Top dissidents detained in Cuba

Most were freed later in the day but one alleges he was severely beaten

By Juan O. Tamayo

jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Cuban police detained four top pro-democracy activists and at least 40 other dissidents Wednesday in a crackdown in which an independent journalist alleges he was severely beaten by a State Security agent.
Most of the dissidents were freed later in the day, but the large number of detentions fueled complaints that the government of Raúl Castro government has been turning to tougher and, at times, violent means of repressing dissent.
Havana human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez characterized the events as “short-term, arbitrary detentions for political motives” and said the number of detainees could top 44 because several activists haven’t been accounted for.
Sanchez’ Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation reported a record 3,821 such arrests in the first four months of this year. That compares to the previous high of 2,795 during the first four months of 2012. The detentions are usually designed to intimidate dissidents and keep them away from opposition gatherings,.
Two well-known dissidents, Jorge Luis García Pérez, known as Antúnez, and his wife, Yris Pérez Aguilera, were hauled away by police during an early morning raid of their home in the town of Placetas, the Cuban Democratic Directorate said.
The wife sent a text message from her cell phone saying that the couple had been taken to police headquarters in the nearby city of Santa Clara, the Miami-based Directorate reported. It was not known whether they had been freed as of Wednesday night.
There was no immediate explanation for the couple’s detention, although they are considered to be among the most hard-line dissidents on the island and are leaders of the National Civic Resistance Front Orlando Zapata Tamayo.
Police have raided their home at least four times since February, seizing phones, computers and documents they brought back from a lengthy trip abroad last year. It took them to several cities in the United States, Europe and Latin America.
Magaly Norvis Otero, a member of the dissident Ladies in White, said she and at least 30 other women and 15 men were detained when they tried to attend the Havana trial of the husband of group member Yalenis Cutiño. She accused him of domestic abuse.
“As the women and the others arrived at the trial, police arrested us and took us to jail. I know of at least 30 women and 15 men but there might be more,” Norvis told El Nuevo Herald by phone.
Among those detained were Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White, and her husband, Angel Moya, a dissident who served about eight years in prison.
Norvis said many of the dissidents detained were freed after about four hours, but she had no immediate word on Soler or Moya.
El Nuevo Herald calls to the cell phones of the four top dissidents were not answered. A call to Sanchez was interrupted by a recording of the first few seconds of the conversation with the human rights activist.
Independent journalist Roberto de Jesus Guerra, meanwhile, said that a State Security agent in plainclothes attacked him as he walked toward the Czech embassy in Havana to file one of his reports on its Internet connection.
“Without saying a word,” the man punched him repeatedly on the face and gave him a bloody nose, Guerra said. Two other men in the type of motorcycles used by State Security did nothing for awhile, he said, and then told the attacker, “OK. Don’t hit him any more.”
“I am going to the doctor now and later to the police to file a complaint, although they never do anything because they are the ones beating us,” he told El Nuevo Herald.
Norvis, who is married to Guerra, said the beating was the latest in a series of government harrasments of Guerra and the independent news agency he heads, Hablemos Press.
Three Hablemos Press reporters have been detained in recent weeks, she said. The couple also has received anonymous death threats as well as obviously faked photos of Guerra with a woman, she said.
“These have been days of a lot of tension, with the government using very dirty methods,” Norvis said.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/11/4171942/top-dissidents-detained-in-cuba.html

Brutality of the Castro regime

                              

Documentary with English subtitles - Las torturas de Fidel Castro

Odalis Sanchez

Published on Aug 23, 2012

Documental cubano donde victimas de las torturas del regimen castrista nos ofrecen su testimonio de los maltratos y torturas sufridas. Este es el tipo de documental que no se permite ver en Cuba.
Tambien Maria V garcia sobreviviente de el asesinato del remolcador 13 de Marzo nos narran en primera persona Como se desarrollaron aquellos sucesos donde murieron asesinados 41 cubanos entre ellos varios ninos.
Lista de torturados
Abel nieves
Orestes Perez
Evelio Ancheta
Aurelio Hernandez
Angel Cuadra
Nelly Rojas
Gerardo Rodriguez
Jose L Fernandez
Fermin Chamizo
Luis A Chamizo
Anette Escandon
Raul Salazar
Eduardo Capote
Maritza Lugo
Reynaldo Alfaro
Maricela Pompa
Milagros Cruz
Cecilio Monteagudo

Direccion Luis Guardia
Produccion Pedro Corzo
Coordinacion Francisco Lorenzo
Narracion Luis Covarrubias
Subtitulado en Ingles
English subtitles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PfXsa... video de 1961, lo que decia castro poco despues de instaurado el embargo comercial contra Cuba

Michael J. Totten: An eyewitness account of Cuba’s shocking wretchedness

Michael J. Totten, National Post | June 6, 2014 | Last Updated: Jun 9 3:59 PM ET
More from National Post

Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite — the Elysium of the title — while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.
I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba — not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy, but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium.
I had to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they known I was a journalist. But not even a total-surveillance police state can keep track of everything and everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It felt like a victory.

Related

• Stephen Wicary: In Cuba, change comes slow
• Jonathan Kay: Canada’s Cuba policy makes no sense

Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there’s nothing to buy. It feels less natural and organic than any city I’ve ever visited. Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn’t supposed to be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in time. But the city wasn’t pleasant for long, and it certainly isn’t pleasant for the people living there. It hasn’t been so for decades.
Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city — tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.
Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”
Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it — and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few … Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.”
“More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not — cannot — build such grand or elegant cities.

Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies

But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”
Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban Revelations. He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans “used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels.”
By the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim needs an ambulance. Castro wasn’t about to reform himself and his ideology out of existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece of the country to the global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced by vacationers, mostly from Europe and Latin America, who brought in much-needed hard currency. Arriving foreigners weren’t going to tolerate receiving ration cards for food — as the locals do — so the island also needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars — restaurants inside private homes — to open, though no one from outside the family could work in them. (That would be “exploitative.”)

Around the same time, government-run “dollar stores” began selling imported and relatively luxurious goods to non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba’s quasi-capitalist bubble created.
When the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger brother Raúl in 2008, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the economy remains heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage — $20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.”
Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Meliá said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8–$10 an hour. But Meliá doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers — but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8–$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day — a child’s allowance.

A one-way ticket to the other side of the island costs several months’ pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual salary

The maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not allowed to have money; they’re hardly allowed to have things. The police expend extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live miserably at the bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom. Dissident blogger and author Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment sarcastically in her book Havana Real: “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.”
Perhaps the saddest symptom of Cuba’s state-enforced poverty is the prostitution epidemic — a problem the government officially denies and even forbids foreign journalists based in Havana to mention. Some Cuban prostitutes are professionals, but many are average women — wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers — who solicit johns once or twice a year for a little extra money to make ends meet.
A one-way ticket to the other side of the island costs several months’ pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual salary. As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency — and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad — especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil — that the island is now facing a personnel shortage.
Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500 — which makes them practically free — but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.
Cuba is short of everything but air and sunshine. In her book, Sánchez describes an astonishing appearance by Raúl Castro on television, during which he boasted that the economy was doing so well now that everyone could drink milk. And yet Raúl’s promise of milk for all was deleted from the transcription of the speech in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper. He went too far: there was not enough milk to ensure that everyone got some.

Cuba has two economies now: the national Communist economy for the majority; and a quasi-capitalist one for foreigners and the elite. Each has its own currency: the Communist economy uses the Cuban peso, and the capitalist bubble uses the convertible peso. Cuban pesos are worth nothing. They can’t be converted to dollars or euros. Foreigners can’t even spend them in Cuba. The convertible pesos are pegged to the U.S. dollar, but banks and hotels pay only 87 Cuban cents for each one — the government takes 13 percent off the top. The rigged exchange rate is an easy way to shake down foreigners without most noticing. It also enables the state to drain Cuban exiles.
Castro created the convertible peso mainly to seal off Cuba’s little capitalist bubble from the ragged majority in the Communist economy. Until a few years ago, ordinary Cubans weren’t allowed even to set foot inside hotels or restaurants unless they worked there, lest they find themselves exposed to the seductive lifestyles of the decadent bourgeoisie from capitalist nations. A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can’t afford to go to these places, anyway.
A single restaurant meal in Havana costs an entire month’s salary. One night in a hotel costs five months’ salary. A middle-class tourist from abroad can easily spend more in one day than most Cubans make in a year. I had dinner with four Americans at one of the paladars. The only Cubans in the restaurant were the cooks and the waiters. The bill for the five of us came to about $100. That’s five months’ salary.

I ate alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the president of some faraway minor republic

Leftists often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for a mall in Havana — a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil — and that’s it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7-11 has a far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop. (I heard, but cannot confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere in Cuba for another four months.)
An advertisement in my hotel claimed that the Sierra Maestra restaurant on the top floor is “probably” the best in Havana. I had saved the Sierra Maestra for my last night and rode the elevator up to the 25th floor. I had my first and only steak on the island and washed it down with Chilean red wine. The tiny bill set me back no more than having a pizza delivered at home would, but the total nevertheless exceeded an entire month’s local salary. Not surprisingly, I ate alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the president of some faraway minor republic.
I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same — at night, anyway — after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied — by local people, not foreigners — but the fantasy faded fast.
I was all alone at the top of Cuba’s Elysium and yearning for home — where capitalism’s inequalities are not so jagged and stark.
National Post
Michael J. Totten is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of five books, including The Road to Fatima Gate. This essay is a adapted from a longer article appearing in the Spring, 2014 edition of City Journal.


 http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/06/06/michael-j-totten-an-eyewitness-account-of-cubas-shocking-wretchedness/

Let me introduce you to Yaoni Sanchez, a true revolutionary

Check out this talk from Yoani in which she explains how it all works.

Her blog:

http://generacionyen.wordpress.com/

Find her on twitter!

One of her books translated into English.

(book review to follow shortly)

http://www.amazon.com/Havana-Real-Woman-Fights-Truth/dp/1935554255%3FSubscriptionId%3D0JJEH4PKQM4ZHS8QY102%26tag%3Dthehuffingtop-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D1935554255



Yoani was kidnapped, beaten and detained on Nov. 6th 2013. She is back home and save now. In this video she describes her ordeal and how she got her injuries.

INSPIRING NEW DOCUMENTARY

Fidel Castro pens new essay on Syria, Snowden

By PETER ORSI

— Aug. 28, 2013 1:09 PM EDT

 

HAVANA (AP) — Fidel Castro can't stay away.
Despite a vow to retire from his second career as a columnist last year, the 87-year-old revolutionary whose interests range from the nutrition benefits of a leafy plant called moringa to the threat of nuclear Armageddon apparently still has a lot to say about world events.
The former president published a new essay Wednesday that took up nearly a full page in the Communist Party newspaper Granma, warning of dire consequences from the conflict in Syria. He also denied a Russian newspaper report that alleged Cuba caved in to U.S. pressure and refused to grant NSA leaker Edward Snowden transit en route to Latin America, calling it a "paid-for lie."
"I admire the bravery and justness in Snowden's declarations," Castro wrote. "In my opinion, he did the world a service by revealing the repugnantly dishonest politics of an empire that lies and cheats the world."
Castro left office in 2006 due to a life-threatening intestinal ailment. But for years afterward, state newspapers continued to carry his semi-regular essays called "Reflections." They were also painstakingly read out in their entirety by serious-faced news anchors.
In June 2012, Castro announced that his columnist days were over. He said at the time that his musings, some of which were increasingly brief and mysterious, were taking up valuable media space.
But the famously loquacious leader has been unable to resist the temptation to weigh in on our troubled world.
In April he published a "Reflection" urging restraint amid elevated tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Last month state media carried a letter of his about the seizure in Panama of Cuban weaponry bound for North Korea.
This time it's the escalating talk of military intervention in Syria that inspired Castro to pick up his pen.
"I am compelled to write because very soon grave things will happen," Castro wrote. "In our time, no more than 10 or 15 years go by without the human race being in danger of extinction."
"The Empire's Navy and Air Force and their allies are preparing to begin a genocide against the Arab people," he added.
In typical Castro style the column meanders somewhat, touching on everything from the U.S. embargo against Cuba and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's tour of a visiting Russian naval vessel, to the crisis in Egypt and our impersonal technological future.
"It is said that by 2040, just 27 years from now, many tasks that today are carried out by the police such as handing out tickets and other tasks, will be done by robots," Castro wrote. "Can readers imagine how difficult it will be to argue with a robot capable of making millions of calculations per minute?"
Castro has appeared in public only a few times this year. In July he was absent from an event commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution's start that was attended by key allies such as Maduro. Castro's brother and successor, Raul, presided over the celebrations.
Cuba's Foreign Ministry also criticized Washington and its allies on Syria on Wednesday.
"An aggression against Syria would provoke the gravest consequences for the already troubled Middle East region," it said in a statement. "It would constitute a flagrant violation of the principles of the charter of the United Nations and international law, and it would increase the dangers to international peace and security."
___http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fidel-castro-pens-new-essay-denying-snowden-report