employees. Again, it is not my intention to demonize a development which, quite obviously, responds to historical and economic necessities. What I do consider cause for concern is a series of potential future developments. Bear in mind that this new law could be Cuba’s effective labor legislation for the next 10, maybe 20 years.

By then, as many of us fear, the capitalist economy will be much more firmly entrenched in our country than it is today. Private companies will have grown and consolidated themselves.

Looking at how the bill is written, I’ve noticed that most of the obligations set down for employers seem to apply almost exclusively to the public or State sector. One doesn’t get a clear sense as to whether alternative employers, private capitalists, that is, have to grant their employees these same rights.

Right now, given the miniscule salaries paid by the State, this fact may not worry people that much (nothing could be worse than a State salary). But, in the future, when the by then not so incipient private enterprise sector employs one or two million Cubans, this blessed Labor Law could well become the envy of the worst exploiters who have ever existed.

By way of an example, look at how so many labor rights are explicitly regulated for State companies and how no explanation as to whether these rights are applicable in the private sector is given. For State companies, the bill stipulates collectively-mediated contracts. For private businesses, contracts are determined individually by the employers.

And, if any prole laboring in the private sector gets a little unruly, the bosses can invoke paragraph b) of Article 67 and terminate the work agreement (at the request of one of the parties) without thereby incurring any obligation towards the former employee. The

47 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 48 ______infamous Walmart has a harder time laying people off than the new Cuban exploiters will.

Such is the monstrosity placed before us. And the Cuban Workers’ Federation (CTC) – or, better, its leadership – is promoting it with all of the enthusiasm that it can muster. ------Cuban dissident: opposition may eventually spark a work stoppage By Juan O. Tamayo [email protected] Miami Herald, Posted on Fri, Aug. 09, 2013

Opponents of the Cuban government may eventually spark a gradual work stoppage against the government that would undermine Havana’s ability to repress dissent, according to activist Jorge Luís García Pérez, also known as “Antúnez.”

The stoppage will be difficult to achieve but could grow into a mass protest down the long road of opposition to the communist system, Antúnez said during a news conference at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies.

By disrupting the work of government agencies and institutions, the stoppage could erode their ability to repress the people and control an outburst of public protests, added Antúnez, who arrived in Miami on Sunday for his first-ever trip abroad.

The stoppage is already visible in the growing abstention rates reported for recent elections, he said, but to make it effective will take time. “It will be a gradual, patient and difficult process. We’re not thinking of paralyzing the country tomorrow,” he declared.

Antúnez also disagreed vehemently with reports that Cuba’s opposition movement is riven by internal disputes and rivalries, and blamed the reports on government propaganda efforts to slander dissidents and diminish their importance.

“I want to deny that the opposition is divided,” he said. “The Cuban resistance is more alive than ever.”

He added: “I know that there is an attempt on the part of the government to neutralize it, to silence it, to make believe that it does not exist.”

The dissident, who served 17 years in prison, added that the opposition to ruler Raúl Castro’s government was much bigger than what is perceived abroad, because each day there are many protests that are never reported in the news media.

“The protests, and the people’s sympathy for the opposition, have been growing,” he said. “Never before has the freedom of Cuba been so close.”

Antúnez, who was interviewed by El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald on Wednesday, also repeated his criticisms of Castro’s economic reforms as “maneuver” designed to fool the international community into believing that real change is afoot.

“They only want to legitimize and give continuity to the dictatorship,” he said. ------

48 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 49 ______La caña es más que azúcar La obsolescencia tecnológica y el incumplimiento de planes, entre otras contrariedades, golpearon duramente la imagen de esa industria. Pero la que por siglos fuera columna vertebral de la economía criolla no acepta el nocaut. No pocos fundamentan que es todavía un sector estratégico y prometedor Marianela Martín González [email protected] 10 de Agosto del 2013 19:13:22 CDT

La agroindustria azucarera representó históricamente la actividad económica más importante de la economía cubana, al ser la fuente principal de ingresos en divisas durante muchísimos años, y la garantía para la adquisición de créditos externos.

Hoy es una fuente considerable de empleo y, por su efecto multiplicador sobre otros sectores, constituye un referente por excelencia para el desarrollo local.

Conociendo estos argumentos, la Sociedad Económica Amigos del País convocó recientemente, a especialistas y directivos del Grupo Azucarero Azcuba y a prestigiosos investigadores de la Universidad de La Habana, a debatir sobre el presente y el futuro de la industria que por mucho tiempo fue considerada la locomotora de la economía en la Mayor de las Antillas.

El taller «La agroindustria azucarera cubana. Situación actual y perspectiva», contó con la presencia de ingenieros, técnicos y economistas en ejercicio y jubilados, con conocimientos plenos para ayudar al desarrollo sustentable de la economía, el cual debe ser, como tantas veces se reiteró en este encuentro: viable financieramente, socialmente justo; y armónico con el medio ambiente.

El Doctor Federico Sulroca Domínguez, especialista principal de Azcuba, abrió la ronda de exposiciones que durante dos días aconteció en la sede de la emblemática asociación.

«En el mundo que probablemente nos tocará vivir en un futuro no muy lejano, la producción cañera azucarera, por su condición autosustentable, fundamentalmente de energía, otros derivados y agua, ofrece las mejores condiciones para adecuarse y sobrevivir en situaciones extremas», afirmó.

Sulroca explicó, además, que en los Lineamientos 246 y 247 de la Política Económica y Social del Partido y la Revolución se refrenda la diversificación de la industria azucarera, con especial énfasis en el aprovechamiento del bagazo y residuos agrícolas cañeros y forestales, creándose condiciones para cogenerar energía en etapa inactiva.

Señaló asimismo, que fuera del esquema de financiamiento de Azcuba, en la propuesta de estrategia del 2014 al 2018, se contemplan inversiones que rondan los 669 millones de dólares para el incremento de la producción de energía, 30 millones para reanimar la destilería de alcoholes y 12 millones para la producción de alimento animal.

49 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 50 ______«Se destina, como se informó, un financiamiento para incrementar capacidades de alcohol, representando un incremento del 60 por ciento con respecto a las capacidades actuales.

En el año 2018 se prevé que la disponibilidad de materia prima supere la capacidad instalada para producir alcohol, por lo que será necesario construir nuevas destilerías previstas en el plan de desarrollo con un aumento de capacidad de 3 000 hectolitros por día.

Dichas destilerías se prevén anexar a plantas de levadura torula para utilizarlas como plantas de tratamiento de residuales, en los centrales Primero de Enero, en Ciego de Ávila, y Perucho Figueredo, en Villa Clara.

Sulroca especificó que desde 2011 se aplica un esquema financiero en divisas al Grupo Azucarero Azcuba, que garantiza poder adquirir los recursos necesarios. El mismo básicamente se sustenta de los propios ingresos del sector.

Se refirió a que en la esfera agroindustrial las cooperativas agropecuarias constituyen la fuente abastecedora de la caña que sustenta todo el sistema. Al cierre de diciembre de 2012, en todo el país se dedicaban a la producción de caña 488 unidades básicas de producción cooperativa (UBPC), 231 cooperativas de producción agropecuaria (CPA), 57 cooperativas de créditos y servicios (CCS), y cuatro granjas estatales.

Esos datos indican que el 62 por ciento de las unidades productoras son UBPC, por lo que sobre estas recaen los mayores retos que deben enfrentarse en el escenario actual.

«Las cooperativas se han desenvuelto en un entorno que no ha evolucionado a la par de las mismas, sumado a que algunos directivos de las organizaciones con las cuales se relacionan carecen de una cultura cooperativa que les facilite encontrar formas adecuadas para trabajar conjuntamente», explicó Sulroca.

Recordó que en septiembre de 2012, el Comité Ejecutivo del Consejo de Ministros aprobó 17 medidas para otorgar autonomía en su gestión a las unidades básicas de producción cooperativa y ponerlas en igualdad de condiciones para producir, en relación con el resto de las cooperativas.

«Pero todavía hay una limitada autonomía de gestión porque prevalece la dependencia de las empresas estatales a las cuales se vinculan, manifestándose, además, una tendencia al gigantismo y a la centralización excesiva.

«En el caso de la agricultura cañera, los precios de la gramínea no han cubierto las expectativas de los productores, sumado al uso de sistemas de financiamiento en divisas muy limitados, lo cual ha provocado una baja motivación», señaló.

Llamó la atención sobre la inminente tendencia al envejecimiento poblacional, debido al aumento de la esperanza de vida y a la insuficiente tasa de remplazamiento, por lo que

50 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 51 ______consideró necesario, a corto y mediano plazo, la introducción de nuevas tecnologías agrícolas basadas en la mecanización, el uso de productos químicos y biotecnológicos, sin que estos desarmonicen con el medio ambiente.

Para la adquisición de tecnologías, según informaron en el taller varios de los ejecutivos, Azcuba deberá concertar alianzas estratégicas o modalidades de negocios con fabricantes o compañías que proporcionen la fuente financiera. Este año se invertirán 18,9 millones de dólares en maquinaria agrícola y 12 millones en riego, precisaron.

Sulroca se refirió a un plan encaminado a mitigar las vulnerabilidades de la parte agrícola en la agroindustria. Señaló entre estas la implantación de los sistemas de servicios científico-técnicos, liderados por el Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones de la Caña de Azúcar (Inica), que recomiendan las principales actividades agrícolas.

Se refirió también a la implantación de un servicio de extensión agrícola de ayuda al productor, y a la elaboración del presupuesto de gastos e ingresos por bloque o finca, que son las unidades mínimas de manejo.

Como parte del apoyo de Azcuba para disminuir las vulnerabilidades de las cooperativas mencionó, también, la creación de las escuelas de gerencia cooperativa territoriales, y la implementación de un sistema de capacitación y superación cultural para los cooperativistas.

«No podemos dejar de mencionar que, como acciones importantes para que estas bases productivas funcionen eficientemente, se trabaja en la vinculación del hombre al área, mediante brigadas integrales y lotes cañeros diversificados. De igual modo se promueve el desarrollo de la diversificación agropecuaria, buscando valores agregados a la producción cañera-azucarera», sostuvo.

Poner la caña a tres trozos

A pocos días de la celebración del referido taller coincidimos en el Palacio de Convenciones con el joven diputado granmense Ricardo García Aguilar, integrante de la Comisión Agroalimentaria. En ese espacio se delinearon estrategias para darle seguimiento a la implementación de las políticas que repercuten en el sector agroindustrial azucarero, y el parlamentario se refirió a las experiencias de la UBPC Andrés Cuevas, Vanguardia Nacional, a la cual pertenece.

«Cuando se hable de las ganancias que reporta la caña al país hay que hablar de lo que se obtiene con sus derivados; y ya es hora de que también empecemos a pensar en cómo pagarles a los productores por la gama de esos productos», apuntó.

«Hay lugares en que, para la resiembra, cortan la caña con combinada; eso es un disparate de los que más dañan nuestra producción. Con el corte mecanizado se perjudica la yema de la semilla y no germina.

51 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 52 ______«Contamos con una brigada calificada, encargada de cortar, picar y sembrar la caña, y entonces, cuando esta nace, por los índices de sobrevivencia es que les pagamos a los que participaron en esa labor.

«Siempre hablamos con satisfacción del Imac (implemento múltiple Andrés Cuevas). Con ese invento de dos de nuestros cooperativistas —Rigoberto Pérez Llorente y Mario Saborit Solano, gente sencilla que tiene ganas de hacer cosas buenas para el país— dejamos de pasarle cinco veces por encima al campo, y arruinar así el suelo y gastar combustible. Este implemento puede, con un solo pase, sembrar, fertilizar y rotar la tierra.

Datos ofrecidos en el mencionado taller develaron que, de 1981 a 1990 el rendimiento promedio en Cuba era de 53,4 toneladas por hectárea. En aquel entonces se llegó a beneficiar más del 30 por ciento de las áreas con riego, con un elevado consumo de fertilizante, herbicida, combustible y mecanización, condiciones que prevén revitalizarse con las estrategias trazadas por Azcuba.

Ana Bueno Guzmán, presidenta de la cooperativa de producción agropecuaria Cuba Socialista, de Mayabeque, no se sienta al borde del camino para hacer catarsis.

«Seguimos trabajando hasta lograr alcanzar las cien toneladas por hectárea. Ahora estamos en 76, porque nos unificaron con una UBPC que tenía promedios muy bajos».

Hace menos de dos años, la CPA que dirige esta economista lograba 92,6 toneladas por hectárea, mientras el país, con gran esfuerzo, tiene como meta para 2020 llegar a las 50.

«Hay que ser disciplinados con la preparación de los suelos, la siembra y escoger la semilla que se dé en nuestras tierras, acorde a sus condiciones. Mi cooperativa tiene como axioma que la mejor resiembra es la que no se hace. La resiembra por indisciplina tiene un costo económico grande. Se justifica cuando no queda más remedio. Quizá por el azote de un ciclón u otro evento de fuerza mayor».

Ana insiste en la importancia de aplicar los herbicidas en el momento requerido, y respetar que cada variedad se corte en el tiempo estipulado, pues si se viola ese principio se manda al central caña seca.

El oro dulce que también alumbra

El Doctor Armando Nova, investigador del Centro de Estudios de la Economía Cubana de la Universidad de La Habana, sostiene que casi no existe otra planta con igual potencial al de la caña.

«La agroindustria cañera, en el escenario actual y en el que se vislumbra, puede contribuir a la solución de las crisis financiera, alimentaria, energética y climática que simultáneamente sufre el mundo», afirmó.

52 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 53 ______Nuestra matriz energética es muy dependiente del petróleo, explicó Nova. El 52 por ciento de la composición de la generación primaria depende del combustible importado, por lo que las posibilidades energéticas de la caña de azúcar le confieren a este cultivo un valor estratégico.

El economista consideró que la creación del nuevo grupo azucarero posibilita estudiar el empleo de la tecnología de otros lugares del mundo, donde se usan las mezclas de alcohol en motores de combustión interna que consumen gasolina, y han convertido los motores diésel en biodiésel, a partir de plantas oleaginosas.

Para el especialista sería interesante experimentar con motores FLEX, y comenzar a valorarlos en aras de lograr el cierre totalmente autoenergético del ciclo productivo de la agroindustria. A lo cual podría agregarse el empleo del biogás y el gas metano como combustible para la generación de energía eléctrica, y para la transportación.

«El escenario internacional actual y futuro ofrece grandes posibilidades para nuestra agroindustria cañera debido al precio favorable de alcoholes y del azúcar. El alcohol se cotiza a 72 centavos dólar el litro, y todo parece indicar que su valor tiende a incrementarse debido al encarecimiento del combustible fósil. El azúcar oscila alrededor de los 17 centavos la libra. Ha bajado en los últimos meses, pero la tendencia es alcista, según estudios realizados a diferentes mercados», sentenció.

Al señalar algunos de los obstáculos de la agroindustria, precisó que existen problemas tanto organizativos como estructurales, pero enfatizó en la estimulación a los productores, por ser el capital humano lo más importante.

«Sabemos que se revisa actualmente el precio que se les paga. Reciben 104 pesos por tonelada de caña, lo que equivale a dos centavos de dólar por cada libra de azúcar, cuando esta se vende a 17 centavos».

En el evento de la Sociedad Económica, especialistas de Azcuba refirieron que en la zafra 2010-2011 se aprobó un incremento del precio de acopio de la caña relacionado con el azúcar en el mercado internacional, y que actualmente en varios complejos agroindustriales del país se aplica un experimento donde se vinculan los salarios a los niveles de aportes en divisas y la eficiencia, estimulando, además, el ahorro.

Nova considera que este sector puede ofrecerles resultados promisorios a nuestra economía. Explicó que ahora se dedican a la caña alrededor de 750 000 hectáreas, pero si pudieran completarse un millón, y se alcanzaran rendimientos por encima de las 50 o 54 toneladas por hectárea, y además de ese total se destina la mitad a producir azúcar y el otro 50 por ciento a alcoholes; y se ampliara la generación de energía eléctrica, el resultado representaría un ahorro sustancial, al dejar de importarse anualmente un millón y medio de toneladas de petróleo.

53 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 54 ______«Nos basamos en precios vigentes y que tienden a aumentar, sin entrar a considerar otros derivados de la caña que pueden potenciar un alto valor agregado y contribuir de forma significativa al incremento de los ingresos».

Como asunto nada desdeñable valoró el uso de tecnologías agroecólogicas, y la rotación de la caña con otros cultivos. Llamó la atención, de igual manera, sobre el vuelco que necesita el sistema de extensión o introducción de los resultados científicos. Debe contar, según Nova, con la participación activa de los productores, además de estar acompañado de un nuevo modelo de gestión económica, que incluya el beneficio del investigador por la introducción del resultado.

Reconoció que estamos ante un momento recuperativo de esta agroindustria. Los rendimientos agrícolas de la última zafra rondaron las 42 toneladas por hectárea —hubo un tiempo en que estos se comportaron entre las 24 y 25 toneladas; es decir extremadamente bajos e ineficientes.

En la pasada zafra los rendimientos crecieron, a pesar de que no se alcanzó lo planificado. La disponibilidad de caña estuvo por encima de los 18 millones de toneladas, con una potencialidad de obtener un millón 640 toneladas de azúcar crudo base 86, compromiso que no se cumplió al dejarse de producir más de 100 000 toneladas, según reconoció, ante los diputados de la Comisión Agroalimentaria de la Asamblea Nacional, Ulises Rosales del Toro, vicepresidente del Consejo de Ministros.

Modernización vs. obsolescencia

Especialistas y directivos de Azcuba argumentaron que, dentro de las posibilidades económicas del país, se están haciendo importantes inversiones, pero que la industria azucarera aún no ha podido recuperarse totalmente del duro golpe que sufrió en el período especial.

Hay un alto grado de obsolescencia, tanto en la parte agrícola como en el sistema de cosecha y transportación. La industria igualmente requiere una especial reanimación y modernización. Similares acciones habrá que realizar en las fábricas que se encargan de obtener y procesar los derivados, como las destilerías.

En el taller se abundó sobre el comienzo de un proceso recuperativo de los centrales. Algunos con más de cuatro zafras sin moler se han puesto en marcha. En la pasada molienda participaron 47 centrales de los 51 del país.

Se conoció asimismo que se están acometiendo importantes inversiones en la agricultura con la compra de tractores, maquinarias y sistemas de cosecha procedentes de Brasil.

Según explicaron los funcionarios, con una firma foránea se inició la inversión extranjera en la agroindustria.

54 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 55 ______Esta experiencia comenzó por el Central 5 de Septiembre, en Cienfuegos, y la contratación contempla la administración conjunta de esta industria con representantes de otro país, con acuerdos redituables para ambas partes. Además, se contrataron a empresas también extranjeras, cinco plantas bioeléctricas bagaceras, de las cuales se están construyendo dos generadoras de electricidad.

Wilson Morel Sosa, vicepresidente del Grupo Empresarial Azcuba, se refirió al programa de desarrollo 2014-2018, el cual, aseguró, ha tenido en cuenta los Lineamientos del VI Congreso del Partido, el desarrollo tecnológico que aplican otros países azucareros, el desarrollo tecnológico en Cuba, así como las inversiones, mejoras organizativas, innovaciones, transferencias tecnológicas e investigaciones a desarrollar e introducir en el referido período.

Otros directivos señalaron los modestos logros del sector, entre los que mencionaron el crecimiento en la producción de azúcar por tres años consecutivos, a razón de un 12 por ciento, y la mejoría gradual en la calidad del crudo.

Reconocieron la buena respuesta en el rendimiento agrícola y la disponibilidad de caña, dificultad que por varios años constituyó la principal limitante de este sector.

Señalaron entre los discretos avances, la disminución de los costos de producción, el crecimiento de las producciones de derivados, y que los centrales se autoabastezcan de energía y aporten a la red nacional.

Como síntoma del reordenamiento se refirieron a la recuperación de las capacidades de almacenaje de azúcar, miel y alcohol, y el aseguramiento de su logística para la exportación.

Especialistas de Azcuba aludieron a la política industrial hasta el 2018, la cual incluye todo el desarrollo de los centrales y el incremento de las capacidades fabriles en aquellos que lo tengan concebido en el programa de acercamiento de las áreas cañeras.

En este período, según afirmaron, se acometerá la estandarización de los sistemas y equipamiento industrial, y la introducción de tecnologías para asimilar el incremento del tiro directo al basculador, a través del montaje de mesas alimentadoras, viradores de camiones e instalación de doble centros en el batey.

La etapa contempla, además, la rehabilitación y modernización del equipamiento tecnológico e introducción de nuevas tecnologías para el incremento de la eficiencia, y la automatización del proceso tecnológico.

Para el sector resulta prioridad la preservación y rescate de la imagen de los centrales, la activación de los que permanecen paralizados, así como la habilitación de los talleres de maquinado y el aseguramiento de los recursos para el mantenimiento.

55 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 56 ______La ingeniera Bárbara Hernández Martínez, jefa de Generación Eléctrica, de la Dirección de Plantas Industriales de Azcuba, anunció que se instalarán hasta el 2030 un estimado de 715 megawatt en bioeléctricas, y que para lograr ese propósito se pondrán en marcha dos cada año, a partir del 2015.

«Se están negociando, una en el central Jesús Rabí con crédito de China, y otra en el Ciro Redondo como empresa mixta entre dos firmas extranjeras».

Con esa generación se podrán vender al Sistema Electroenergético Nacional los excedentes eléctricos durante la zafra de 150 a 180 días. Estas bioeléctricas deberán producir electricidad durante un período no menor de 240 días anuales, según informó.

«Cada megawatt generado por estas plantas evita consumir 280 toneladas de petróleo en la generación de electricidad», subrayó.

Bárbara reiteró que, si bien en la pasada zafra azucarera no pudo cumplirse el plan de producción de crudo por deficiencias, tanto objetivas como subjetivas, debe quedar claro que la caña de azúcar es mucho más que azúcar.

«Disponemos de una cantidad de energía muy superior a la que demanda la producción azucarera, y podemos acumular bagazo para paradas y arrancadas, y entregar excedentes a plantas de derivados y al Sistema Electroenergético Nacional, pues todos nuestros centrales están sincronizados por 33 000 voltios, con una infraestructura agrícola e industrial distribuida por toda la Isla.

«Esta industria genera el combustible que necesita a muy bajo costo, y sin contaminar el medio ambiente, pues el dióxido de carbono que debiera emitirse al quemarse en las calderas de vapor, la caña lo absorbió por fotosíntesis al crecer», señaló finalmente. ------

Are self-employed Cubans really budding entrepreneurs? By MIMI WHITEFIELD [email protected] Miami Herald, Posted on Sun, Aug. 11, 2013 ADALBERTO ROQUE / AFP/Getty Images

Farmers wait for fruit and vegetable retailers to buy from them at a wholesale market in Havana, on August 6, 2013. Entrepreneurship has many faces in Cuba today, from street vendors who sell skimpy tube tops purchased at Miami discount stores to the chauffeur of an improvised bicycle taxi to the operator of a white-tablecloth private restaurant with the tips already included in the bill.

But while the government initially declared that it wanted to move 500,000 Cubans off state payrolls by April 2011 and another 800,000 by the beginning of 2012, it has fallen far short of those targets. And there is a vast gray area in this world of so-called cuentapropistas, where the self-employed function on the fringes of legality, key elements that would lead to successful small businesses are missing and broad questions remain about how the program should go forward in a communist country.

56 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 57 ______There’s also disagreement about whether Cuba’s flirtation with private business represents a path toward true entrepreneurship or has simply resulted in reinforcement of a shadowy informal economy where cuentapropistas bend the rules in order to survive.

At the end of May, nearly 430,000 Cubans in a workforce of 5 million were self-employed, according to a report from the CubanMinistry of Labor and Social Security. But not all of them are furloughed government employees.

Some 14 percent were retired, meaning they didn’t switch from current state employment to working on their own, and analysts say a significant number are probably former black marketeers, who are used to operating outside the bounds of state control, or workers who have held on to their state jobs but want to earn extra money on the side.

“So far it’s been more of a legalization of the illegal economy than creation of a small business class,’’ said Ted Henken, a Baruch College professor and president of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

Self-employment is permitted in181 economic activities, and 18 percent of cuentapropistas are employed by small private business owners. In other fledgling attempts at private business, scores of non-farm cooperatives — most of them former state companies — have been launched and private farmers are now cultivating once-idle public land.

The budding private sector is mainly a service economy. The most popular activities are selling and preparing food, transportation of cargo and passengers, renting homes and selling agricultural products on the street, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

Karina Gálvez, an economist from Pinar del Rio, agrees that the recent changes aren’t necessarily things the government wanted to do, but said the economic situation as well as pressures from Cuba’s nascent civil society obligated the reforms.

Speaking at the recent meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy in Miami, Gálvez said that many of the self-employed have to “break the law’’ to make a living because taxes are so high and many self-employment activities still aren’t allowed, including freelance work by lawyers, accountants, architects and other professionals.

Some of the new entrepreneurs have resorted to bribing inspectors to avoid high fines for violations, said Gálvez, who is also one of the founders of Convivencia, a digital magazine.

“In Cuba, everyone commits illegalities in their business,’’ said Antonio Rodiles, a Cuban political activist who has created a forum for public debate through his Estado de SATS movement. One of the most common infractions, he said, is stealing electricity because utility bills are so high.

“At this point, self-employment is failing,’’ he said. Many of the cuentapropistas are dependent on the black market to supply them, and instead of the emergence of a small entrepreneurial class, he said, what is happening is the encouragement of an informal or underground economy.

But Gálvez said she believes the self-employed prefer to operate legally. “This gives me hope,’’ she said. “I believe in the force of la pequeña (small).”

José Luis Leyva Cruz, a professor at the University of Camaguey, also has embraced entrepreneurship with a project he calls “ DLíderes,’’ whose goal is to develop entrepreneurial leaders in Cuba. Lacking another space, the organization held its first meeting in front of his home in Camaguey.

57 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 58 ______He outlined DLíderes’ goals during the ASCE meeting: Develop networks of entrepreneurs and intellectuals, provide training in leadership and technology, develop a digital magazine called @emprenda, and connect international patrons with Cuban entrepreneurs.

“In Havana you see a lot of successful entrepreneurs who are creating jobs or innovating,’’ said Henken. For example, some of the more sophisticated paladares (private restaurants) have live music, well stocked bars and gourmet fare.

“There is a new class of high-quality gourmet restaurants mainly surviving on their owners’ ingenuity,’’ he said. But Henken added, some of the more established enterprises “may have some form of protection’’ and are run by former military or government officials.

Many self-employed people are “still trapped in survival mode with very low productivity,’’ Henken said. “And a lot of corruption is caused by unworkable, antagonistic rules the government has put in place.’’

Analysts said important ingredients for these very small businesses to be more successful would be micro-credit programs, a dependable wholesale network to supply them, and a system for allowing investment capital.

“The micro-entrepreneur is the beginning of the solution; it is not the solution,’’ said Jorge A. Sanguinetty, president of Devtech, an international consulting firm specializing in development.

Self-employment became legal in Cuba in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged the island into dire economic straits, but it fell out of favor as a government policy until President Raúl Castro revived it in 2010.

The Cuban government has made it clear that it doesn’t want market forces to get out of control and that it isn’t a fan of wealth accumulation by its citizens. During the 2011 Party Congress, Castro said that self-employment is “an active element facilitating the construction of socialism in Cuba.’’

Meanwhile, informal trade connections also operate between the cuentapropistas and Cuban- Americans despite the U.S. embargo, which has been in place for more than 50 years and prohibits U.S. citizens and companies from buying and selling in Cuba.

U.S. exports of food, farming equipment and medicine are exempt from the embargo, but a wide array of goods also enters in the form of gifts to family and friends.

Cuban-Americans not only bring in many of the products offered for sale by Cuba’s self- employed, but they invest in businesses and provide tools, equipment and other inputs needed to set up small businesses from car-washing operations to woodworking shops.

The Obama administration lifted restrictions on family visits and remittances in 2009, opening the floodgates for Cubans-Americans to send cash and products to the island, and then went even further in 2011 by allowing any American to send $500 per quarter to qualified Cubans on the island.

There are various levels to this “commerce.’’ Some people operate purely as “mules,” ferrying goods to Cuba for a fee and working with a group of customers who aren’t necessarily family members. Others carry goods to Cuba for resale by their families.

58 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 59 ______Still, other Cuban-Americans act as silent partners, generally joining family members in various enterprises, or supply the cash for purchases of real estate or cars.

“There is this gray area with various levels of legality,’’ said Richard Feinberg, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In effect, sending remittances and goods to Cuba’s private sector is a “way to punch a hole in the embargo,’’ he said.

Despite the problems faced by Cuba’s new class of small entrepreneurs, Sanguinetty views self- employment as a positive in creating civil society. “In any society there are entrepreneurs. The point is that a business entrepreneur is an entrepreneur in general — including political activities. An entrepreneur is a very dynamic person, willing to take risks.’’ ------Cuba and the High Cost of Political Apathy August 12, 2013 | Pedro Campos

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” – Plato

Havana photo by Caridad

HAVANA TIMES — The debates surrounding Cuba’s new Labor Law are starting on the island. In this connection, it is not enough to express our opinions, to say what we think at the meetings – based on the top-down administrative model – to be held around the country. As this is an issue that affects us all, we must, all of us, demand that the final draft of the bill be subjected to a free and democratic nationwide referendum.

Unfortunately, owing to the Cuban government’s long-standing policy of excluding the public from decision-making processes, many will likely say: “I don’t care what they finally approve. I’m indifferent to everything this government does.”

This is a serious mistake. The labor law is something that involves all Cuban citizens.

59 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 60 ______Recently, my friend Felix Sautie, a fellow activist who is also struggling for a participative and democratic form of socialism, published an article on the patent lack of motivation he has perceived in some sectors of Cuban society, as regards to participating in the reform processes underway in our country.

This apathy is not only evident in people’s response to the extremely modest changes being implemented as part of the “reform process”, but also to Cuba’s socio-economic and cultural ailments in general.

In effect, no few citizens opt to distance themselves from the country’s problems, aware that it is next to impossible to have any real say in these processes, which the State- Government-Party attempts to control as though they were a private affair and not something that ought to be decided by each and every one of the citizens who are going to suffer their consequences later.

The sad truth of the matter is that the profound disappointment that has built up in Cuba because of the failure of the huge efforts of the Cuban people and the insignificant progress that has been achieved at the level of the majority’s concrete, daily lives, has ended up convincing many that nothing is really worth saying or doing.

The bureaucracy itself took care of propagating the conformist and counterrevolutionary saying which goes: “no one can fix this, but no one can change it either.”

The Party is the vanguard of the revolution. Photo: Caridad

This is the way in which Cuba has been governed for over fifty years, through methods that create spectators rather than political actors, for everything is decided at the top and declared through abusive presidential decrees.

Those who have taken action, proposing a different way of governing, have ultimately been crushed by the apparatus, silenced and excluded, in the best of cases, and

60 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 61 ______imprisoned or exiled, in the worst. All the while, the Party’s “cadre policy” has taken care of promoting those who are loyal.

The “revolutionary leadership” that has controlled the country, government, State and Party for over 50 years has hijacked the nation’s politics and, since coming to power, anyone who has dared promote policies different from theirs, be it for Cuba’s economy or other sectors of its society, have been and continue to be labeled “counterrevolutionaries”, “imperialist agents” and a whole slew of other manipulative appellations typical of neo-Stalinist governments.

The fact is that there always exists a direct relationship between an authoritarian government, such as Cuba’s, and low levels of citizen participation in decision processes.

Cuba’s authoritarian government and undemocratic system have their roots in the concrete military circumstances that led to the triumph of the revolution in 1959, in the context of the Cold War, when a State-controlled and centralized form of socialism was predominant. These circumstances allowed the Cuban leadership to unfold its authoritarian potential.

In this connection, a decisive aspect was the fact that the people blindly trusted their leaders, accepted the indefinite postponement of democratic elections and accepted the struggle for “social justice” demanded by the Sierra Maestra rebel commanders as a priority.

This doesn’t mean the people are to blame for their lot. What it means is that the authoritarian government that still rules Cuba took advantage of their nobleness and devotion. It is not those who refuse to participate in political processes who are most to blame for the country’s apathy, but, rather, those who have impeded and continue to impede others from participating, or to restrict such participation to voicing opinions in the “place, time and venue” decided by those at the top.

We cannot, however, resign ourselves to a situation in which people do not participate in debates, do not express their opinions, and do not seek to take part in decision-making processes. If we did, we would also have to resign ourselves to having authoritarian governments forever.

Bertolt Brecht once said: “The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life. He doesn’t seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines, all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his political ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics. He doesn’t know, the imbecile, that from his political non- participation comes the prostitute, the abandoned child, the robber and, worst of all, corrupt officials, the lackeys of exploitative multinational corporations.”

If we want to move forward, if we want to break out of Cuba’s current economic, political and social state-of-things, then we have to take action, we have to shake away

61 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 62 ______the apathy of those who have lost hope, encourage their participation in society, the voicing of opinions, the struggle against the violation of other people’s rights, against impositions and authoritarianism and, of course, continue the struggle for freedom of expression through all possible peaceful means.

Photo: Caridad

All Cubans must feel free to express what they wish, no matter what others think, no matter whether absurd provisions that impede the free and respectful expression of one’s opinions are in place.

All Cubans have the right to demand participation in decision-making processes that affect them, beyond official debates, to demand, in all possible places, at all podiums, at all meetings, their right to express themselves freely, that laws cease to be dictated in the form of decrees and that they be submitted to everyone’s consideration and vote, by referendum.

It is up to us, to all of us, to put an end to the generalized oppression of our society, to a State whose bureaucratic elite controls and decides everything.

Let no one level absurd accusations at us, saying that we are calling on the people to rebel or anything of this nature. We are calling on the people to peacefully demand their participation in decision processes. What socialism could we even speak of, if they do not?

Given its importance, the workers, the entire population, must demand that the labor law be submitted to a referendum.

62 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 63 ______The costs of political apathy are very high. —– To contact Pedro Campos: [email protected] ------INDISCIPLINA SOCIAL: ¿Un asunto de pi? Por VLADIA RUBIO ([email protected] ) Fotos MARTHA VECINO ([email protected] ) 12 de agosto de 2013

(Foto: MARTHA VECINO)

Calles sin basura, ni escombros o papeles ensuciando el andar; personas que conversan sin que nadie les interrumpa o pase entre ambos olvidando pedir permiso, balcones desde donde lanzan sonrisas y no jabitas con desperdicios o cabos de cigarro; música solo para el disfrute privado, sin agredir el tímpano de los vecinos; muros limpios, libres de graffitis o huellas de zapatos; manos tendidas para ayudar a la señora, respeto por el orden de la cola…

No es la descripción de un panorama ilusorio por abarcador, sino realidad alcanzable para todos los cubanos. La merecemos.

Y es una paradoja, porque al tiempo que abundan disgustos por tal convivencia complicada que viola normas elementales y va de la mano de la falta de educación y la indisciplina, a veces es la propia ciudadanía -una parte de ella- la que atenta contra esa cotidianidad más confortable, higiénica y ordenada.

BOHEMIA fue en busca de explicaciones al fenómeno, para nada exclusivo de esta Isla, pero que aquí resulta particularmente chocante por contradecir los valores y el paradigma de sociedad defendidos por tantos cubanos.

El presidente de los consejos de Estado y de Ministros, general de ejército Raúl Castro Ruz, hizo de este tema uno de los ejes centrales de su discurso en la más reciente sesión de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, cuando incluso condicionó el avance en la actualización del modelo económico al orden, la disciplina y la exigencia. No se estaba refiriendo únicamente al sector productivo, sino al acontecer del país en general.

Lo que ven cien

Un sondeo periodístico realizado entre cien capitalinos, aun cuando para nada pretende ser representativo del panorama nacional, sí aporta un botón de muestra sobre lo que más parece estar reiterándose, al menos en esta ciudad con más de dos millones de habitantes... hasta que el censo diga su próxima y esperada palabra.

Escribir paredes e incluso monumentos habla de sentidos de pertenencia bien deteriorados. (Foto: MARTHA VECINO)

Al interrogar a estos pobladores de disímiles edades, ocupaciones y municipios, mitad del sexo masculino y mitad del femenino, sobre cuáles eran las cinco indisciplinas sociales y violaciones de normas de convivencia que más veían reiterarse en su cotidianidad, 98 por ciento señaló el botar basura y otros desechos en sitios inapropiados concediéndole un lamentable primer peldaño.

Dayamí Arbela, de 43 años, engurruña la nariz en respuesta al mal olor que emana de la loma de desperdicios junto al contenedor de basura, mientras la señala con dedo acusador: “Yo no entiendo por qué la gente tiene que ser tan cochina. ¿Qué trabajo cuesta tirar la jaba dentro del tanque?”

Sintiéndose confortada al quejarse a la reportera, vuelve a la carga: “Pero eso no es lo único mi’ja; junto a la peste, se mete por las ventanas también la música del vecino de al lado, que no me da tregua. He pensado hasta en mudarme, pero es por gusto, porque en todas partes pasa igual”.

Los llamados a voz en cuello, la música alta y otros ruidos se apuntan entre lo que hoy más atenta contra una tranquila vida cotidiana (Foto: MARTHA VECINO)

Junto a Dayamí, 83 por ciento de los interrogados se declaran víctimas de músicas “a todo lo que da” o de ruidos molestos, que van desde las prácticas de un estudiante de trompeta hasta la sierra de cierto carpintero partiendo en dos el amanecer.

No hubo diferencias entre los grupos de edades al señalar como la violación más reiterada la basura y otros desechos fuera de lugar, pero como peculiaridad, en el caso de los ruidos, aquellos entre 15 y 25 años no la indicaron como la segunda de sus molestias. Quizás sea porque entre ellos se apunte la mayoría de los “ruidosos”, especialmente en cuestiones musicales.

A diferencia del resto, los más jóvenes marcaron en segundo lugar los daños al transporte público, que para la generalidad ocupó con 74 por ciento el cuarto peldaño, antecedido por la indisciplina de ensuciar o escribir paredes, y que especialmente molesta a los mayores de 60 años.

Debería haber determinados muros o espacios donde se expresaran aquellos con inquietudes artísticas o de comunicador social, pero la parada de la guagua o la pared exterior de la panadería no pueden servir de soporte, por ejemplo, a un tal JM para anunciarle al mundo que él es “El locote de la Lisa”, acompañado por un dibujo obsceno que intenta graficar las dimensiones de su locura.

Aunque en el quinto lugar, las afectaciones a parques, jardines y áreas verdes en general, fueron señaladas por 64 por ciento del total, esa no deja de ser una conducta que a todos hace la vida menos grata, y llega a indignar cuando trasciende de pisotear el césped a destrozar bancos y hasta cargarlos en peso quién sabe con qué rumbo.

¿Di por qué?

Poco se avanzaría con solo describir situaciones como las mencionadas, aun cuando los números puedan aportar una magnitud algo más precisa del fenómeno. El asunto está en buscar razones, y para eso, indagamos en los motivos que los propios ciudadanos asocian a esas conductas.

El 92 por ciento de los interrogados las atribuyen a la falta de exigencia por parte de las autoridades para hacer cumplir lo establecido. Aunque este multifacético tema no puede

65 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 66 ______quedar solo en manos de los agentes del orden, el coronel Juan José Hernández, de la Dirección General de la Policía Nacional Revolucionaria (PNR), durante el acto central de esa institución por los 60 años de los sucesos del 26 de Julio, subrayaba que “para la PNR, el Moncada de hoy está en garantizar la eficacia, eficiencia y profesionalidad en el enfrentamiento al delito, las ilegalidades y las indisciplinas sociales en el actuar diario, en la cohesión de las acciones con los órganos del Estado, las organizaciones políticas, de masas y sociales, bajo la dirección del Partido, con el objetivo de mantener el orden y la tranquilidad del pueblo”.

El habitual saludo que por tradición distinguía al cubano, se ha ido desdibujando. (Foto: ANTONIO PONS BEATO)

Por su parte, la viceministra de Justicia Rosa Charró comentó a esta reportera la necesidad de “ser mucho más exigentes en la aplicación de las normas con quienes infrinjan la disciplina social y vulneren la tranquilidad ciudadana. No basta con lo educativo. Las dos cosas son importantes y deben aplicarse en la justa medida que correspondan”.

Resolver ese tema nos toca a todos los ciudadanos, también precisaba la viceministra; pero, paradójicamente, la segunda causa por la que acontecen tales hechos, según la muestra con que BOHEMIA interactuó, resultó ser el individualismo y la escasa solidaridad, seguida en tercer lugar por la falta de exigencia sobre la propia ciudadanía.

Es revelador constatar cómo la mayor cantidad de encuestados declaró hacer siempre lo correcto en bien de las otras personas y de su comunidad, al pedirle a cada uno que indicara la frecuencia de ese actuar. De ser así, entonces ¿quiénes son los infractores y los mal educados?, ¿perpetuamente los de al lado? Asoma de manera evidente la falta de una conciencia crítica. Por suerte, fueron los jóvenes quienes más dijeron que solo ocasionalmente hacían lo correcto, con 44,4 por ciento.

Instruidos pero no educados

Violar normas de convivencia ciudadana, incurrir en indisciplinas, usualmente se hace acompañar de mala educación. Por eso, la revista se propuso además indagar en cuáles eran las faltas de educación que más se reiteraban en el diario acontecer.

Daños al transporte público, a teléfonos y a otros servicios de uso colectivo hablan de una indisciplina social a la que ya debe ponérsele coto (Foto: MARTA VECINO)

El centenar de entrevistados no dudó en señalar mayoritariamente, con 83 por ciento, el no pedir permiso para pasar, entrar o salir; y le siguieron -marcados por 71 por ciento en ambos casos- hablar en un tono de voz inadecuado y la ausencia de las “gracias” y el “por favor”. Comunicarse en voz alta, gritar y vocear molesta a todas las edades, según este sondeo; mas a los abuelos parece disgustarles en particular que la gente no salude.

“Llegas a cualquier lugar, al consultorio, a un centro de trabajo, a una cola… y es como si no te vieran, porque nadie te da los buenos días”, refiere dolido Antonio Vistalegre, de 67 años. Junto a este abuelo, 64 por ciento de los encuestados indicó la omisión del saludo como la cuarta falta de educación que más constatan.

Entre las causas de tan maltrecha educación formal los entrevistados apuntaron mayoritariamente a la familia y también a que “los conciudadanos no se respetan entre sí”, 86 por ciento en los dos casos. Como tercera causa quedó señalada por 69 por ciento que “los malos tratos a nivel institucional acarrean la mala educación personal”.

¿No hubo una autoridad que impidiera que ellos prácticamente se adueñaran de la calle, cerrándola y además exhibiendo a todos sus torsos desnudos? (Foto: LEIVA BENÍTEZ)

A propósito de tal estado de cosas, en su ya citada intervención ante el Parlamento, Raúl había expresado: “Conductas, antes propias de la marginalidad, como gritar a viva voz en plena calle, el uso indiscriminado de palabras obscenas y la chabacanería al hablar, han venido incorporándose al actuar de no pocos ciudadanos, con independencia de su nivel educacional o edad”. Luego de una larga y dolorosa enumeración de inadmisibles conductas y faltas de educación, apuntaba: “Todo esto sucede ante nuestras narices, sin concitar la repulsa y el enfrentamiento ciudadanos”.

En el diario y agitado acontecer ha ido calando la desidia e indiferencia ante lo mal hecho en no pocos pobladores (Foto: MARTHA VECINO)

No pocos se han percatado de dicha desidia porque 67 por ciento del sondeo indicó entre los motivos de la mala educación que “a nadie le importa”; ello, sin que hubiera variaciones

68 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 69 ______significativas entre los grupos de edades, salvo en el caso de los abuelos, quienes, en comparación con los de menos edad, fueron los que menos señalaron esa causa.

Yuniel Vladimir Velázquez, por ejemplo, con 24 años, declara sin entibiar mucho las palabras “yo no soy nadie para decirle a la gente lo que tiene que hacer. Mientras el problema no sea conmigo…”

El problema es de todos, y todos somos alguien. Nos empodera el sentido de pertenencia por el lugar donde habitamos, el respeto hacia uno mismo y hacia el prójimo, la ética y en general los valores que han fraguado personalidades y conductas. Pero esas tuercas parecen estar flojas en algunos puntos del engranaje social.

Sin embargo, el primer vicepresidente de los consejos de Estado y de Ministros, Miguel Díaz- Canel Bermúdez recordaba durante un diálogo con la prensa, en vísperas de la sesión parlamentaria, que “a nosotros siempre nos ha distinguido la decencia, el buen comportamiento, no somos una población históricamente chabacana ni vulgar. Con todos esos valores, y debatiéndolo de manera abierta y sin tapujo, comprendiendo que hay una situación económica pero con la voluntad de superarnos a nosotros mismos, podemos resolver esos problemas”.

Fidel Castro's role in Cuba is chiefly offstage as he turns 87

Marc Frank 4 hours ago Politics & Government

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) - Fidel Castro turns 87 on Tuesday, largely out of sight but not out of mind, as Cuba struggles to move on from his half-century rule and as many of his policies are reconsidered under the leadership of his younger brother Raul.

The birthday of one of Latin America's most iconic revolutionary figures has been a low key celebration in recent years. A choral concert in his honor at the Jose Marti national monument in Havana on Monday evening was the only official event planned.

Castro goes about his daily activities out of the public eye, and how much influence the retired comandante still wields is unknown. He emerges every once in a while to reassure his followers that he is very much around, frustrating those who wish he was not.

69 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 70 ______"No one believes anymore that Fidel has any real influence over day-to-day policy," a western diplomat said, "but that doesn't mean he is never consulted on big questions or that when he comes out it isn't important."

The government has staged just three media events this year for Castro: first, to vote in January for National Assembly deputies and chat with local reporters; then, in February, to attend the new parliament's opening session where his brother's possible successor, 53- year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, was named first vice president, and more recently, to inaugurate a school near his home on the outskirts of Havana.

Photos of a frail-looking Castro meeting with visiting dignitaries are occasionally published, as well as some of his writings, though far fewer than his once frequent "Reflections," on global topics.

The once-towering, broad-shouldered man is now stooped. He has trouble walking, and his famed booming oratory has softened to a near whisper. It is a transformation which brought tears to two women interviewed for this story.

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Delegates enter to the sixth congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) beside a portrait of former …

Castro, now referred to as "the historic leader of the revolution," lives in a modest home on the western outskirts of Havana with his wife, Dalia Soto del Valle, near his sons and grandchildren, and where he studies, writes and receives visitors.

Cubans who have seen Fidel up close on one of his occasional ventures away from home report he remains lucid and in relatively good shape for a man who was at death's door in 2006 after undergoing repeated abdominal surgeries and reportedly having part of his colon removed.

"He was old, but the same old Fidel, asking questions, citing statistics from last year and before, shuffling around, chuckling and talking with everyone," said a worker at the Empresa Genética Pecuaria Los Naranjos in Atemisa province, around 30 miles west of Havana. "His mind was still amazing," he said.

70 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 71 ______The worker, who asked that his name not be used, said Castro on April 26 paid a surprise two-hour visit to the company, which raises and improves livestock such as goats, turkeys and buffalo.

"He showed up in a caravan of at least 10 vehicles, including two vans and an ambulance, and accompanied by his wife, one of his sons, numerous military-clad bodyguards and other people," he said.

SMOOTHING THE TRANSITION

Castro writes that he spends much time trying to increase Cuba's agricultural production and promoting alternative animal forage plants grown at Los Naranjos.

"Fidel is Fidel and he continues experimenting in the countryside," said a farmer in central Camaguey who asked that he not be identified.

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People are seen through a poster with a picture of Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro and late Argentine Che Guevara …

Raul Castro, 82, has governed the Caribbean island since his brother became ill.

He is presiding over a sweeping plan to move the bankrupt Soviet-style economy in a less paternalistic and more market-friendly direction, like those of Vietnam and China. He has loosened regulations on travel and the buying and selling of personal property and broadened other personal freedoms, while preserving Cuba's one-party communist system.

Raul Castro rarely speaks in public, and when he does it is invariably for less than 45 minutes, a dramatic change from the hours-long oratory of Fidel Castro. Cubans expressed mixed feelings about this difference between the brothers.

71 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 72 ______"What do I miss? The constant guidance of Fidel in the face of any eventuality," said Pedro Gonzales, a Santiago de Cuba retiree.

Havana housewife Luisa, who declined to give her last name, was less kind, saying that reforms under Raul had done little to improve her life and had created "uncertainty among the people." She said his inability to communicate left her feeling like "I'm on a boat without a captain."

Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, said Fidel Castro had transitioned from policy making to "a symbolic role as the protector of the revolution's integrity," in order to allay public unease, which inevitably accompanies both a leadership and economic transition in a country like Cuba.

"There is a need for continuity with change and that is his new role," Sabatini said.

(Editing by David Adams and Jackie Frank)

------Panama ending search of N. Korean ship from Cuba 12 hours ago

PANAMA CITY (AP) -- Panamanian officials say they're ending their search of a North Korean ship that was detained as it carried weapons from Cuba.

Public Security Minister Jose Raul Mulino tells The Associated Press that Panama removed the ship's last unopened container, which was buried under sacks of sugar, and found it held equipment for launching missiles.

Panama has unloaded and searched 25 containers, finding a variety of weapons systems and parts. Cuba says it was not violating sanctions meant to halt sophisticated arms sales to North Korea because the ship contained obsolete weapons being sent back for repair.

But some of the containers were loaded with undeclared live munitions, and United Nations experts will be in Panama in the coming days to prepare a report on whether the shipment violated sanctions. ------

An Information Service of the Cuba Transition Project Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies University of Miami

Issue 198

72 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 73 ______August 12, 2013 José Azel* The Illusion of Cuban Reform: Castro Strikes Out**

The 2006 succession from Fidel Castro to his brother Raúl, programmed since the early days of the Cuban revolution, was efficient, effective, and seamless. The eighty-two-year-old Raúl, who recently announced that he will step down in 2018, is now orchestrating his own succession behind the scenes. But however the transition from the Castro era plays out, one outcome is off the table: that Raúl will emerge as a reformer to end the Communist era and inaugurate a new democratic and market-oriented Cuba. How Cuban communism will finally meet its demise is yet to be known, but perhaps we will find parallels in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 at age eighty. His successor, Yuri Andropov, took over at sixty-eight and died less than two years later. Andropov was in turn succeeded by the Konstantin Chernenko, who died a year later at the age of seventy-four. Chernenko was then succeeded by the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. It took the Soviets three leadership changes to get to a new generation with prospects for reform.

Cuba’s first vice president of the Council of State, the eighty-two-year-old José Ramón Machado Ventura, was expected to be Raúl Castro’s pro forma successor. In February 2013, however, he was replaced in that post by Miguel Díaz-Canel, a factotum-like party apparatchik in his early fifties. The international media jumped on the appointment and concluded that Cuba’s Gorbachev had arrived on the scene. But while Díaz-Canel is in line to succeed Raúl in the Council of State, this is not equivalent to being number two in the regime. General Raúl Castro leads Cuba not because he is president of the Council of State, but because he is first secretary of the Communist Party, head of the armed forces, and Fidel’s brother. Article 5 of the Cuban Constitution makes it clear that the Communist Party is “the superior leading force of the society and the State.” It is the eighty-two-year-old Machado who remains second secretary of the fifteen- member Politburo of the Communist Party—and thus, at least for now, Raúl Castro’s heir apparent. Under Cuba’s governing succession protocol, the military- dominated Politburo is the cabal that will recommend, when the time comes, the country’s next leader.

The succession plot thickens when we consider that the president of the Council of State is also the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. When Raúl Castro leaves office, it is difficult to envision old comandantes like Ramiro Valdés and three-star generals of the Politburo offering their allegiance and subordinating themselves to a youthful civilian bureaucrat like Díaz-Canel. Civilian control of Cuba’s armed forces is not part of Revolutionary Cuba’s genetic makeup.

When contemplating change in Cuba, one must be mindful that for the past half-

73 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 74 ______century Cuba’s history and political culture has been shaped and dominated by the Castro brothers and their ideas. Raúl Castro’s inner circle is not made up of closet democrats waiting for an opportune moment to put into practice their long- suppressed Jeffersonian ideals. Their governing philosophy is inseparable from the totalitarian ideology that subordinates citizens to the state, and the state to an unelected Communist elite. The incentive for democratic reform is further hindered because this elite profits personally from a symbiotic relationship in which authoritarianism engenders a corrupt oligarchy and that oligarchy profits from the continuation of corrupt authoritarianism. The extraordinary degree to which Communist Cuba has failed to provide for the citizens’ economic well-being is well documented by an avalanche of statistics and data that have defined the country’s stagnation and regression since the 1959 revolution. A most disturbing illustration of this economic condition is Cubans’ purchasing power compared to that of other countries. A study by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies shows, for example, that to purchase fourteen ounces of powdered milk, the average Cuban worker has to work 57.5 hours. To make the same purchase, the average worker in Costa Rica has to work only 1.7 hours. Comparable disparities hold for the other items analyzed in the study’s consumer basket.

A centerpiece of the reform program announced by Raúl Castro in 2010 is the government’s decision to fire up to 1.3 million workers—something on the order of twenty percent of the country’s workforce—from state jobs and then “allow” them to become self-employed “outside the government sector.” In the Cuban version of Orwellian doublespeak, this particular reform is called an “actualization of socialism,” and the term “private sector” is not to be uttered.

The measure assumes that the newly unemployed have the interest, training, and resources to be entrepreneurs able to make an independent living in jobs that may be far from their work experience and training. Furthermore, the reform makes no allowance or acknowledgment that these newly anointed entrepreneurs might require access to cash, credit, raw materials, equipment, technology, or other resources necessary to produce goods and services.

To fully appreciate the extent of this reform surrealism, one must understand that General Castro’s reform measure has helpfully identified the one hundred and seventy-eight jobs that the state now permits for private employment. Cubans can now request permits to become self-employed in activities such as: trade number 23, the purchase and sale of used books; number 29, attendants of public bathrooms; number 34, pruning of palm trees; number 49, wrapping buttons with fabric; number 61, shoe shinning; number 62, cleaning of spark plugs; number 110, box spring repairs (not to be confused with number 116, which is mattress repairs); number 124, umbrella repairs; number 125, refilling of disposable cigarette lighters; number 150, tarot cards fortune telling; number 158, peeling natural fruits (which is different from number 142, selling fruits in kiosks).

74 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 75 ______With significant fanfare, Granma, the Cuban government’s official newspaper, later announced that the activities permitted “outside the government sector” were being expanded to one hundred and eighty-one. The three new permissible activities are granitero (doing tile work), party planning for weddings and quinces (sweet sixteen– like parties), and selling insurance. Cuba’s vice minister of Finance and Prices (yes, there is a ministry in charge of prices) also announced that the activity of granitero would have to be approved by the work directives and by the office of the City Historian. The bureaucrats further decreed that these three activities will be taxed at markedly different fixed monthly fees as follows: graniteros at one hundred and fifty Cuban pesos, party planners at three hundred, and insurance agents at twenty. The central-planning logic of these taxation rates is left for the public to decipher.

Not surprisingly, three years after the issuance of these new rules, the process is mired in a web of internal debate and paralyzing regulation. The dismissal of state employees has been essentially halted and is now supposed to take place over five years. Kafkaesque “efficiency committees” will determine the “ideal” number of employees for each function, and then other committees will decide who is to be dismissed.

The reforms that General Castro has initiated are not driven by any philosophical awakening that recognizes that open political and economic systems produce opportunity and prosperity for the society. They have been adopted in an effort to help save the regime. These are not reforms to unleash the market’s “invisible hand” but to reaffirm the primacy of the Castros’ clenched fist. One does not have to be an economist to appreciate that the refilling of disposable cigarette lighters, for example, will not contribute in any measure to economic development. And yet, the callousness and inadequacy of the reform measures promulgated by Raúl’s diktat are somehow lost in the eagerness by some observers to believe that any change from the Castro brothers, no matter how empty and silly, is a positive sign of genuine reform.

One thing that Cuba’s central-planning arrogance does indisputably accomplish, however, is an exacerbation of racial tensions. Access to dollars is essential for self-employment. The vast majority of Cubans receiving remittances from relatives living abroad and able to become self-employed are white. Afro-Cubans, without access to remittances from family members abroad, are left behind as income inequality increases.

One lesson to be learned from the history of political transition in the former Soviet bloc countries is that the success of reforms hinges on placing individual freedoms and empowerment front and center. This is not where Cuba is headed with its “actualization of socialism,” as Raúl Castro made clear in a speech to the National Assembly in late February: “I was not selected to be president to restore capitalism to Cuba...I was selected to defend, maintain, and continue to perfect socialism and not to destroy it.”

75 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 76 ______In sorting out the future of Communist Cuba, China is also a helpful example. As the United States and other countries began to engage China in the 1970s, attempting to lure it into the larger community of nations, it was widely assumed that a liberalized Chinese economy would create not only prosperity but also greater political freedom. China’s experience has demonstrated the virtue of market reforms and capitalism as engines for prosperity, albeit a prosperity that is enjoyed disproportionately by Communist Party members. But the personal freedoms and the empowerment of the citizenry have not followed, discrediting the belief that any market reform necessarily creates a freer society. Some observers, sharing this mistaken belief, have applauded gestures like Raúl Castro’s “privatization” initiatives. But in reality, the dominance of a one-party regime, coupled with the absence of an independent legal system and legislature, a free press, or other open civic institutions, ensures that these economic changes will not lead to democracy in Cuba. In fact the most likely outcome of General Casto’s latest central planning will be to transfer any wealth generated from the state to the ruling military and party elite—in other words, a kleptocracy.

General Castro has led the Cuban armed forces for more than fifty years. In this period he has taken full advantage of the opportunity to appoint his military officers to positions of command in government and industry. The Cuban military elite control more than sixty percent of the economy. The breadth and depth of this control, over the country’s key sectors, is astonishing. GAESA, the holding company for the Cuban Defense Ministry, is involved in all key sectors of the economy. Enterprises with innocuous-sounding names such as TRD Caribe S.A., Gaviota, S.A., and Aerogaviota are all part of the vast economic holdings of Cuba’s army, navy, air force, and paramilitary forces—the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR). There is every reason to expect that Castro will continue to promote the monopolistic control of the economy by his armed forces, as he has since the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. Accordingly, the most likely “after Raúl” scenario will feature a strong military presence in the country’s civil and economic sphere, as exists in China, with Raúl’s loyalists adhering to the Castro regime’s ideology and methods, with perhaps some minor tinkering around the edges. The likely succession scenario in the short term will follow the lines of a more or less classical military dictatorship, but perhaps led by a triumvirate or some “first among equals” approach. It is hard to imagine a Cuban Gorbachev emerging before the country runs through the remnants of this aging generation of revolutionaries.

It is entirely possible that Raúl, or his immediate successor, will eventually introduce partial but somewhat genuine “reforms” to avoid economic collapse. In that case, the reforms will not be designed or intended to better the lot of everyday Cubans. Rather, he will opt for a variation of the Chinese, Vietnamese, or Russian model in order to prolong the dictatorship and at the same time enrich himself and his comrades by privatizing the country and morphing his revolutionary officers into revolutionary businessmen.

76 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 77 ______In the current system, where enterprises are state owned and managed, military officers enjoy the privileges of an elite ruling class. Their standard of living is higher, they live in better homes, and they have access to luxury consumer goods. But today’s benefits are minuscule when compared with the future opportunities for self- enrichment in positions of equity ownership of the enterprises under their managerial control.

A defining feature of Cuban totalitarianism has been the intrusive use of pervasive repression to atomize society. This process has eliminated political competition, destroyed economic performance, and rendered civil society weak, ineffective, and debilitated by fear. By and large, the politically demoralized—and by now apathetic —Cuban population will not view these ownership changes as particularly undesirable or nefarious. They may even view them mistakenly as a positive transition toward a market economy and prosperity. The irony will be that, believing that they are experiencing democracy and free markets when actually they are not, Cubans will come to despise a new system that serves only to enrich the governing elite. This may set the conditions for a new round of Cuban revolutionary cycles, akin to 1933 and 1959.

Cuba today is not yet post-Castro, but ideologically it is post-communism. When Raúl goes, there may be the appearance of a political “opening” in which other parties may be permitted to exist so long as they don’t challenge official party domination. In this disheartening endgame scenario, the generals oversee a hegemonic party system offering a patina of political legitimacy, and the international community acclaims the generals, or their civilian front men, as agents of change bringing a market economy to Cuba. The post-Castro regime will then present a facade of political normalcy that will enable the generals to monetize their behind-the-scenes power. It will not be important who fills the civilian poster-boy roles. After all, the Roman emperor Caligula made his favorite horse a consul—to show that even a beast could perform a senator’s duties. ______**Previously published in World Affairs Journal, Issue July/August 2013. ______*José Azel is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban- American Studies, University of Miami. He is the author of the recently published book, Mañana in Cuba. ______

The CTP can be contacted at P.O. Box 248174, Coral Gables, Florida 33124- 3010, Tel: 305-284-CUBA (2822), Fax: 305-284-4875, and by email at [email protected]. The CTP Website is accessible at http://ctp.iccas.miami.edu/.

Malos pagos, altos precios Cuaderno de Cuba, 08-12-13, Alejandro Armengol

La brecha entre salarios y precios sigue aumentando en Cuba, lo que constituye una situación anómala con consecuencias que van desde el aumento de la corrupción y el robo hasta la amenaza potencial de disturbios y caos. Y lo peor en este caso es que el principal empleador del país, el gobierno que controla un Estado totalitario, no enfrenta el problema con decisión y premura. Desde 1990 los precios no han cesado de aumentar. El fin del subsidio soviético y el inicio del llamado “período especial”, que ya va para 23 años, trajo como consecuencia que se dispararan las desigualdades en la isla. No es que éstas no existieran con anterioridad, pero se mantenían en parcelas que delimitaban privilegios: el grupo dirigente; un sector dedicado al trabajo privado de forma parcial o completa, más o menos reducido según los años, y la mayoría del sector laboral, que era empleado por el Estado, desde profesionales hasta auxiliares de limpieza. Al comenzar a quebrarse esta parcialización surgieron dos fenómenos hasta entonces desconocidos en Cuba: la posibilidad de vivir —y de vivir bien— gracias a la entrada permitida de dinero desde el exterior y la oportunidad de obtener ingresos, en cifras que el Gobierno no es capaz de pagar, debido a la posesión de determinadas habilidades, capacidades, bienes o medios. El primer grupo de beneficiados fue constituido principalmente por aquellos con familiares residiendo en el exterior, mientras que el segundo lo formaron desde artistas hasta cocineros y dueños de los ahora famosos “paladares”. Tras la llegada de Raúl Castro al mando de los asuntos cotidianos en la isla, las posibilidades de crecimiento de ambos grupos se han ampliado. Sin embargo, el papel del Gobierno se ha limitado a permitir y no a desarrollar. De hecho, en este terreno las quejas que se formulan a diario a la actual presidencia es que no avance más rápido en esa permisividad a cuentagotas, que ha hecho que ahora los cubanos puedan, desde tener una computadora hasta poder viajar al extranjero. Claro que al mismo tiempo, ese gobierno totalitario ha dejado en manos privadas el asunto de conseguir el dinero necesario, tanto para comprar el equipo como el pasaje. Es decir, que al tiempo que se han democratizado las diferencias (ya la desigualdad no se siente en el viaje del dirigente a los países socialistas sino en el dinero que tiene el vecino para comprar un televisor de pantalla gigante), la adquisición de los bienes de consumo han pasado de métodos políticos y sociales a formas individuales (ya el centro de trabajo y el colectivo laboral no otorga la autorización para comprar el televisor, sino el dinero que se recibe del

78 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 79 ______extranjero o que se gana de forma privada). Dicho de forma rápida: el Estado cubano se desentiende cada vez más del problema de la subsistencia de sus ciudadanos. Se asiste entonces al desarrollo cada vez mayor de una especie de engendro económico, en que el “carácter socialista” viene determinado por el monopolio en el comercio de ventas al por mayor, y en buena medida también minoristas, mientras se desentiende del incremento, o incluso el mantenimiento, de la creación de empleos bien remunerados. Esta actuación esquizofrénica solo es posible de mantener bajo el principio de que el Estado te vende, pero no te paga lo suficiente para comprar, por lo que mira hacia el exterior para los ingresos: remesas, turismo, servicios médicos y profesionales en general en otros países y ventas también en el exterior de productos muy específicos, como la industria farmacéutica y algunos minerales. Lo curioso es que, con esta actitud parásita al extremo, el gobierno logre mantener un control absoluto y sustentar una retórica nacionalista. No cabe esperanza alguna de que la discrepancia entre precios y salarios vaya disminuyendo, sino todo lo contrario. Limitarse a ver el asunto como el resultado de la existencia de una dualidad monetaria es interpretar un resultado del problema como la esencia del mismo. La dualidad monetaria en Cuba es un problema que el Gobierno de la isla admite, pero cuya solución está subordinada, al menos en teoría, a un aumento de la productividad. Sin embargo, este enfoque no sólo parece estar cada vez más alejado de cualquier posibilidad de éxito, sino que en la práctica no cumple la función de plan de largo alcance para lograr un objetivo, aunque sí un fin más inmediato: dilatar el asunto y trasladarlo a una especie de limbo que intenta ocultar la falta de capacidad o de disposición para hallar una solución. Una estrategia destinada al fracaso económico que es en realidad una táctica política, la cual hasta ahora ha logrado su meta: considerar transitorio un callejón sin salida. Se repite así la paradoja del modelo cubano, donde la falta de eficiencia productiva actúa muchas veces como carta de triunfo político. Esta es mi columna semanal en El Nuevo Herald, que aparece en la edición del lunes 12 de agosto de 2013. ------

La insoportable lucha cotidiana de una familia cubana POR IVÁN GARCÍA ESPECIAL DIARIO LAS AMÉRICAS , Publicado el 08-12-2013

LA HABANA.- Del primero de julio al primero de agosto, la familia de Augusto, 46 años, gastó 2.794 pesos (alrededor de 130 dólares) sólo en comida.

Augusto es electricista en una empresa estatal. Su esposa Yadira, 42 años, es enfermera. Los tres hijos, Anselmo, Noemí y Yunier de 20, 17 y 14 años respectivamente, estudian.

Anselmo promovió al tercer año de ingeniería civil en la CUJAE, una universidad de formación técnica situada en el distrito de Marianao. Noemí, estudia segundo nivel de bachillerato en una desvencijada escuela del municipio 10 de Octubre. Yunier, el más pequeño, comenzará noveno grado en un colegio próximo a su casa.

Ahora sus hijos están de vacaciones. De la familia forma parte también Inés, madre de Augusto, quien a sus 74 años padece una ligera demencia senil. La familia reside en un caserón amplio y antiguo, construido en 1928, en la barriada habanera de Santos Suárez.

La casa pide a gritos una reparación a fondo. “Al menos no tenemos problemas eléctricos, cableé toda la casa con unos rollos que ‘luché’ en mi empresa. También puse tomacorrientes y encendedores nuevos que me llevé del trabajo”, confiesa Augusto.

Haciendo cálculos al vuelo, la familia necesitaría entre 7.000 y 8.000 dólares para remozar su vivienda. “Es un estimado por lo bajo”, dice Yadira. ------

Cuba today: walking new roads? BY ROBERTO VEIGA GONZÁLEZ JULY 12, 2013 I During the last few decades, Cuban society has changed dramatically. In recent years the government has made changes to certain institutions and has tried to adapt some structures to the needs and hopes of the people. The latter task has not been slow nor lacked the necessary substance. However, it does not satisfy the speed and comprehensiveness demanded by most Cubans.

It is difficult to overcome this contradiction. The precarious conditions in which large segments of the population live demands speed and comprehensiveness, but the economic, social and political circumstances in Cuba, and around Cuba, demand much consideration and gradual changes. A tightrope might be necessary to harmonize these two challenges.

However, there have been significant strides. I will cite some examples: micro and small business enterprises are allowed; it is possible to establish cooperatives for non- agricultural operations; cars and properties can be freely sold and bought; migratory policy has been relaxed; religious freedom is expanding, and free debate is respected in certain small public spaces. Yet this is not sufficient to say that we have done enough to change our social model and live normally.

It is essential that we continue to advance and create the conditions for greater speed and comprehensiveness. It is true that to achieve this, many Cubans, especially leaders and officials, will have to open their minds and take the risk of moving into uncharted and even dangerous territory. But it is also true that the opening of these minds will depend to a large extent on the results of the transit along such paths, to build wellness and balance, and not destabilization and risk.

II. This has marked the positive experience of the establishment of a new private activity, named cuenta-propismo (self employment), on the Island. There had always been threats that once some kind of private activity were allowed it would become a destabilizing social model that would challenge the so-called socialist model. Logically, this could have conditioned the boldness with which we have to assume the institutionalization of this form of economic activity.

However, practice has shown that has not been the case. It is clear that economic entrepreneurs can become important agents of development and that the key to attaining social justice is not in the abolition of private property, a necessary tool of economic endeavor, but in the distribution of wealth. This, of course, calls for a functioning democratic state and an active and organized civil society.

80 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 81 ______In the economic sphere it is necessary to go much further. This requires the acceleration of the decentralization of the state economy, intensification of cooperatives, the establishment of mid-size private enterprises, and the authorization to practice in independent professions.

The results and experiences from the so-called cuenta-propismo can provide support for this advancement. However, such confidence is not enough, because to do so also requires very costly infrastructure, and we do not have the funds. It is essential to develop strategies to achieve this. A new foreign investment policy can help in this regard. It can also help Cuba’s economic integration in Latin America and the expansion of economic ties with other key players, such as Europe and the United States. Sure, the latter requires a degree of stability in political trust between the island and these powers, something for which we have to work hard. However, I think that Cuban leaders are willing to reshape the economic structure in a way that avoids threats to their strategic interests, and would open relations with the United States, Europe and other countries, so long as they perceive that such relations will be transparent.

III As far as religious freedom, it has advanced significantly, although there is still a lot to do in this area. In Cuba, religious freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution, but we lack a legal framework for such guarantee. In that sense, I think that we should not attempt these changes through a law of beliefs that would establish a rigid and feeble equality, trying to establish a common denominator for all religions. It would be better to establish these conditions through legal covenants between the State and each church. Thus, regulations could highlight the institutional nature of each religion and they would participate directly in the design of their legal rights.

On the other hand, a greater role for religious institutions in the country´s social life poses a challenge for them. Their success in Cuba will depend on their understanding of the country’s present and future, and in finding ways to carry out their tasks.

In this regard, I would like to expand on the responsibility of the Catholic Church, of which I am a member, and of the current and future possibilities open to it. The Church, to achieve its catholicity (aspiration of universality) and become the mother of all Cubans, even of those who do not have faith, or who reject faith, should be increasingly open to the entire spectrum of the nation. To that end, the Church should provide spaces for everyone to express themselves, provided that the intention is to seek good through good, to discuss all matters, human and divine, even those that are hostile to Church doctrine. But also, it should embrace the positive from the full range of opinions and desires in society-at-large, frame it within evangelical values, and promote it. This would also require that the Church accompany, without desire of religious or moral hegemony, all Cubans, even those who have no faith, in their life, as this would help them to be more human and therefore achieve greater spiritual life. All this requires the Church to build and articulate, with great commitment, the spirituality emanating from its faith, because in order to offer much, one must possess much.

IV Another major structural change that seems to be a priority for the country’s leadership is the modification of the state’s structure and functions. The intention is to achieve

81 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 82 ______greater functionality for public institutions. In this regard, there has been a reduction and reorganization of what has been called the central state apparatus, and at the same time there has been experimentation in certain parts of the country of new modes of execu- tive and administrative management supported through decentralization and autonomy. There has also been a reinforcing of mechanisms to control corruption, which can be reinforced by economic decentralization and the strengthening of private enterprise.

Furthermore, there is talk that the structure and operation of the National Assembly could be modified as well. There is speculation that the intention is to seek better relationships with citizens, better dynamics in links with other state institutions, as well as an increase participation and effectiveness in all state activities.

All this is positive, but it takes time, it requires analysis and consultation, and careful implementation. This, there is no doubt, is in the works. However, there is a need for more participation by citizens in this area. This would help deepen the enthusiasm of citizens, expand the sense of inclusion, accentuate the legitimacy of the state, and lead to better results and greater participation.

Not much has been heard about upgrading the exercise of judicial functions. However, there are academic analyses and proposals that should be taken into account and shared in order to allow their important and sensitive performance to evolve.

V All this reveals a development path that strengthens the country’s institutions and improves opportunities for every Cuban. Therefore, we must commit to contribute to its consolidation. However, the process is taking into consideration many of the criticisms of citizens, but without establishing the necessary proper dialogue. Some say they prefer to create better conditions for the future, and with greater assurance, to unleash later popular participation. Others claim that no dialogue with society takes place as it should because of the absence of new mechanisms to enforce the role of the people, and that the study of how to erect them has been relegated.

The postponement of this issue has some justification in Cuba, as it has often been reduced to a question of multiparty politics, and this is a tricky matter. On January 1st, 1959, the multiparty model lacked legitimacy in many social sectors, and has since been conceived as a means of confrontation. Therefore, it became relatively easy to replace it with a single party model. However, years have passed and this latest model is also increasingly exhausted.

Given this reality, relevant sectors are determined to find a system without political parties, or a network of relationships that makes political parties almost irrelevant. Others struggle to return to the multiparty model and grant democratic control to political parties. It is evident that an agreement is necessary. I think that political parties can exist and not be insignificant, but I also think that democracy’s ultimate control must be in the exercise of sovereignty by the citizens, which can be expressed from outside political parties and beyond political parties. The study of these possibilities require a lot of effort if we want to direct our institutions to a social model at the service of every Cuban, especially the most disadvantaged, and erect a new benchmark for other peoples. We must also remember that political parties, should they exist, should assume a culture of service to the common good. For this, each party must be willing to recognize the

82 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 83 ______legitimacy of the other, be challenged by various criteria and integrate the best of them, help develop positive initiatives emanating from the opposition, and consider, in their proposals and projects, the wellbeing of all, without exclusions.

The issue of participation in, and through, civil society is an important and delicate subject. So we must study and analyze it and assume practices that perform in the best way possible. Perhaps the most favorable option is not to be satisfied with the mechanisms we already have, or to expect to achieve the most perfect and efficient design of new ways to do it. Perhaps the most effective option is to strengthen inclusive participation, with methodologies that lead to synthesis, through ways that could prove to be unusual, but positive. This could be the best way forward (through study and dialogue, but especially a renewed and creative practice thereof), capable of indicating how to shape the model of our democracy.

VI Some foreigners, and even some Cubans, cannot get away from the temptation to expect changes in Cuba to occur as they did in Latin America, Eastern Europe, South Africa, in Spain, or in the so-called Arab Spring. It is healthy to accept the experience of world history and it may result in certain circumstances that occur similarly to other experiences. However, the generality of the Cuban people, when they think of changes to improve national life, look, above all, to themselves, to their particular anxieties and expectations of freedom and justice. This, of course, would make the process of change in Cuba which we all seek, although from different perspectives and positions, an unprecedented model of national renewal.

The real Cuba, that of the Cuban who suffers and waits, hopes for social readjustment, and economic, legal and political changes (peaceful and deep, gradual and also faster) that lead to a victory for everyone. The Cuban people reject social and political fractures, economic and human misery, the institutional difficulty to build a better country, and the triumph of some over the others. Cubans want a change marked by a process, peaceful and intelligent with increasing integration, which will empower all citizens.

But such changes, in order to be possible, demand goodwill and a spirit of openness, intelligence and serenity, from the vast majority of social actors. It also demands a lot of wisdom and boldness by the State. Therefore, the present moment challenges us all and calls to build the best Cuban socio-political climate needed to consolidate new roads.

ROBERTO VEIGA GONZÁLEZ Matanzas, 1964. Attorney-at-Law . Editor of Espacio Laical, professor of Seminario San Carlos y San Ambrosio, responsible for the Justice and Peace Committee for the Archdioceses of Havana, and member of Laboratorio Casa Cuba. ------

EL FRACASO DE WASHINGTON EN CUBA The failure of Washington policies toward Cuba http://CUBASIKASTRONO-4.blogspot.ca, 08-12-13 Por Hugo J. Byrne

En un triste y sangriento proceso histórico de más de 54 años, la diplomacia norteamericana hacia la tiranía castrista ha constituído un clásico estudio en confusión,

83 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 84 ______incongruencia y fracaso. Este sólido desastre de política externa se ha mantenido sin cambiar un adarme durante las últimas 11 administraciones norteamericanas; seis republicanas y cinco demócratas. Ha sido una constante perversa. Un común denominador maldito. Si se tratara de clasificar objetivamente los diversos métodos que Washington ha usado encarando al régimen castrista desde el fin de la década de los 50 hasta el presente, se les podría ceñir a sólo tres. El primero fue uno de tolerancia y apaciguamiento. Esa política insana y miope, reminiscente de la utilizada por Gran Bretaña hacia Hitler en los años treinta, se implementó incluso desde antes de la fuga de Batista y sus partidarios más cercanos en las primeras horas de enero de 1959. El régimen que se desmoronara en diciembre de 1958 fue presionado por la administración de Eisenhower a ofrecer concesiones de todo tipo a la oposición violenta. Estas presiones incluyeron la decisión insólita de suspender embarques de armas para las fuerzas armadas cubanas que, por adelantado habían sido pagadas por La Habana. Esos equipos bélicos fueron entregados más tarde al nuevo gobierno, cuyo reclamo a la legalidad no era mejor que el del derrocado. En esa época un misterioso funcionario del Departamento de Estado de nombre William Arthur Wieland influenció decisiva y perjudicialmente decisiones vitales del Departamento de Estado relacionadas con Cuba. Weiland era Director de Asuntos Mexicanos y del Caribe y antiguo protegido de Benjamin Summer Wells.

Nacido en los Estados Unidos, Wieland había emigrado a Cuba siendo muy joven junto a su madre y el esposo de ella, un venezolano de apellido Montenegro. Curiosamente ese apellido fue adoptado por el jóven William. Bilingüe, graduado universitario y poseedor de una extensa cultura, Wieland se granjeó la simpatía de Wells (algunos en inteligencia caracterizaban su relación como bastante íntima). El caso fue que al término de la controvertida “mediación”, el embajador Wells regresaría a Washington acompañado de un nuevo edecán. Todas las evidencias recopiladas en documentos hechos públicos por la Secretaría de Estado confirman todo cuanto describe el penúltimo Embajador de Estados Unidos en La Habana Earl E. T. Smith en su libro “The Fourth Floor”. El capítulo más dramático de ese formidable trabajo narra la tensa entrevista entre su autor y el antiguo jefe de estado, en la que el primero informara a Batista del fin del apoyo de Washington a su gobierno. La realidad es que el golpe del 10 de marzo, nunca fue auspiciado por Washington, como siempre afiman el régimen castrista y sus corifeos. La administración de Truman y el Presidente Prío sostenían excelentes relaciones y Washington fue tan sorprendido por el cuartelazo como el gobierno derrocado. Después de enero de 1959 el gobierno de Eisenhower trató sin éxito de coexistir con los nuevos amos de Cuba. Esa fallida estrategia incluyó generosas ofertas para solventar diferencias. Todas fueron rechazadas por La Habana. Un servidor supo de fuentes fidedignas que Philip Bonsal, último embajador norteamericano en La Habana antes de la final ruptura diplomática con Washington, sufrió humillaciones intencionales por parte de funcionarios de segunda categoría del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores revolucionario. Dichas humillaciones fueron aprobadas por el propio Castro. El segundo método fue una hostilidad oficial que, después del increíble capítulo de Bahía de Cochinos y (su consecuencia lógica) la crisis de octubre de 1962, nunca incluyó medidas prácticas para eliminar al régimen. Esto muy a pesar de la leyenda ridícula sobre los muchos intentos contra la vida del Tirano (algunos realmente dignos de comedia barata), el 99% de los cuales nunca pasara de la fase esquemática. Después del asesinato del Presidente Kennedy, los sucesivos

84 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 85 ______gobiernos de Johnson, Nixon y Ford, fundamentalmente concentrados en otros objetivos internacionales, relegaron La Habana al clásico “backburner”. Eso, a pesar de que fue durante esa época cuando más intensa y abiertamente la tiranía castrista conspirara contra la libertad e intereses de Norteamérica y las de otras naciones de Occidente. La administración de Carter, junto a casi desmantelar la infraestructura económica de Estados Unidos hizo cuanto pudo por revertir la relación entre Washington y La Habana a los niveles de 1959, estableciendo las llamadas “Secciones de Intereses” en ambas capitales. No creo necesario recordar al lector que la respuesta de Castro a la mano extendida por Carter fue el éxodo de Mariel. Tal como en sus relaciones con la desaparecida Unión Soviética, Carter demostró con Castro ser un ideólogo divorciado de la realidad e ignorante de la naturaleza intrínseca del totalitarismo. La era de Reagan parecía prometer una actitud más racional hacia el peligro castrista, en consonancia con socavar “el Imperio Malvado”. Esas esperanzas se disiparon ante el envío del General Vernon Walters a La Habana en 1981 en calidad de embajador plenipotenciario de Washington. Tras el proverbial fracaso de esa gestión conciliadora, la política de Reagan se limitó a la contención del castrismo en el Caribe (Granada), África y Centroamérica. Esa política fue esencialmente continuada por Bush I, como parte de la represión contra el tráfico de estupefacientes, siendo su éxito más importante el derrocamiento y captura del dictador de Panamá cuando se evidenció que La Habana compartía de lleno ese negocio en un esfuerzo por aliviar su desastre económico. Bill Clinton, más interesado en política doméstica, se limitó a enviar mensajes sutiles a La Habana para un posible acomodamiento. La invasión de balseros en 1994 y el derribo de los dos aviones de “Hermanos al Rescate” sobre aguas internacionales obstaculizaron ese objetivo. Bush II enfrentó durante sus dos períodos demasiados desafíos internacionales para preocuparse mucho por la tragedia cubana más allá del interés electoral de Florida y New Jersey. Las elecciones del 2008 pusieron en la Casa Blanca al presidente más izquierdista en la historia norteamericana, el que fuera reelecto cuatro años más tarde. Obama, contando con mayorías abrumadoras en ambos cuerpos legislativos durante sus dos primeros años, se dedicó a expandir el control del gobierno federal a extremos ruinosos y dudosamente constitucionales. El componente de política exterior en la presente administración ha sido desde el principio uno de acercamiento y diálogo con todo enemigo que no abrazara abiertamente el terrorismo después de la investidura presidencial del 2008. La excepción a esa regla fue la muerte de Bin Laden y la pulverización de algunos jefes del terrorismo islámico con el uso de los llamados “drones”, ambas medidas altamente populares. Los cabecillas del terrorismo musulmán, naturalmente, fueron substituídos con rapidez. El nuevo presidente de palabra y obra estableció una separación histórica de política exterior, entre su administración y cuantas le precedieron. Eso incluyó la denuncia de la pasada “arrogancia” norteamericana: su reverencia abyecta ante el Rey de Arabia Saudita,cuando el trasero presidencial casi se eleva por sobre su cabeza, que perdura como la máxima humillación de Washington en su historia. Durante la campaña del 2008 Obama prometió dialogar sin condiciones previas con enemigos violentos de América como Castro, Ahmedinejad y Chávez. A esos efectos, en su discurso de aceptación como Secretaria de Estado, la ex senadora Clinton no dejó el menor lugar a dudas: “Regresamos a la diplomacia blanda”. Benhgazi lo demostraría Sin embargo, los avances de Obama y Clinton hacia La Habana, ignorando la historia castrista de medio siglo contra toda apertura a la libertad o hacia Estados Unidos, han encontrado una vez

85 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 86 ______más el rechazo del régimen. Convencer a Ahmedinejad o a su flamante sucesor a renunciar a sus ambiciones nucleares tampoco ha tenido éxito. Los herederos de Chávez continúan adquiriendo material bélico billonario para poder hacer realidad sus amenazas. ¿Esperaban peras del olmo? La pocas naciones de Iberoamérica que (hasta hoy) no son satrapías, como Brasil o Chile, hace tiempo decidieron que su interés permanente no reside en alianzas con el inconfiable Washington, en especial cuando quien decide el destino de nuestro país es la izquierda política. Por eso han abierto sus brazos a los petrodólares de Venezuela, que el castrismo coloniza. La señora Clinton manifestó hace algún tiempo su desilusión ante el rechazo castrista. Hillary afirmó en esa ocasión su “convencimiento de que Raúl Castro no desea liberalizar su régimen ni remover obstáculos para poner fin al embargo económico de Estados Unidos”. La antigua Primera Dama y Senadora por New York parecía haber descubierto la Vía Láctea y su sucesor John Kerry, es sólo el anodino, clásico “caretaker”. ¿Cuántas veces necesita Estados Unidos golpearse la frente con la misma pared? ------

El William Soler donde llevaste a tu pequeña ya estaba ahí Posted on August 12, 2013 by Polioro Cubano

En Cuba nuestros falsos líderes llevan 54 años robándole el dinero a la nación para promover la guerra, el odio, la violencia social, el terrorismo y la división a lo largo de América Latina, África y el mundo

Redacción de Polioro.Com Servicios de Información LinCu

Cardiocentro Infantil William Soler La Habana. Esta foto es de la Agencia de Información Nacional de Cuba, Ni una letra de mención a las personas sencillas comunes. Si no te llamas Fidel o Raúl Castro en Cuba estás muy distante de que mencionen tu nombre, aunque te dediques diariamente a salvar niños enfermos del corazón. Publicdo por Polioro.Com el 13 de enero del 2013

Hoy mismo profesionales cubanos con la más alta calificación técnica, se esmeran en vencer el cáncer y devolverle la vida al ser humano que es el venezolano Hugo Chávez, incluso poniendo en grave riesgo su seguridad personal y la de sus familias, a cuenta del peligroso síndrome del secretismo oficial castrista. Pero el propio resucitado Chávez y los otros bandidos en el poder en Cuba y en Venezuela no reconocen los nombres y grados de sus salvadores, hombres y mujeres mil veces más importantes para la humanidad que los nombres de los asesinos de sus personalidades públicas.

Algo así explica el porqué, a pesar de existir notables científicos en el campo de la medicina en Cuba, no hay ni uno solo reconocido con el Premio Nobel. Estos forajidos de la justicia cubana y mundial, encaramados en el poder y en la Patria en Cuba y en Venezuela, han relegado a segundo plano a los científicos en espera de que sea Fidel Castro el nominado y que reciba el más alto galardón del mundo de hoy.

¿Tú crees desplante más grande y qué clase de desprecio hacia los profesionales y los científicos? Juventud Rebelde no tiene ni siquiera una foto para poner en su artículo ni del Director Eugenio Hussein Selman, ni de la enfermera Ofelia, ni el nombre del Técnico de Rayos X, tampoco el del Técnico de Ecocardiograma, ¡de nadie! Y así y todo escriben aquí que aman a los profesionales de la salud…

¡Pero de qué estamos hablando! Polioro Com allá en Miami, enseguida consiguió una foto del Dr Naranjo. ¡Pa su madre! Si soy yo preferiría que me odien, a ver si así me toman una foto aunque sea en la Estación de la PNR. Mire amigo visitante, lea esto; cuenta como se siente uno cuando lo menciona la sociedad. “ Queremos agradecer en especial al sistema de salud cubano, a la Revolución, que ha puesto a disposición de todos las tecnologías y el personal médico calificado y benefactor”-dice esta madre cubana sincera. No es su culpa identificar los escasos recursos que el Gobierno castrista permite que sirvan a los cubanos de a pie con la benevolencia de la Revolución; es la propaganda castrista que conduce y mantiene a varios millones de cubanos bajo esta agradable, cómoda ilusión.

Señora Cyara, mira a tu alrededor…

Señora Cyara, mira a tu alrededor y comprenderás sin muchas explicaciones que no es ese el lugar que los reales revolucionarios cubanos queremos para Cuba y los cubanos.

El Clan Castro nos engaña a todos: a ti, a Lyan, a mí, a mis hijos y nietos; a todos los cubanos. Ya pasó medio siglo y la licencia que nos otorgó Liborio para sacar al cubano de la pobreza y hacer de Cuba un país próspero y libre expiró sin lograrlo, porque se hicieron cargo de ella los Hermanos Castro, sus descendientes y colaboradores incondicionales, y ellos nunca trataron de llegar a ninguna cosa buena para el pueblo cubano.

El propio Hospital William Soler, donde llevaste a la pequeña Lorena ya estaba ahí cuando nosotros, la Revolución, tomamos el poder. Las instalaciones nuevas y modernas construidas después de 1959 las dedicamos a atender extranjeros y personalidades de la nomenclatura o a realizar investigaciones secretas para preparar armas bacteriológicas de destrucción masiva, prohibidas por la humanidad. Nuestros falsos líderes llevan 54 años robándole el dinero a la nación para promover la guerra, el odio, la violencia social, el terrorismo y la división a lo largo de América Latina, África y el mundo.

Mira, lee aquí los hechos -Los Servicios de… Pepita Riera-, la mayoría con nombres, apellidos, fechas, lugares… Y si aun quieres mayor información acerca de alguna de las afirmaciones que en este artículo o en este sitio web aparecen –como por ejemplo: “dedicamos modernas instalaciones científicas a realizar investigaciones secretas para preparar armas bacteriológicas de destrucción masiva”-, escríbenos y publicaremos de inmediato información específica y confiable acerca del asunto, con citas, protagonistas y abundante documentación.

Como el Clan Castro te come la mente, amigo chavista. A la hora que el regimen castrista publicaba esto sus funcionarios se negaban a recibir los equipos medicos que le regalaba Su Alteza Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al Maktoum de Dubai.

Un ejemplo, Señora Cyara:

Nuestro amigo Dr Hussein Selman le dijo al periódico Granma -no puedo saber si voluntariamente u obligado- que el bloqueo no le permite al Hospital William Soler adquirir ciertos equipos porque esa institución, el Hospital William Soler, está entre las denegadas del permiso Americano para este tipo de transacción. No lo sé, quizá sea cieto lo que dice el doctor.

Sin embargo la organización caritativa de Dubai(1) Gulf for Good, que le regala importantes medios materiales a numerosos hospitals del mundo, dice que le regaló al William Soler de La Habana, Cuba, el equipamiento que el hospital solicitaba para el Cardiocentro Infantil y que nunca lo recibieron porque los directivos cubanos no cumplieron jamás con preparar los papeles pertinentes. Tampoco pudieron emplear el dinero en gastos locales. La organización entonces le entregó los medios al Haiti Hospital Appeal, que lo necesitaba y lo quería, y lo recibieron.

¿Crees que él Director Hussein salman pudiera explicar el asunto?

Notas de la Redacción: 1. Established in March 2001, Gulf for Good operates under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al Maktoum | G4G Chairman: Brian Wilkie. El regalo de cumpleaños del Washington Post al Clan Castro Posted on August 13, 2013 by PolioroCom 7 “El tipo de civilidad que es reconocido en todo el mundo como la dignidad básica -la libertad de hablar y asociarse, para elegir a los dirigentes de uno, para vivir sin temor a los servicios de seguridad del régimen- no está en la mente del señor Castro.” The Washington Post

Editorial de Polioro.Com Servicios de Información LinCu

Para el Segundón Dictatador los derechos humanos son cuento. Composición de LinCu-Adán, de Cuba

Palabras vacías de Raúl Castro sobre civilidad en Cuba es el título del Editorial del Washington Post el 12 de Agosto, la víspera del cumpleaños Fidel Castro, quien figura como Padrino y máximo jerarca del Clan Castro, cuyas decisiones son en realidad tomadas por dos bandos separados en La Habana, los tres hijos del anciano dictador con Dalia por un lado y su tío Raúl Castro, quien detenta la jefatura nominal del Clan, por el otro bando.

Después de recordar en una breve cita que hace apenas un mes el hermano menor de Castro -ellos le llaman Presidente de Cuba Raúl Castro- lamentó la desaparición de la cultura y la civilidad cubanas y arremetió contra el mal comportamiento ciudadano, desde la construcción de casas sin permisos, pasando por gritos e insultos en las calles, burlando el pago del pasaje del autobús, hasta la pintura de grafittis en las paredes de la ciudad. “Vivir en sociedad implica, en primer lugar, la aceptación de normas que preserven el respeto por la decencia y los derechos de los demás”, cita el Post que declaró el cabecilla cubano.

“¿Los derechos de los demás? ¿Civilidad?“, se pregunta el Washington Post, para luego asegurar que “El tipo de civilidad que es reconocido en todo el mundo como la dignidad básica -la libertad de hablar y asociarse, para elegir a los dirigentes de uno, para vivir sin temor a los servicios de seguridad del régimen-

no está en la mente del señor Castro. Su régimen sigue amenazando y persiguiendo a aquellos que se atreven a cuestionar su legitimidad.”

En este artículo el Consejo Editorial del Post le acertó al castrismo en el diez de la diana, y sin preámbulos ni entuertos periodiqueros, con valentía, le ha espetado en pleno pecho el golpe demoledor de la verdad aplastante al régimen totalitario de Cuba. El prominente diario americano a continuación le relata al público de los Estados Unidos -a menudo desinformado sobre el cubano de a pie- la represión contra las archiconocidas Ladies in White para los americanos.

“Siete días después de el señor Castro pronunció estas palabras, -recuerda el Post-, los grupos de la sociedad civil en Damas de Blanco hicieron una marcha por la libertad y los derechos humanos en la provincia de Matanzas. Han hecho esto antes, en otros domingos, en otras ciudades. Un grupo de partidarios del gobierno cubano por la fuerza interrumpió la marcha y procedió a golpear y hostigar a las miembros del grupo, que fue fundado por las esposas, madres, hermanas e hijas de 75 presos políticos que fueron encarcelados durante la represión de hace una década. El ataque fue el más reciente acoso e intimidación a disidentes cubanos.

Los editores del Washington Post saben que finish coronat opus y así lo demostraron en su breve pero contundente editorial regocijándose primero porque Samantha Power, la embajadora de los Estados Unidos ante la ONU, le pidiera a los oficiales cubanos realizar una investigación creíble sobre la muerte Oswaldo Payá y de Harold Cepero, líderes del opositor Movimiento Cristiano de Liberación, y una demanda similar provino del Presidente del Comité de Relaciones Exteriores del Senado, Robert Menéndez; y segundo porque le ha recordado al régimen dictatorial cubano que el Post tiene una información que genera una razonable duda en relación con los eventos que condujeron a la muerte de los opositores cubanos narrados a ellos por uno de sus protagonistas, Ángel Carromero, el joven político español envuelto en el incidente.

“Tal vez es demasiado sugerir que el señor Castro podría permitir una investigación verdadera sobre estas muertes trágicas, no importa a dónde conduzca. Eso sería verdaderamente civil.” -termina declarando el Editorial del Washington Post. ------Risk of doing business in Cuba: Raul Castro’s empty talk on civility, ‘cosmetic’ reforms Democracy Digest, August 13, 2013 in

90 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 91 ______Fidel Castro (far right) turns 87 today, “largely out of sight but not out of mind,” Reuters reports: Castro goes about his daily activities out of the public eye, and how much influence the retired comandante still wields is unknown. He emerges every once in a while to reassure his followers that he is very much around, frustrating those who wish he was not. “No one believes any more that Fidel has any real influence over day-today policy,” a western diplomat said, “but that doesn’t mean he is never consulted on big questions or that when he comes out it isn’t important.” Castro has transitioned from policy making to “a symbolic role as the protector of the revolution’s integrity,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, in order to allay public unease, which inevitably accompanies both a leadership and economic transition in a country like Cuba. “There is a need for continuity with change and that is his new role,” Sabatini said.

Legalizing the illegal economy But the cosmetic nature of the current changes is increasingly evident, the Miami Herald reports, citing “disagreement about whether Cuba’s flirtation with private business represents a path toward true entrepreneurship or has simply resulted in reinforcement of a shadowy informal economy where cuentapropistas bend the rules in order to survive.” ‘While the government initially declared that it wanted to move 500,000 Cubans off state payrolls by April 2011 and another 800,000 by the beginning of 2012, it has fallen far short of those targets,” the Miami Herald reports:

91 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 92 ______At the end of May, nearly 430,000 Cubans in a workforce of 5 million were self-employed, according to a report from the Cuban Ministry of Labor and Social Security. …Some 14 percent were retired, meaning they didn’t switch from current state employment to working on their own, and analysts say a significant number are probably former black marketeers, who are used to operating outside the bounds of state control, or workers who have held on to their state jobs but want to earn extra money on the side. And there is a vast gray area in this world of so-called cuentapropistas, where the self-employed function on the fringes of legality, key elements that would lead to successful small businesses are missing and broad questions remain about how the program should go forward in a communist country. “So far it’s been more of a legalization of the illegal economy than creation of a small business class,’’ said Ted Henken, a Baruch College professor and president of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. Hat-tip: BabaluBlog

Risky business The Economist received the following letter from Stephen Purvis, a British businessman detained in Cuba for 15 months, which highlights the personal and political risks of doing business in Cuba: Dear Editor, I enjoyed reading about my misfortunes in the Economist, albeit many months after publication and in the company of fellow inmates in the Cuban high security prison, La Condesa. I would ask you to correct the impression that you give in the May 9th 2012 edition and subsequent articles that I was accused and detained for corruption. During my 8 month interrogation in the Vila Marista I was accused of many things, starting with revelations of state secrets, but never of corruption. …..

92 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 93 ______I spent time with a number of foreign businessmen arrested during 2011 and 2012 from a variety of countries, although representatives from Brazil, Venezuela and China were conspicuous in the absence. ….. Whilst a few of them are being charged with corruption many are not and the accusations range from sabotage, damage to the economy, tax avoidance and illegal economic activity. It is absolutely clear that the war against corruption may be a convenient political banner to hide behind and one that foreign governments and press will support. …. Why for example is the representative of Ericsson in jail for exactly the same activities as their Chinese competitor who is not? Why for example was one senior European engineer invited back to discuss a potential new project only to be arrested for paying technical workers five years ago when he was a temporary resident in Cuba? You interpret the economic liberalization evident at street level as an indication of a desire for fundamental change. …. But until the law relating to foreign investment and commerce is revised and the security service changes its modus operandi for enforcing these laws, Cuba will remain extremely risky for non-bilateral foreign business and foreign executives should be under no illusion about the great personal risks they run if they chose to do business there. Yours faithfully, Stephen Purvis RTWT Castro’s younger brother Raul delivered a speech to the National Assembly last month in which he lamented that Cuba had “regressed in culture and civility,” the Washington Post notes: He railed against bad behavior, from building houses without permits to shouting and swearing in the streets, from dodging bus fares to painting graffiti. “Living in society entails, in the first place, accepting rules that preserve respect for decency and the rights of others,” he declared.

The rights of others? Civility? Seven days after Mr. Castro spoke these words, the civil society group Ladies in White went on a march for freedom and human rights in Matanzas province. … A group of Cuban government supporters forcefully cut off the march and proceeded to beat and harass the group … The kind of civility that is recognized all over the world as basic dignity — the freedom to speak and associate, to choose one’s leaders, to live without fearing a regime’s security services — is not on Mr. Castro’s mind. His regime continues to threaten and persecute those who dare challenge its legitimacy. The new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, last week called for a credible investigation into the suspicious death of leading dissident Oswaldo Payá and his colleague Harold Cepero, a demand echoed by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). “Perhaps it is too much to suggest that Mr. Castro might allow a genuine investigation into these tragic deaths, no matter where it leads. That would be truly civil,” the Post suggests. ------Realiza ONDI registro de diseñadores para proteger y desarrollar la profesión Las empresas y demás entidades con necesidades deberán contratar a quienes estén debidamente inscriptos como diseñadores en tal documento Por VENUS CARRILLO ORTEGA (ACN, Revista Bohema13 de agosto de 2013)

La Habana.-Los profesionales del diseño en Cuba ya cuentan con un registro nacional, mediante el cual quedan representados legalmente para el ejercicio de su actividad en el país.

Gestionada por la Oficina Nacional de Diseño (ONDI), esa base de datos surge con el propósito de valorizar y proteger a nacionales y extranjeros avalados en el sector, en momentos que urge promover la presencia del buen diseño a favor del desarrollo de la economía cubana.

Carmen Gómez Pozo, directora de Imagen y Promoción de la entidad, explicó a la AIN que ese instrumento permitirá mayor control sobre la práctica de la especialidad y sus profesionales, en aras de evitar la improvisación, sobre todo al proliferar nuevas figuras en el entorno económico, las cuales también requieren servicios de calidad.

Como por primera vez se aúna a todos los diseñadores del país en una misma base, una de sus ventajas será servir de garantía a las organizaciones empresariales, porque deberán contratar a quienes estén debidamente inscriptos, para no incurrir en ilegalidades, consideró la directiva.

Publicada el 15 de julio en la Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, la Resolución 202 -referente al Registro Nacional de personas naturales autorizadas a ejercer la actividad de Diseño Industrial y de Comunicación Visual-, estableció un plazo de 120 días para la puesta en marcha de la herramienta.

Gómez Pozo precisó que, una vez entre en funciones, la inscripción es de obligatorio cumplimiento para todos los profesionales de las disciplinas del diseño, ya sean nacionales o extranjeros residentes en la Isla.

En el caso de los graduados del Instituto Superior de Diseño, solo deberán actualizar sus datos personales, ya que el registro se sustenta en la base de información de los egresados hasta la fecha.

También podrán inscribirse titulados en otras carreras que hayan mantenido por más de dos años un vínculo laboral con esta rama, y deberán estar aprobados por una Comisión de Evaluación creada al efecto, dijo Gómez Pozo.

El grupo de expertos examinará también a los técnicos de nivel medio con más de 10 años de ejercicio en este campo, quienes contarán con 180 días hábiles para presentar su solicitud y ser evaluados, puntualizó.

La ONDI emitirá un aviso en próximos días para comunicar los procedimientos y requisitos necesarios para las inscripciones.

Fuente: Agencia Cubana de Noticias El jardinero Fidel no se quiere retirar La Ventana de Carlos Malamud, 08-13-13

El título de esta Ventana no quiere ser un juego de palabras en torno a una de las últimas novelas de John Le Carré, El jardinero fiel, sino que alude directamente a una de las más recientes pasiones de Fidel Castro, la jardinería tropical, según la versión transmitida por el presidente uruguayo José Mujica. Éste último viajó a Cuba con motivo de la celebración de un nuevo aniversario del intento frustrado de la toma del Cuartel de Moncada, el 26 de julio, y aprovechó la ocasión para mantener una entrevista privada con Castro.

La versión de Mujica de los hechos pretende relatar un cariñoso encuentro de dos viejos camaradas de juventud. Uno, el anfitrión, a punto de cumplir 87 años, el otro con 78 a sus espaldas. Los dos aprovecharon la ocasión para recordar antiguas batallas, pero también para repasar otras más modernas, como el proceso de paz en Colombia, en función de las responsabilidad políticas actuales de uno y pasadas del otro.

Castro experimenta con semillas de vegetación tropical que puedan convertirse en pienso para animales. Por eso, “está lleno de semillas, de plantas, de variedades que está impulsando y le da un motivo a la existencia”.

Pese a que Fidel Castro abandonó sus puestos de máxima responsabilidad en 2006, consecuencia de su deteriorado estado de salud, resulta evidente su fuerte resistencia a dejar de ocupar un puesto central en la política cubana y a no ser más un referente para la opinión pública internacional. La publicación periódica de sus “Reflexiones”, convenientemente difundidas urbi et orbi por los aparatos de prensa y propaganda cubanos y bolivarianos, así lo atestigua.

Con todo, resulta muy llamativa la descripción de Mujica del encuentro. Lo primero que se observa es que sigue tratando a su camarada cubano con la actitud reverencial propia de quien sigue en presencia del máximo dirigente de la Revolución Cubana y no de un político jubilado. Pese al paso del tiempo parece que Mujica no ha procesado hasta las últimas consecuencias la derrota político militar de los Tupamaros y su no tan nueva apuesta electoral.

Mujica sigue creyendo en la revolución y en su necesidad. Su reflexión suena más a autodisculpa que a autocrítica: “Seguramente en las etapas juveniles las ilusiones nos hacen ver que las metas están mucho más cerca, que son más fáciles y con el transcurso de los años nos vamos llenando de arrugas, de canas, de fracasos, de derrotas y de aprendizaje”. En el contexto de nuevos aprendizajes es difícil entender su defensa de las revoluciones como una forma de avance de la sociedad humana: “Si no hubiera actitudes revolucionarias en el mundo, todavía seguiríamos dando vueltas por ahí con algún taparrabo en una selva”.

Lo segundo, y quizá más interesante, es su postura de reivindicar la actual deriva de Castro: “Fidel es hoy un anciano con la cabeza fresca para inventarse causas y vivir motivado y con interés”. Pero, lo que en un jubilado normal sería un hobby legítimo, capaz de atraer la atención del implicado y mantenerlo ocupado y activo, en el caso particular de Castro se vuelve un motivo de admiración. Si se analizan con cierta pausa

96 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 97 ______las palabras de Mujica se encuentra un cierto embelesamiento detrás de ellas. Para comenzar, los dos dirigentes latinoamericanos mantuvieron una discusión frondosa, “demasiado arborescente”. En ella “hablamos de todo, qué se yo, pero me encontré con un anciano que sigue siendo brillante, siempre promotor de ideas”.

En su caso, las ideas que promueve Castro ya no tienen un componente estrictamente político, como solía ocurrir hasta no hace mucho tiempo atrás. Hoy sus preocupaciones son otras y se relacionan directamente con la jardinería, que se ha convertido en su “preocupación central”: “Hoy está muy motivado con el trabajo de investigación y de experimentación biológica, de materiales oxidantes, vitamínicos, proteicos y fundamentalmente plantas de origen tropical que pueden servir para sustituir en la dieta animal a los granos”.

Por eso Castro experimenta con semillas de vegetación tropical que puedan convertirse en pienso para animales. Por eso, “está lleno de semillas, de plantas, de variedades que está impulsando y le da un motivo a la existencia”. El objetivo de Mujica al contar todo esto es mostrar “cómo un hombre con dificultades para moverse y con una vida de legítima militancia, que podría darse grandes lujos, está interesado en volver a empezar al final de su vida”. Ahora bien, pese a ello Mujica no da cuenta de ningún éxito o resultado concreto de esas investigaciones, que de haber existido hubieran sido convenientemente publicitadas.

Gracias a los avances médicos es normal estar a los 70 y 80 años en plenas facultades físicas y mentales. Sin embargo, los políticos que quieren hacer de la renovación y el cambio ejes fundamentales de su lucha deberían saber cuando dar un paso al costado y permitir una cierta renovación generacional en el liderazgo. Es verdad que algunos dirigentes de primera línea, como Silvio Berlusconi, se resisten a abandonar la escena, pero Berlusconi no habla de cambio, sino todo lo contrario.

Los fuertes caudillismos latinoamericanos tienden a replicar la idea y ya Rafael Correa suspira por la reelección indefinida, la mejor vía para perpetuarse en el poder y cumplir la abnegada misión de sacrificar la vida en aras de su país y de la revolución, como han hecho otros. No en vano el mensaje que transmiten Fidel Castro y José Mujica es el de dos personas que han decidido agotar sus existencias en el altar de la patria. ------

TURISMO: Menos visitantes extranjeros en el primer semestre de 2013 Agencias | La Habana | 14 Ago 2013 - 9:39 am. | 16

La cifra de turistas baja ligeramente, en comparación con el año pasado.

El Gobierno informó que un 1.596.883 visitantes extranjeros llegaron a la Isla durante el primer semestre de este año, unos 30.000 viajeros menos que en igual periodo de 2012, según Notimex.

97 ASCE Cuban Economic News Clippings Service -- Release N 578-08-14-13 -- p. 98 ______La Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas e Información (ONEI) detalló que Canadá se mantuvo como primer mercado emisor de turistas durante los primeros seis meses de este año, seguido de Reino Unido, Alemania, Argentina, Francia, Italia, México, Rusia y España.

El reporte oficial, con estadísticas de enero a junio de 2013, permitió comparar que 29.586 visitantes extranjeros se abstuvieron de viajar ese semestre.

En julio de 2012, también analizando el mismo periodo, la ONEI reportó la llegada de un 1.626.469 turistas extranjeros, que entonces significó un incremento de 5,4 por ciento comparado con el primer semestre de 2011.

Pese a la baja comparativa en uno de los sectores claves de la economía nacional, medios oficiales publicaron que el atractivo del destino Cuba para viajeros internacionales "continúa hoy entre los primeros peldaños de esa industria".

El turismo, segundo capítulo en ingresos de divisas, detrás de los servicios técnicos y profesionales, aportó en los últimos años ingresos por encima de los 2.000 millones de dólares anuales.

La baja general no pudo ser compensada por el crecimiento del turismo del Cono Sur a Cuba, con la llegada hasta el pasado 7 de agosto de 118.303 excursionistas procedentes de Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay, Perú y Uruguay.

La cifra representó un desempeño de 100,65 por ciento respecto a igual periodo de 2012, según el consejero de Turismo de la embajada cubana en Buenos Aires, Luis Felipe Aguilera.

Datos divulgados en fecha reciente por la ONEI indicaron que Argentina, principal emisor latinoamericano hacia Cuba, se confirmó en el primer semestre como el quinto mercado turístico a nivel mundial para la Isla, detrás de fuertes emisores como Canadá, Reino Unido y Alemania. ------Fidel Castro: North Korea Provided Us With Free Weapons In The 1980s Published August 14, 2013 Fox News Latino

Fidel Castro attends a meeting with intellectuals and writers at the International Book Fair in Havana, Cuba, on Feb. 10, 2012. (AP2012)

In his first essay in more than four months, Cuban leader Fidel Castro said that in the 1980s, North Korea provided Havana weapons "without charging a cent."

"Comrade Kim II Sung, a veteran and flawless fighter, sent us 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and the corresponding (ammunition),” he wrote in a long, wide-ranging article taking up three pages of Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

"Only a few of us knew about this because it would have been very dangerous for the enemy to have that kind of information."

- Fidel Castro

Last month Panama detained a cargo ship carrying an undeclared shipment of arms including missile systems and live munitions that were bound from Cuba to North Korea. Havana has called it obsolete equipment and said it was being sent for repairs in North Korea.

In the article, Castro also touched on key Cold War moments such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and said Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov told him in the early 1980s that Moscow would not step in if Cuba were to be invaded by its northern neighbor.

"He said that if we were attacked by the United States, we should fight alone," Castro wrote. "We asked if they could supply us with free arms as (they had) up until that time. He said yes. We told him then: 'Don't worry, send us the weapons and we will take care of the invaders ourselves.'"

"Only a few of us knew about this because it would have been very dangerous for the enemy to have that kind of information," Castro said.

Castro, who turned 87 Tuesday with little fanfare, has made only a couple of public appearances this year.

In the essay, he said that when he became ill in 2006, he never thought he would have seven more years to live.

"As soon as I understood that it would be definitive I did not hesitate to cease my charges as president ... and I proposed that the person designated to exercise that task proceed immediately to take it up," the retired leader said, referring to his successor and younger brother Raul Castro, 82.

"I was far from imagining that my life would be prolonged seven more years," he added.

Castro also reflected on topics such as the death in March of his friend and close ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, as well as the wonders of science.

"The sciences should teach us above all to be humble, given our congenital self-sufficiency," he said. "Thus would we be better prepared to confront and even enjoy the rare privilege of existence."

Castro stepped down as president following a near-fatal illness in 2006, and his successor, Raul, has said that his current term ending in 2018 will be his last, ostensibly ending nearly six decades of rule by the Castro brothers.

Based on reporting by The Associated Press.

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