CASTRO"S MEDICAL MERCENARIES

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Castro's Medical Mercenaries
Susan Kitchens, -Forbes- 11.14.05


While clinics crumble at home, bereft Cuban doctors are dispatched on El Jefe's goodwill missions. But their purpose, it turns out, is more than just charity care.
At 4 A.M., hours before a pink sun would climb above the hills near Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, Leonel Córdova was jerked awake. "Get up! Get up, now!" screamed the figure bursting through the door. Córdova, a doctor from Cuba, sat up on the couch. A policeman from the brutish African state, muscles bulging under his jacket and khaki-colored trousers, towered over the medic, pointing a gun barrel in his face. Córdova could hardly breathe. There was at least one other cop in the small, dark room now, with a gun trained on another Cuban, a dentist named Noris Peña.

The two Cubans had committed a potential act of treason: Though promised to faltering Zimbabwe on behalf of the Cuban government, they had left the mission days earlier, escaping to a local's home. That morning, with the door flung open in the predawn chill, Peña shivered in her T shirt and shorts. Her heart pounded as the cops steadied their guns and then motioned for the two to get into a waiting jeep. "I felt like we were going to die," she recalls, five years later.

Córdova, 36, and Peña, 30, are two of at least 60,000 Cubans who have, for decades, been dispatched as part of what Fidel Castro terms his "humanitarian medical missions." Of late this effort has grown more pointed, with new medical degrees being churned out and ever more doctors, nurses and dentists dispatched abroad--even as the state of care in Cuba itself deteriorates. What is El Jefe up to?

Few of the médicos see as much drama as Córdova and Peña did. Most quietly complete multiyear stints, sometimes in remote regions, in dozens of countries in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia, such as Sri Lanka and East Timor. They then return home, many times to even more poorly equipped hospitals and clinics in Cuba.

But a disturbing picture emerges from the ranks of those who, like Córdova and Peña, never go back. These two "deserters," as Cuba labels them, ultimately managed to slip to freedom, joining perhaps hundreds of others who've taken refuge in Canada, the U.S. or Europe. Most don't want to be located or identified, preferring not to bring further trouble onto themselves or family still in Cuba. FORBES interviewed nine.

Castro dispatched his first medical brigade to Algeria in 1963 and has since boasted that in spite of a U.S. trade embargo Cuba managed to provide these trained missionaries to the world. He delighted in offering 1,500 doctors to help America deal with Hurricane Katrina. (Washington said it didn't need the help.)

The Cuban missions have multiple aims. At some level, certainly in the minds of the medics themselves, this is humanitarianism. It is also a chance to practice in their field with resources absent at home.

But for the Castro regime there are geopolitical and financial objectives. Shipping out the doctors bolsters support for Cuba in international circles such as the United Nations, where it faces periodic human rights censure. And extending social services to the poor assists ideologically aligned despots like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has the largest Cuban contingent, some 22,000 at last count.

Physicians have been diverted to presidential palaces in the cases of the ailing 81-year-old Mugabe and onetime Sandinista boss Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, according to Alcibiades Hidalgo, a ranking Cuban government official who defected to the U.S. in 2002. Saddam Hussein was treated for a spinal tumor by at least one Cuban surgeon while ruling Iraq, Hidalgo has written.

And then there's the money: Castro's doctors help to keep the Cuban regime equipped with hard currency. While a number of the destination countries are destitute, others make cash or in-kind payments to Cuba, and Castro maintains a firm grip on such inflow, say those who study Cuba's economy.

Doctors exiled from Cuba say that in exchange for their mission work they earned a third or less of what Havana got for their services from foreign governments. The balance may amount to hundreds of millions of dollars for the state till, perhaps destined for handling by foreign banks (see box, p. 130).

At their clinics for the dirt poor abroad, these medical emissaries get a further shock: They see drugs in use that are manufactured in Cuba--such as ones to treat asthma or heart disease--but are unavailable at home. "People I knew in Cuba needed these medications," says one doctor who recently fled a mission in Venezuela and wouldn't talk on the record. ("Deserter" families still in Cuba are routinely punished, losing apartments or jobs. To retain such leverage, the government prefers not to send unmarried doctors.)

Aside from tourism and nickel Cuba has little to offer the rest of the world in exchange for cash. What Castro lacks in salable goods he can make up for with Cuba's highly literate population of 11 million, especially those in medicine. In the last five years enrollment in Cuban medical, dental and nursing schools has more than doubled to 50,000, according to Cuban state statistics.

Outside of the schooling achievement most promises of Castro's 1959 revolución, including good health care for all, have been shunted aside. "At first I believed in the revolución and everything it stood for," says one Cuban doctor, Alejandro Ramos, 62, who when younger went on a medical mission to Angola. "But when things begin falling apart, you start to see there is no hope, no future, if you stay in Cuba. You become desperate to find a life for yourself and your family." Years later, in 1994, he escaped to Miami by boat with his family. Now a nurse at Coral Gables Hospital, Ramos is part of a group that assists doctors who've fled. (At his age he elected not to obtain certification here as an M.D.)

Even in South Africa, one of the better postings over the years for a Cuban doctor, the negation of professional status can become too much. "People used to tease me because I was a ‘principal medical officer,'" says Alfredo Hevia, 37. "And medical officers, people below me who were fresh out of school, were driving BMWs. And they would ask, ‘Why don't you get a car?'"

Though he was happy to have served a neglected patient population for two years in South Africa, Hevia slipped into U.S. exile in 1999. Cuba seized nearly all the modest pay it had sequestered for him. Hevia now is an internist at Baptist Hospital in Miami.

A Pair in Flight

Leonel Córdova's story is extraordinary enough to have received notice in the south Florida press as it played out four years ago. But it shares origins in the experience of other young doctors in Cuba after the fall of its Soviet benefactors. As Córdova graduated in 1992 from Havana's High Institute of Medical Sciences, life in Cuba was changing for the worse. Starting as a family practitioner in Havana, he was making a few dollars a month in pesos. In earlier years, with billions of dollars in food, oil and other basics coming in from Cuba's big Communist ally, such meager pay would have gotten him by. But then staples became scarce. Castro blamed the U.S. embargo.

By the mid-1990s Cuba's vaunted medical program was crumbling as well. Hospital patients asked relatives in Miami to send bedsheets, pillowcases and cotton balls because Cuba's hospitals had none. Hospital hallways were dark because staff stole the lightbulbs in order to resell them. Some doctors complained they couldn't write prescriptions: no paper or pens. Córdova's frustrations mounted. Some days, he turned patients away. "You can make a diagnosis, but there's no medication to treat it," he says. "No penicillin, no aspirin. It is like a bad joke."

Yet at certain hospitals, such as Cira García in Havana, the shelves were well stocked with drugs and top-of-the-line equipment. Cira García strictly treated foreigners with hard currency and Cuba's ruling elite--doctors' families not included.

Life for Córdova, with a wife and two young children, was growing mean. People relied on cunning, often stealing--not just lightbulbs but chickens, vegetables and soap--to resell. In earlier years Córdova had been able to buy a refrigerator. Now he put the fridge to use, selling ice cream treats for 3 cents each, and chickens on the side. Doctor pals did similarly. By this time Córdova was earning about $20 a month from the government, the average medical salary in Cuba. Still not enough.

Yet as a physician Córdova did have one out. He could go abroad on a mission. Córdova had heard that by working overseas he could earn $100 per month--though a portion would be deposited in a Cuban bank account, touchable only on completion of the typical two-year stint.

In early 2000 Córdova flew to Harare with 100 other medics. It was his first trip outside of Cuba, and his government still clearly controlled his every move: During a layover in London the Cubans were not allowed to exit the plane.

Córdova soon grew close to Peña, also in the group. But he also got frustrated again: For weeks he and at least some others in the mission weren't able to see patients; paperwork holdups, they were told. The country's increasingly autocratic Mugabe was facing his last real election, with a population upset that its own doctors and nurses were seeking better conditions elsewhere. Touting Cuban medical help was just a cover, Córdova thought.

He and Peña chose to flee. They got in touch with a UN refugee representative, John Adu, to whom they'd been referred by diplomatic contacts, and he promised to help them leave Zimbabwe. First, however, they told their story to a Harare newspaper, the Daily News. It was published on the front page the next day. "We were sent here under the policies of Fidel Castro so that he can appear to the world as a good man. He sent us here for his political goals," Córdova was quoted as saying.

Knowing they could not return to their quarters, Córdova and Peña sought refuge at a Zimbabwean friend's home. For days they met at the UN office with Adu to try to arrange asylum. Then, on the morning of June 2, their safe house's door was burst open by the Zimbabwean cops. The two had become an embarrassment to two regimes.

They were taken to an immigration office for hours before being whisked away for a flight to Johannesburg and on to Havana. But at the stop a South African lawman got nosy. Córdova scribbled a distress note. The officer could only advise the pair to raise a stink on boarding the next plane to avoid leaving Africa.

At the Air France flight they recall doing so, yelling, "We are being kidnapped!" and the like. The captain refused to take off, the Cuban pair says, and they were returned to the terminal and days later to Harare. (Air France declines to comment.)

Zimbabwe's immigration boss met them for a 40-kilometer drive outside of the capital to a region called Goromonzi. A one-story detention center was hidden behind a clump of trees. Córdova and Peña were locked up and their shoes were taken away. Once a day they ate grits with dried fish, served in a big pan that all the prisoners shared, eating with their fingers. Peña lost so much weight that her once-tight-fitting jeans hung on her hips.

During a month in jail the two befriended some guards and persuaded one to call the friend they'd stayed with in Harare. He contacted John Adu of the UN, who said he'd been looking for them.

With Adu's help the Cuban pair left Zimbabwe in July 2000. They arrived in Miami via Sweden; a Christian charity, Church World Service, lent them enough for tickets to the U.S. Once in America, Peña found work in Atlanta; Córdova got a job at Miami's Mercy Hospital, prepping patients for surgery. Meanwhile he studied to qualify to practice and made plans to get his wife and kids out of Cuba.

But within a year Córdova's wife was killed in a motorcycle accident near home that police said was a hit-and-run. He blitzed the Cuban government with appeals for his orphaned kids, ages 4 and 10. They were freed, and later that year Córdova and Peña, who'd stayed close, were married. The family now lives in New Jersey. He got certified to practice medicine in the U.S. this summer and is working as a pediatrician at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

Oil for Doctors

Venezuela is Cuba's biggest and most important doctor deal, worth an estimated $1 billion to the island nation last year, second only to its tourism intake. At least 22,000 doctors have been sent there in the last five years.

The terms of the deal were hammered out between Fidel Castro and his friend and political ally Venezuelan President Chávez. An agreement signed in 2000 guaranteed that Venezuela would ship 53,000 barrels of oil per day to the Caribbean island, according to Cuban government reports; Cuba agreed to pay for the bulk of the shipment in cash and "services," including medical help.

But as crude prices climbed, Cuba failed to meet the cash portion of its obligation. So it began sending more of its workforce, including teachers and physical therapists, but primarily doctors. The pact was later revised, with even more oil now for Cuba, nearly 100,000 barrels per day, says Carmelo Mesa-Lago, emeritus economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh. And Chávez pays for the Cuban doctors. "It is a real bonanza for Fidel Castro," says Mesa-Lago.

What's more, some of the oil, he says, never even reaches Cuban shores: Crude is sold to buyers in Central America, with the proceeds, most likely in U.S. dollars, transferred to the Cuban central bank.

None of that matters to the people of Parroquia Caucaguita, just beyond view of the gleaming skyscrapers of Caracas. One of many shantytowns that house a large portion of the city's 5 million people, it gives a taste of the poverty of the Venezuelan countryside beyond.

In the barrio the Cubans are regarded as heaven-sent. "I don't care if I never see a Venezuelan doctor for the rest of my life," says Aida Márquez, a petite 72-year-old. She shook a plastic bag in the air. "Because of the Cuban doctors I get free medicines!" Another patient, Gilma López, 60, says one Cuban doctor diagnosed her as having an eye disease; she was sent to Cuba, gratis, where she got several days of treatment. "We ate seven meals a day, got free medicines, and we didn't have to pay for anything," she says.

"This is the first time that the government has been able to aid the poor population in Venezuela," chimes in Mirna Mucura, a social services staffer for Chávez's health department. "Past administrations never cared about doing anything like this."

But the presence of Cuba's doctors in Venezuela polarizes an already divided land. In July the Venezuelan Medical Federation protested in downtown Caracas, demanding that the médicos be expelled. The group, whose 60,000 doctors serve a nation of 25 million, says Venezuela doesn't need the medical help.

The Venezuelan doctors ask why Chávez doesn't put oil money into the country's own underfunded public health system. And some question the credentials of Castro's newly minted medical corps. Venezuela's El Nacional newspaper (hostile to Chávez) reported that 96 Cuban doctors in Brazil were sent home after a judge there ruled they weren't eligible to practice.

In addition, Venezuelan doctors complain that their salaries haven't budged in four years, while many are losing work to the Cubans. The imported doctors are resented in anti-Chávez quarters for being central to a growing Cubanization of the country under its radical leader. But they win favor with the lower-class families who keep Chávez in power. Chávez survived a hotly contested referendum on his tenure last year, says Eric Driggs, a researcher at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies, after Castro sent in thousands of docs in the months leading up to the vote. A Chávez defeat would have been dire for Castro because the opposition had pledged to halt Venezuela's oil shipments.

When Otto Sánchez, a family practitioner, arrived in Venezuela in 2003, his duties included showing films that praised Cuba's health care system. "The films made it look like it was a very efficient program," says Sánchez, 39.

Propaganda was one task, self-preservation another. Where he was posted, Sánchez says, he locked up for the day just as the sun set. "You could not go out after that, for fear of being shot," he says. Cuban doctors are known in these neighborhoods as particularly good targets for thieves because they are paid in cash and are not permitted to open bank accounts. An attempted cover-up of one killing led indirectly to his pursuing a six-month escape to the U.S. He now lives in Miami and works with an organization, Solidarity Without Borders, that helps other doctors flee. His wife, also a doctor, and son, 9, remain in Cuba.

Venezuelan officials say they need the outside help for rural areas, that the Cubans are properly certified at home and that Chávez has said he intends to boost domestic doctor pay this year.

A few days of calls to Cuba's diplomatic mission in New York ultimately got a reply, not for attribution, that the global medical missions long predated any oil considerations. Any further comment to FORBES required an appointment, we were told.

Although economic conditions have improved somewhat for average Cubans since the dreariest days of the 1990s, doctor shortages and clinical privations remain a way of life. Another recent defector from a medical mission in Venezuela says that in his home city there were once seven clinics; now there is one.

In a society that was to have closed the gap between rich and poor, ordinary Cubans who have waited for years for, say, cataract surgery are often bumped aside so that patients flown in from other countries, presumably with cash, may be treated instead. Castro's people joke among themselves, says one longtime Havana resident, that if they are going to receive any type of medical attention, they'd best get themselves to where they can find some of those Cuban doctors.

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There are 25 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

1. Exile could face deportation
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
2. Cuando gato caza raton
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
3. Se atrasa venta de aceite comestible racionado
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
4. Denuncia de Julia Cecilia Delgado, Presidenta en Funciones del Partido Liberal de Cuba
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
5. Operativo policial detiene a decenas de transeuntes
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
6. Dos acusados de Ekin otorgaron poderes de una empresa a dos etarras
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
7. Se declara Antúnez en huelga de hambre
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
8. I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
9. Productor de legendaria "Carrozas de Fuego" visita Cuba
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
10. The Secret History of Rum
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
11. "El neopopulismo es La NEP de Castro": Vladimiro Roca
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
12. Mas pan y menos circo
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
13. Donde estan los negros?
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
14. Castro's ailments stir plans for future
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
15. How should US prepare for a post-Castro Cuba?
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
16. 16 Dec 2005. European Parliament awards Sakharov Prize. Cuban leader angered
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
17. Cuban electricity rates soar
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
18. Castro toma medidas de ``categoría 5''
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
19. Cubanos amanecen con anuncio de paquete de medidas
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
20. Cuba sube tarifas para ahorrar luz
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
21. Sube en hasta 333 pct costo de electricidad en Cuba
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
22. Cuba Raises Pay, Castro Attacks 'New Rich'
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
23. Chavez shows $100bn spending plan
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
24. Cuba announces major salary rises
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
25. Cuba raises salaries of skilled workers
From: PL <***@pandora.be>


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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:29:54 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Exile could face deportation

Posted on Wed, Nov. 23, 2005

IMMIGRATION
Exile could face deportation
Santiago Alvarez, benefactor of Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, could face deportation to Cuba and loss of his citizenship application.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND JAY WEAVER
***@herald.com

Santiago Alvarez, a permanent resident, could face deportation proceedings and be denied U.S. citizenship if convicted of federal weapons and fraudulent passport charges.
Alvarez, a close ally and benefactor of Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles, is being held on charges of possession of a cache of machine guns, grenades, rounds of ammunition and a fake Guatemalan passport and identification papers. His immigration status could be further complicated by a prior aggravated assault conviction stemming from weapons charges, according to experts on U.S. immigration law.
Alvarez's attorney, Ben Kuehne, said his client is not ''a convicted felon'' because his 1988 case was settled when the judge withheld adjudication. Immigration attorneys, however, say that such a ruling is considered a conviction for the purposes of immigration law.
''He could be subject to deportation on his previous conviction and may now be -- depending on the outcome of this case -- subject to deportation without any relief available to him,'' said Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration attorney considered a national authority on immigration law.
During Alvarez's bond hearing Monday, Kuehne revealed his client is not a U.S. citizen but was applying for citizenship. Alvarez's co-defendant in the case, Osvaldo Mitat, is a U.S. citizen.
Kuehne also disclosed immigration authorities had questioned his client in recent years as a result of the 1988 case. Under changes to immigration law in 1996, foreign nationals convicted of aggravated felonies are subject to deportation.
Kuehne said Alvarez is optimistic. ''Mr. Alvarez's position is that he is a lawful permanent resident and he's confident that he will be able to obtain his citizenship when he prevails in this case,'' Kuehne told The Herald Tuesday night.
NOT IMMEDIATELY
Because Alvarez is Cuban, he would not be deported immediately. But the federal case against Alvarez, a wealthy developer and exile activist, has angered many elderly hard-line exiles who believe the Bush administration is making Alvarez a scapegoat to appease the Cuban government in the Posada case. Posada is wanted by both the Cuban and Venezuelan governments for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner and hotel bombings in Havana in 1997-98. Posada says he was not involved.
Cuba generally does not take back Cuban nationals ordered deported, though Cuban leader Fidel Castro has clamored for Posada's return.
U.S. immigration authorities generally do not seek to send exiles back to their homeland, but convicted Cuban nationals living in the United States usually face deportation proceedings in case political conditions change in Cuba. If and when those conditions change, immigration officials say, thousands of Cubans ordered deported over the years could be sent back.
In some cases, however, immigration officials have asked immigration judges not to order a Cuban deported. That happened during Posada's recent asylum trial when a Department of Homeland Security assistant chief counsel told the immigration judge Posada should not be deported to Cuba because he could face torture there.
AGREED NOT TO
Judge William Abbott eventually agreed not to deport Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan born in Cuba, to either the communist island or to Venezuela -- but said he could be expelled to a third country.
As a permanent resident, Alvarez could ask an immigration judge to spare him deportation but only if his conviction did not amount to an aggravated felony. However, some of the charges lodged against him over the weekend are aggravated felonies under immigration law.
If convicted, Alvarez would serve prison time and then would be transferred to immigration custody for deportation proceedings. Once a judge's deportation ruling is final, he could be held up to six more months and then set free under supervision if he cannot be deported to Cuba.
The investigation into the weapons case is being conducted by the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/13237840.htm


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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:32:01 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cuando gato caza raton

Noviembre 23, 2005
Cuando gato caza ratón

Víctor Manuel Domínguez, Lux Info Press

LA HABANA, Cuba - Noviembre (www.cubanet.org) - Si Marcel Proust era un niño bitongo obcecado en la búsqueda del tiempo perdido, en cazar las muchachas en flor por los caminos de Swann, los cubanos de a pie sobornarían a Kronos con tal de que alargara el día de 24 a 48 horas como mínimo.

Quienes aseguran desde sus horarios abiertos prebendas administrativas, contactos sociales o inmunidad por categoría ideológica y escalafón político que miles de trabajadores cubanos buscan durante el horario laboral el ocio furtivo, la vagancia sigilosa y el majaseo a hurtadillas, son injustos con los proletarios de la Isla del laboreo intenso y gozador.

La cifra de remociones, escapistas, mete líneas, resbalosos y mata tiempo que arrojó la encuesta realizada a 2,178 clientes sorprendidos en horario laboral bajo el aire acondicionado o el ventilador antiapagón de unidades comerciales como Indochina, Maisí, La Puntilla y el pan.com de 7ma. y 26, entre otras Tiendas Recaudadoras de Divisas (TRD) de la capital, demuestra un nivel de conciencia proletaria incomprendido por los funcionarios del Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social encargados del sondeo.

¿Acaso se han puesto a pensar estos funcionarios cuán en alto queda el prestigio de la revolución por su eficiencia para generar riquezas, si sus trabajadores sin producir se dan el gusto de vagar por un centro comercial abarrotado de productos desconocidos y que no saben de dónde rayos ni por cuál vía llegan al país?

¿No representa una muestra de poder adquisitivo que puedan comprar en estas tiendas desde un chicle de a diez centavos en moneda convertible, un jabón de 35, hasta un paquete de espaguetis de 90 sin que se afecten sus salarios de ocho dólares al mes como promedio?

Además, si analizamos que de los 2,178 compradores el 56 por ciento eran personas en horario laboral y sólo el 17 y el 13 por ciento lo constituían amas de casas y jubilados en ese orden, nos damos cuenta de la ventaja numérica de quienes se supone que trabajan por estar emplantillados en un centro laboral, sobre el resto de la población ociosa que vive del trapicheo insigne, la gerencia del comercio subterráneo o el robo pudoroso.

Mucho menos asegurar que la disciplina y el descontrol se adueñan de cientos de organismos y timbiriches del Estado sólo porque 347 unidades en Ciudad de La Habana arrojaran subutilización del fondo del tiempo laborable, y 86 de sus administradores se encontraran fuera de la empresa, la fábrica o la unidad a la hora de una sorpresiva inspección.

Eso es una cirigaña, una bobería, una minucia, algo para no tomar en cuenta o siquiera tenerlo como punto de referencia en la agenda de una reunión, si sabemos que miles de tutsis, haitianos, chechenios, palestinos, congoleses y hondureños no tienen siquiera dónde trabajar.

Y aún más cuando entre los resultados de la encuesta sobresale la desactualización de los convenios colectivos de trabajo, en cuestiones esenciales sobre los derechos y deberes de los trabajadores en el 52 por ciento de los centros visitados.

Todo esto indica que si un obrero se siente burlado en su centro laboral, pese a no conocer cuáles son sus derechos y obligaciones, sale a desconocer, a tomar aire puro, a ver si le cae algo del cielo o de la shopping como un espanta penas ante la desidia, la falta de recursos, condiciones, silencios o de algo que sustraer, desviar o repartir de la oficina, el riego por aspersión, el aula, el cementerio u otro punto donde la administración, desde su ausencia o desinterés, les deja vivir la vida.

La frase célebre acuñada para la posteridad por el ministro de Trabajo y Seguridad Social de Cuba, cuando aseguró que "no es tiempo de seguir perdiendo el tiempo", transcurridos sólo 46 años de gestión, es una clara señal de la persuasión para detectar problemas y un ultimátum contra los comedores de horas, cuyos primeros frutos se alcanzarán transcurrido similar período de tiempo.

Ante análisis tan profundo y parto histórico de un apotegma digno de un Aristóteles, un Séneca o un Cicerón, se reunió el Grupo de Apoyo de la Transparencia Organizativa (GATO) y determinó un plan de medidas que acabará en breve tiempo con las diversas categorías de perder el ídem en los centros de trabajo.

Presidido por el incorruptible administrador Nefasto "El laborioso" Poma, quien además es técnico en triquiñuelas, master en desvío de recursos y especialista de Segundo Grado en infladera de plantillas, inventos de calificador de cargos y en racionalización de horarios laborales, el cónclave determinó lo siguiente:

Primero. Como búsqueda de un equilibrio psíquico-físico del trabajador ante la suspensión de las Tribunas Abiertas Antiimperialistas y la escasez de marchas del pueblo combatiente que semi paralizaban o cerraban en su totalidad, respectivamente, un gran por ciento de entidades del país, se decidió, para lograr un balance corpóreo-mental en el obrero que:

a- El sesenta por ciento -no más- de los trabajadores de organismos, empresas y entidades del país no vinculados a la salud, la producción o los servicios, asistan a las tiendas, parques, peluquerías y hogares a comprar, estirar los huesos, ponerse presentables, alimentar la cazuela y otros ejercicios útiles para mantenerse en forma en el horario laboral, comprendido entre las diez -hora de la ausente merienda- y las doce del medio día, horario en que les correspondería el almuerzo planificado, pero no del todo resuelto.

b- Los comprendidos en las tres categorías a las que se les prohíbe abandonar el puesto de trabajo en el horario asignado al sesenta por ciento de sus colegas de otros oficios y profesiones, lo pueden hacer de dos a cinco de la tarde, período en que ya el médico terminó la consulta, se acabó la materia prima para trabajar, y las croquetas y el refresco gaseado llegaron a su humanitario final.

Segundo. Aclarada esta situación, queda prohibido importunar a los trabajadores deambulantes por parte de los encuestadores de la prensa y los funcionarios del organismo del trabajo y la seguridad social, únicos que se encontraban autorizados, ya que un gran por ciento de administrativos, dirigentes sindicales y militantes integrados a cualquier categoría ocupacional, practicaban el ocio furtivo, la vagancia sigilosa y el majaseo a hurtadillas, antes de ser autorizados por el GATO.

En cuanto a la existencia de "causales muy profundas del mal, que trascienden la mera visita a las tiendas en horario laboral, y están relacionadas con ciertas distorsiones de la Ley de Distribución Socialista y la consiguiente desestimulación que crea el estatismo salarial en franca desventaja con ciertas posibilidades del empleado en el llamado sector emergente y otros espacios económicos alternativos", la respuesta del GATO es no, pues el nivel de conciencia de los trabajadores cubanos no anda contemplando un pesito más u otro menos. Las estadísticas de pleno empleo y el bajo nivel de corrupción a lo largo y ancho de país así lo demuestran.

Nada, compañeros, que cuando hay un Gato que caza ratón, los guayabitos sólo pueden vivir en la azotea.


LUX INFO-PRESS
Agencia Cubana Independiente de Información y Prensa
2471 N.W. 21 Terrace
Miami, Florida 33142
E-mail: ***@aol.com

http://cubanet.org/sindical/news/y05/11230501.html


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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:33:15 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Se atrasa venta de aceite comestible racionado

SOCIEDAD
Se atrasa venta de aceite comestible racionado
MORON, Cuba - 22 de noviembre (Abel Escobar Ramírez / www.cubanet.org) - Los residentes del municipio Morón, en la provincia de Ciego de Avila, no han podido adquirir desde hace más de 45 días la cuota de aceite comestible, por lo que se enfrentan a la disyuntiva de renunciar al necesario producto o adquirirlo en las tiendas dolarizadas a precios exorbitantes.

Amas de casa entrevistadas este domingo aseguraron que es muy difícil enfrentar las labores de la cocina sin ese componente, ya que la comida es muy difícil de digerir. Además este aceite, de bastante mala calidad por cierto, se comenzó a repartir, después de mucho tiempo sin que se vendiera, a cambio del descuento de una libra de azúcar de la esmirriada canasta básica normada.

Esta situación ha empeorado con la prohibición a particulares de la venta de cerdos, lo que facilitaba la compra de gordos para sacar manteca, lo que hace que sea muy difícil de conseguir el necesario producto, y el Gobierno no cumple con sus obligaciones de distribuir en tiempo los alimentos normados.

http://cubanet.org/CNews/y05/nov05/23a4.htm


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Message: 4
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:30:56 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Denuncia de Julia Cecilia Delgado, Presidenta en Funciones del Partido Liberal de Cuba

Denuncia de Julia Cecilia Delgado, Presidenta en Funciones del Partido Liberal de Cuba

2005-11-22

La Habana, 22 de noviembre del 2005.

Yo, Julia Cecilia Delgado, denuncio ante la Opinión Pública Nacional e Internacional la continuidad del ensañamiento represivo que sufro por parte de la Policia Politíca por ser una dirigente opositora pacífica enfrentada al régimen de Castro.


Esta vez dicho régimen, ha fijado sus garras en Francisco Pérez Delgado, de 26 años de edad, siendo el más jóven de mis tres hijos, quien fuera detenido el 26 de abril del 200,1 mientras me encontraba cumpliendo una condena de un año en la prision de mujeres conocida como Manto Negro por mi condición de opositora.

Siendo involucrado éste en una causa común junto a un grupo de jóvenes, que en el " juicio" celebrado en consecuencia mi hijo Francisco solo tuvo responsabilidad en la venta de un reloj de mesa de origen desconocido. Situacion esta aprovechada por la Policia Política y utilizada como chantaje para doblegar mi resistencia llena de dolor.

Éstos, sin escrúpulos ni miramientos, al no obtener sus objetivos, han procedido a culminar dicho proceso con el encarcelamiento definitivo de mi hijo Francisco durante cinco años a partir del próximo 6 de diciembre.

Debo agregar que ya el segundo de mis hijos, Yosvani Pérez Delgado, de 30 años de edad, fue víctima de estos métodos criminales, al guardar prisión por un término de siete años y un mes, siendo brutalmente torturado en la prisión provincial de Pinar del Rio, conocida esta como Km 5 œ. Antecedentes que me indican puedan repetirse con mi hijo Francisco.

Es de señalar que por la coherencia de mi familia en la lucha opositora, incluyendo la activés de mi hijo Francisco, se nos ha negado la autorización de viajar al exilio aún poseyendo visas para los EE.UU., por lo que somos rehénes del Gobierno castrista.

Como madre y luchadora pacífica, reclamo a los organismos competentes y a las personalidades del mundo político e intelectual que intercedan ante el régimen de La Habana para que se respete la integridad física y mental de mi hijo Francisco y cese la represión extendida a mi familia.

Julia Cecilia Delgado González, Presidente en funciones del Partido Liberal de Cuba (PLC), Coordinadora del Proyecto de Bibliotecas de Cuba (PBIC) y miembro de la Comisión de Relatoría de Todos Unidos.

http://www.presslingua.com/web/article.asp?artID=3712


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Message: 5
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:32:42 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Operativo policial detiene a decenas de transeuntes

REPRESION
Operativo policial detiene a decenas de transeúntes
MORON, Cuba - 22 de noviembre (José Manuel Caraballo Bravo, APLA / www.cubanet.org) - El operativo policial realizado en días recientes dejó un saldo de más de 60 detenidos, entre las personas que transitaban por la calle principal de la ciudad.

Varios carros patrullas y un ómnibus de la base de transporte fueron utilizados para la detención de ciudadanos que no portasen su carne de identidad, desempleados, y personas que no pudieran justificar mercancías transportadas en jabas o pequeños bultos.

Una vez más la población demostró su inconformidad con algunas detenciones donde primó la fuerza bruta. Según un colaborador de la APLA un motorista residente de la calle 8 quien no pudo detener su motocicleta en firme por fallas en el freno recibió maltratos.

Otra victima, según la misma fuente, fue la auxiliar de limpieza del restaurante "El Criollo", quien al ser empujada por un agente del orden quien pretendía sorprender a los que disfrutaban del parque contiguo al restaurante, cayó al piso.

"Parecía que perseguían a prófugos de la Prisión Morón, la calle Martí quedó como cuando hay un toque de queda," comento el colaborador, quien vive cerca del lugar de los hechos.

Militantes del PCC alegan que el operativo era necesario porque la calle principal parece una zona de tolerancia donde se vende desde una aguja de máquina de coser hasta tabacos de marca registrada. Otros moronenses opinan que los sucesos violentos que vienen ocurriendo últimamente con tendencia a aumentar fue la causa del operativo policial.

http://cubanet.org/CNews/y05/nov05/23a5.htm


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Message: 6
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:35:02 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Dos acusados de Ekin otorgaron poderes de una empresa a dos etarras

Dos acusados de Ekin otorgaron poderes de una empresa a dos etarras

Una procesada declara en el juicio que desconocía la dirección de la banda para mandar dinero.El Supremo considera válido el escupitajo como identificación

Madrid
José Antonio Díaz Urrutia, alias «Andoni», y Juan Pablo Diéguez Gómez, dos de los acusados en el macrojuicio que se sigue en la Audiencia Nacional contra el entorno de ETA, admitieron ayer que dieron poderes de la empresa Gadusmar en Cuba a los presuntos etarras Carlos Ibarguren y Agustín Azkarate, pero como particulares y no como miembros de la banda terrorista. La segunda jornada del juicio por el «caso Ekin» estuvo marcada, como la primera, por la decisión de los procesados de no contestar a las preguntas del fiscal ni de la acusación, sólo a las de sus defensas, y por las protestas de estos abogados defensores por no contar con la documentación que quieren utilizar en los interrogatorios.
El fiscal Enrique Molina explica en su escrito de acusación que Gadusmar era una sociedad constituida en 1994 para la comercialización de bacalao, pero que dos años después Diéguez amplió el objeto al de pesquería y otorgó poderes especiales y exclusivos a favor de los etarras Ibarguren y Azkarate. Esta sociedad inició a partir de entonces un proyecto de expansión en Iberoamérica para sostener económicamente a miembros de ETA en Cuba y Panamá.

Otros cuatro de los seis procesados que declararon ayer negaron que sus empresas financiaran a la banda y coincidieron en decir que «no había dinero» para este fin porque tenían pérdidas o beneficios muy escasos. Una de ellas, Inmaculada Berriozábal Bernas, para quien el fiscal pide doce años de prisión por un delito de integración en ETA, afirmó que la agencia de viajes para la que trabajaba, Ganeko, no financió a ETA porque «no había dinero», y añadió: «No tenemos la dirección tampoco». Antes de declarar esto, Berriozábal afirmó: «Casi que lo voy a decir en el idioma de Cervantes», después de haber tenido problemas con la traducción que del Euskara hacía una intérprete.
Para el Ejecutivo vasco el macrojuicio responde a la estrategia «llevada a cabo por el PP, con el silencio cómplice del PSOE, de gobernar contra Euskadi y de condicionar las actuaciones del Poder Judicial». Arnaldo Otegi afirmó que Batasuna «mide» al presidente Zapatero y que gana «lo negativo» porque el macrojuicio «es un gran obstáculo para la paz».
Mientras, la Sala Penal del Tribunal Supremo sentenció que considera válida la prueba de ADN practicada al escupitajo de un detenido por «kale borroka», ya que se trata de una muestra obtenida de «un acto voluntario de expulsión de materia orgánica», que no requiere autorización judicial para ser analizada. Y confirmó seis años de cárcel para el imputado, Orkatz Gallastegi, por quemar un cajero bancario. La misma Sala, con distinta composición de magistrados, absolvió en mayo al mismo acusado por otro acto de vandalismo callejero, al entender que la prueba de ADN del mismo esputo sí requería el permiso del juez.

Por último, la Ertzaintza encontró sobre las nueve y media de ayer por la mañana los restos de una bomba colocada por ETA en las bodegas El Coto, en la localidad alavesa de Oyón, que estaba compuesta por medio kilogramo de cloratita con amosal, informaron fuentes de Interior.

El presidente de la patronal vasca, Confebask, Miguel Lazpiur, aseguró que la extorsión etarra a los empresarios «no ha cedido en ningún momento, aunque no puedo decir si ha habido un repunte en los últimos meses».


http://www.lne.es/secciones/noticia.jsp?pIdNoticia=350041&pIdSeccion=43&pNumEjemplar=1101


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Message: 7
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:33:52 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Se declara Antúnez en huelga de hambre

PRISIONES
Se declara Antúnez en huelga de hambre
SANTA CLARA, Cuba - 22 de noviembre (Guillermo Fariñas, Cubanacán Press / www.cubanet.org) - El prisionero de conciencia Jorge Luis García Pérez "Antúnez" se declaró en huelga de hambre para exigir a las autoridades penitenciarias sus derechos, en la prisión camagÌeyana Kilo el pasado 15 de noviembre.

Bertha Antúnez Pernet comunicó que su hermano protesta debido a que no le facilitan la comunicación telefónica y pide ser trasladado hacia una celda aislada donde no sufra el hacinamiento a que está sometido en la actualidad.

"Conozco que la situación por el teléfono se debe a mi participación en una emisión en directo en un programa de la emisora Radio Martí, y me mantendré en esta posición de inanición, incluida el agua, hasta que mis peticiones sean cumplidas. Responsabilizo al gobierno por el deterioro de mi integridad física e incluso si pierdo mi vida", comunicó el reo en misiva a su familia.

Jorge Luis García Pérez "Antúnez" es uno de los más antiguos y emblemáticos prisioneros políticos del gobierno de Fidel Castro. Durante sus casi 16 años de reclusión, se ha caracterizado por el enfrentamiento y la denuncia sistemática de la situación de violación de derechos humanos en las cárceles cubanas.

http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y05/nov05/23a1.htm


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Message: 8
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:35:47 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth

I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth
Director: Vicente Ferraz
Documentary
Rated: Not Rated
90 minutes
Reviewed by Scott Tobias
November 23rd, 2005

When Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 I Am Cuba was rediscovered and re-released by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola in 1995, it was an event for Western cinephiles, a fevered piece of Communist propaganda shot through by some of the most technically astonishing camerawork in history. Its impact on young American filmmakers was immediate: For his 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson lifted an amazing long take in which the camera dives into a swimming pool teeming with beautiful women. That this landmark Cuban-Soviet co-production finally found an appreciative reception remains deeply ironic, because it was only embraced after its naïve revolutionary notions had safely gone to seed. As poetry, it's ravishing; as politics, it's bunk.

Vicente Ferraz's competent documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth looks back at the project's fascinating history, which came about at a time when the newly simpatico Cuba and the Soviet Union were steeling themselves against U.S. pressure. Under the aegis of the Cuban Institute For Art and the Cinema Industry, a team of Soviet filmmakers-principally, Kalatozov, cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, and Urusevsky's wife Bela Fridman, who oversaw the casting-I Am Cuba was the first filmic collaboration between the two countries. Working with a Cuban cast and crew-several of whom Ferraz has rounded up for interviews-Kalatozov and his team tried to capture the island's robust revolutionary spirit, but they wound up with wildly sensual Communist kitsch. After an arduous 14-month shoot, the result pleased nobody: The Cubans thought the camera pyrotechnics overwhelmed and distorted the realities of their recent uprising; the Soviets were put off by the inadvertently seductive portrait of Western excess in the film's early sections. Shortly after its premiÚre, the film was quietly buried.

Though it doesn't rise above the cut-and-paste aesthetic of other making-of documentaries, The Siberian Mammoth assembles many members of the disparate Cuban cast and crew, and unearths some rare production photos and footage. Perhaps the best moment comes when Ferraz shows his interview subjects a copy of the U.S. video cover, which is emblazoned with rapturous quotes from many of America's premier publications. Their reactions are somewhere between bemusement and gratification, pleased that the film had found some admirers but also surprised that a production this badly muffed could ever be appreciated. Ferraz's documentary still seems a bit obscure for a th

http://avclub.com/content/node/42853

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Message: 9
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:36:32 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Productor de legendaria "Carrozas de Fuego" visita Cuba

Posted on Tue, Nov. 22, 2005

Productor de legendaria "Carrozas de Fuego" visita Cuba

ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press

LA HABANA - En el marco de un ciclo de cine británico con temas de deporte, el productor David Puttnam visitó Cuba para presentar personalmente la legendaria cinta "Carrozas de Fuego", galardonada con varios Oscar.
Puttnam se encontró el martes con críticos de cine, comentaristas y periodistas interesados en saber sobre su obra, que incluye otros clásicos como "Expreso de medianoche" (1978) "Los gritos del silencio" (1984) y "La Misión" (1986), y ante quienes habló sobre su filosofía: las películas sirven mostrar que los humanos somos seres "fabulosos".
El productor británico, quien también tiene título de Lord desde 1995 cuando la reina Isabel II lo invistió, se mostró muy satisfecho por estar en Cuba y admirado por la prioridad que se da en la isla a la salud y la educación de los niños, pues es embajador de buena voluntad de UNICEF.
También exaltó los valores de solidaridad y el apego a las familias en la nación caribeña.
Ferviente creyente en Dios, considerado un profesional capaz de hacer del cine de autor un éxito de taquillas, Puttnam declaró: "Tengo una enorme fe en el individuo. No tengo ninguna fe en los movimientos sociales..."
"La historia me muestra que los individuos sufren cuando los movimientos sociales se vuelven muy poderosos", agregó Puttnam.
Su auditorio se mostró interesado en algunos aspectos técnicos de su trabajo como las motivaciones que lo llevaron a "Carrozas de Fuego" (1981) --la historia de una competencia--, la forma de seleccionar a los actores o la música, cuya banda sonora a cargo de Vangelis ganó el Oscar en 1981.
El ciclo de proyecciones de películas con temas de deportes fue producto de una colaboración de la isla y Gran Bretaña en esta materia y con el apoyo del Instituto Cubano de las Artes e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC).
Además de la afamada película, se programaron desde el 15 al 20 de noviembre en la capital y por una semana más en la provincia de Pinar del Río los filmes "En un día claro" (Gaby Dellal, 2005), "Absolutamente estelar" (Mark Herman, 2000), "Maravilloso olvido" (Paul Morrison, 2003) y "Fiebre en las gradas" (David Evans, 1997) entre otras.

http://www.miami.com/mld/elnuevo/news/world/americas/13235401.htm


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Message: 10
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:38:30 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: The Secret History of Rum

The Secret History of Rum
Ian WilliamsTue Nov 22,11:51 AM ET

The Nation -- Rum has always tended to favor and flavor rebellion, from the pirates and buccaneers of the seventeenth century to the American Revolution onward. In addition, sugar and rum pretty much introduced globalization to a waiting world, tying together Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean in a complex alcoholic web of trade and credit. Not until oil was any single commodity so important for world trade. So it is not surprising that the Bacardi Corporation has become one of the world's first transnationals.
Even before Fidel Castro took power, the Bacardi family moved its headquarters from its Cuban home to the Bahamas, allowing it to get British imperial trade preferences, while opening a large distillery in Puerto Rico to allow penetration of the American market. Now its management is mostly living in exile in Florida, monopolizing the local markets across the Caribbean and the world with its bland, branded spirit. Fifty years of marketing have made Bacardi almost synonymous with rum in much of North America, and as Thierry GardÚre, maker of the acclaimed Haitian rum Barbancourt, pointed out with a pained expression to me once, "They always advertise it as mixed with something else."
In Prohibition-era America, lots of thirsty Americans went to Cuba, and what they drank there, in keeping with the ambience, was rum, usually in cocktails and often in bars favored by Fidel's onetime fishing partner, Ernest Hemingway. He made a clear distinction: "My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita."
Cuba made great rums and had some of the world's most renowned bars. Bacardi had really risen to prominence after the American occupation, or "liberation" (sounds familiar?), of Cuba, at the turn of the twentieth century, when the island became the playground for its northern neighbor. Barcardi built its market position during Prohibition, edging out the old New England rum. When the Eighteenth Amendment took force, Bacardi USA sold 60,000 shares, closed down the company and distributed its assets, coincidentally 60,000 cases of Bacardi rum, to the stockholders.
During the dry years the company's order books would suggest that there were unquenchable thirsts in Shanghai, Bahamas and tiny islands like the French enclave of St. Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland. But of course, shiploads of Bacardi went to rendezvous with the rum-runners just outside American territorial waters. As soon as repeal was in sight, Bacardi litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court to open its business in Puerto Rico, where it was eager to get Caribbean costs combined with American nationality. Its rivals in Puerto Rico used the same style of targeted retrospective legislation that Bacardi later did against Castro's Cuba in an attempt to keep Bacardi out. In the first year after Prohibition, Bacardi sold almost a million bottles to the United States. But soon it was not selling it from Cuba. Despite the family's overt and noisy Cuban patriotism, the company pioneered outsourcing and supplied the United States from Puerto Rico. Cuba's share of American rum imports dropped from 52 percent in 1935 to 7.3 percent in 1940.
In 1955 Bacardi moved its trademark to the Bahamas, perhaps in gratitude for the islands' help in keeping the product moving during Prohibition, and also because that made it eligible for British Commonwealth preferences. Its offshoring from Cuba proved very prescient when Castro nationalized the Cuban operations in 1960, which was as much a shock to Bacardi. The Bacardi building had greeted the arrival of Fidel, Che and the compañeros with a banner saying simply "Gracias, Fidel!" In common with some other rum producers, they had supported the rebels financially. In 1959, Castro's trade delegation to the United States had included Juan Pépin Bosch and Daniel Bacardi, two of the family's heads. Neither side dwells on these happy days any more. The company is still held by 600 descendants of the founder, so it does not have to file financial statements or submit to valuations as if it were listed on stock exchanges, and in any case, with sales in 200 countries adding up to 200 million bottles, no one could be sure which stock exchange it would list on.
As its record shows, Bacardi is the original multinational. Its trademark is now held in Liechtenstein, one of the most secret and secure banking centers in the world, which contrives to be "offshore" in the middle of the Alps. However, while attending to business, the Bacardi family has never missed a chance to get its own back on Castro. Bacardi clan chief Juan Pépin Bosch brought a touch of the old connection between buccaneering and rum back to life in 1961 by buying a surplus US Air Force B-26 Marauder medium bomber in order to bomb a Cuban oil refinery. Later he was the money behind a plot to assassinate Castro. For many years Bosch was a major financier for the Cuban American Lobby and a major litigator who brought the United States to the verge of trade wars with the rest of the world. The technique has been to lobby legislators to exercise their anti-Cuban prejudices, regardless of general principles of international or indeed domestic law, and then to pay lawyers to implement the resulting legislation.
Bacardi was spurred into action when Castro's government went into partnership with the French liquor giant, Pernod Ricard, to market the renowned Havana Club internationally. Even though excluded from the US market by the embargo, Pernod was able to sell 38 million bottles of Havana Club in the first few years. In anticipation of an end to the Cuban embargo, it was gearing up for big sales in the United States. This was a challenge both political and commercial to Bacardi, which set to firing retaliatory legal broadsides and to the rediscovery of its Cuban roots.
Bacardi, wherever it is made, had for some decades tried to bury its Cuban origins, but in the 1990s it went into reverse. Its labels began to mention prominently that the company was founded in Santiago de Cuba in 1862 while eliding mention of where the rum was actually made currently. In 1998, "rum and Coke" or "Bacardi and Coke" suddenly became known as a Cuba Libre again. To match the myths, various stories were circulated to celebrate Cuba Libre, claiming that it had been invented by an American in 1898 to celebrate the American victory over the Spanish in Cuba.
The original makers of Havana Club, the Arechabala family, had fled the country after the Revolution, leaving the distillery and the brand behind. The family did not renew its trademark, which lapsed in 1973, and in 1976, the Cuban state export company registered the century-old brand with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Twenty years later, Bacardi sought out the Arechabala family members and bought out whatever suing rights they may have had. Reportedly, Bacardi paid them $1.25 million after the family had spurned offers from Pernod Ricard, which was attempting to cover its back. Bacardi, happy to tweak Fidel's beard, began selling a rum with the Havana Club label (made in the Bahamas) in the United States in 1995, and Pernod sued. The case was going in Pernod's favor, as the Manhattan judge initially made her rulings based on existing law. Then the Bacardi family cut the Gordian knot. Using political clout in Florida, it got the law changed by persuading lawmakers to smuggle a clause into a large spending bill specifically to exempt trademarks nationalized by the Cubans from the usual international protections unless the original owner had agreed to hand them over. And of course, the Arechabalas had not.
In the end, the judge broke new legal ground by accepting this retrospective and clearly privileged legislation as binding, since Pernod wanted an injunction against future use of its trademark. Judge Shira Scheindlin decided: "At this point, because plaintiffs can sell no product in this country and may not be so able for a significant length of time, they suffer no impairment of their ability to compete as a result of defendants' actions. Any competitive injury plaintiffs will suffer based upon their intent to enter the U.S. market once the embargo is lifted is simply too remote and uncertain to provide them with standing."
It was yet another case of the United States flouting treaties and international law, and the judgment is not recognized anywhere else in the world--a point emphasized by the World Trade Organization shortly afterward.
Even so, the US patent office threw out Bacardi's attempt to register other names containing Havana, because the company was claiming a spurious connection to Havana, which could have confused drinkers who thought they were buying rum from Cuba.
When Pernod pushed the European Union into filing a dispute with the WTO, Bacardi complained, in a manner that almost defines the term "disingenuous" from a family that had just secured private legislation: "Pernod Ricard has pressured the EU into filing a claim with the WTO in an attempt to politicize a purely civil dispute. Bacardi views this as a private civil matter and one that is not connected in any way to world trade laws or the WTO." Others begged to differ, not least when Castro announced that Cuba could abrogate US trademarks, such as Coca-Cola, in retaliation. The WTO itself found in 2001 that the American law violated free-trade agreements, and the US trademark office has refused to revoke Pernod's registration despite even more litigation and lobbying by Bacardi, helped by alleged illegal campaign contributions to Congressman Tom DeLay, yet another politician who might be laid low by the demon rum.
Perhaps the ultimate weapon was used when Castro threatened in 2001 to start producing a rum in Cuba called Bacardi. The US State Department, not good at seeing itself as others see it, promptly declared this to be a provocation. In the meantime, the European Union has effectively been bullied into taking no action to enforce the case it has won at the WTO. Castro himself has an occasional talent for expediency. One of the first winds of change that he got from the Soviet Union was when Mikhail Gorbachev cut back imports of Cuban rum as part of his anti-booze campaign. In 1999 the Cuban leader, who had already given up the trademark cigars that regularly put him on the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine, went one step further; he urged Cubans to give up rum as well and warned that anyone who wanted rum over the New Year "will pay dearly for it." He asked an assembly of medical students, "How much damage has rum caused in any society?" He even lamented that there were "supporters of the revolution who like to toss down a few once in a while." Cynics assumed that the supplies for the growing export market for Cuban rum were threatened by domestic demand.
While Fidelistas may berate Bacardi for its feud with Havana Club, rum aficionados almost universally deplore the company for the effect it has had on rum. Gresham's law observes that bad money drives out good; Bacardi has achieved this with rum. Its bland ubiquity has been driving the distinctive rums of the world from the mass consumer market. It is the equivalent of American cheddar driving out the 300 cheeses of France. Its monopoly power has been used to keep much better, genuinely local Caribbean brands from reaching takeoff. The islands cannot compete with subsidized and tariff protected high fructose corn syrup and Floridian sugar grown by former Cuban barons, so their one chance to market a value-added branded commodity is frustrated by the transglobal black bat.
Republicans used to inveigh against the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion," but now Bacardi has the GOP in its pocket, it symbolizes the complete turnaround of political positions.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20051122/cm_thenation/20051205secret_history_of_rum;_ylt=A86.I16WgINDGTQAUAT9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--


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Message: 11
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:41:57 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: "El neopopulismo es La NEP de Castro": Vladimiro Roca

POLITICA
"El neopopulismo es La NEP de Castro": Vladimiro Roca
Juan González Febles

LA HABANA, Cuba - Noviembre (www.cubanet.org) - El arsenal ideológico de los totalitarios se hace recurrente. En las primeras décadas del pasado siglo XX, el primer tirano comunista exitoso, Lenin, ideó un engendro que fue conocido como NEP. Esta NEP o Nueva Política Económica, representó un viraje estratégico decidido a torcer el cuello de los "burgueses". Pero en un final era sólo más de lo mismo.

En el siglo XXI, en Cuba, la historia parece repetirse reeditada por el Comandante. Una economía en crisis, corrupción generalizada y un fuerte antagonismo social presiden el panorama nacional. Vladimiro Roca, presidente del Partido Social Demócrata de Cuba y miembro ejecutivo del Bloque Todos Unidos responde interrogantes sobre este particular.

P: ¿Qué está sucediendo en Cuba?

R: Esa pregunta es amplia y escabrosa. Voy a tratar de concretarla en lo posible. En estos momentos, todos conocemos la situación de crisis, económica, política y social que atraviesa el país. Dicen algunos que por las deficiencias del sistema, y yo digo que aquí no hay sistema. Aquí tenemos un dueño de finca que con sus acciones ha convertido la finca en potrero. Esta situación de deterioro se hace ver más en estos últimos tiempos. Esto se hace evidente en un menor control por parte del gobierno, mayor inconformidad en las calles. Ahora el gobierno retoma una política discursiva neopopulista, esto por ponerle algún nombre, ya que no es algo nuevo. Se trata de los mismos temas del populismo que usó en los años iniciales del triunfo de la revolución. La diferencia estriba en que ahora lo está dirigiendo contra la corrupción. Este fenómeno de la corrupción ha sido creado por el propio gobierno, ellos necesitan de esta corrupción para mantenerse en el poder. Esto ha sido algo a lo que siempre ha recurrido cuando ha estado en momentos de crisis profunda, tanto en lo económico, político y en lo social, para desviar la atención del problema fundamental.

Muchos recuerdan el problema de la grúa de la CTA Habana, a principios de los años 90. Tomó ese incidente para emprenderla contra la aparente corrupción -construir con recursos del estado. Es un tema, que se ha hecho recurrente para mantener al pueblo en una lucha inútil de unos contra otros. Por esto lo llamo Neopopulismo. Mientras el pueblo se faja abajo, nadie opta por mirar lo que pasa arriba. Nadie se percata de que el problema no son los pisteros, los trabajadores de los agromercados, o los intermediarios. El problema aquí es más sencillo: el gobierno cubano, específicamente el gobernante Fidel Castro, no quiere transigir, no quiere permitir que el pueblo cubano pueda ser feliz con el producto de su trabajo. Esto es básicamente lo que sucede en Cuba.

P: ¿Qué considera usted que va a pasar en Cuba?

R: Esa es el tipo de pregunta que no me gusta. No me gusta hacer de profeta, no me gusta vaticinar. Los vaticinios en política, específicamente en Cuba, son bien riesgosos por lo volubles que son las variables a conjugar. Todo parece indicar que el gobierno, con todo su accionar represivo -que es social completamente, no sólo contra la oposición, sino pura represión social- apuesta por una salida violenta de la crisis cubana. Esto por dos vías: una, que se produzca el estallido social a partir de las duras condiciones y la represión a que está sometiendo el gobierno a la población; la otra, mediante un éxodo masivo hacia Estados Unidos. Esto, ya ha sido advertido por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos, y será interpretado como una declaración de guerra. Parece ser que Fidel Castro -como reconoció de forma pública en fecha reciente- en vísperas de su muerte, no quiere permitir que el pueblo cubano se vea libre de él. Quiere conducir al pueblo cubano al mismo lugar adonde va, a la muerte. Quiere llevar al país a un desastre aún mayor.

P: ¿Qué opina debe hacer la oposición interna ante esta situación?

R: Por desgracia la oposición interna lo único que puede hacer es dar su ejemplo. Tratar de estar al lado del pueblo. Esto es hacerlo en sus lugares de residencia. Tratar de esclarecer en lo posible a la gente cuál es el problema fundamental del país. Empeñarse en evitar que el pueblo avance hacia el desastre a que lo quiere conducir el gobierno. Estar ahí para escuchar al pueblo, pero sobre todo para apoyarlo en lo que éste necesite. No pedir al pueblo que haga lo que nosotros queramos; hacer lo que el pueblo necesite y desea. Dar el apoyo que el pueblo cubano ha necesitado siempre y no ha tenido.

http://cubanet.org/CNews/y05/nov05/23a8.htm


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Message: 12
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:41:04 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Mas pan y menos circo

Más pan y menos circo
Alejandro Gomez, El Nuevo Herald, 20 de noviembre de 2005.

Fidel Castro habló más de seis horas en la Universidad de La Habana. No dejó tema por tocar, desde su parkinson diagnosticado por la CIA hasta la siempre presente perfidia del imperio y su jefe, George W. Bush.
En Venezuela, Hugo Chávez calificó al presidente estadounidense de ''asesino'' y en Caracas se especulaba sobre cuántos venezolanos creían posible una invasión de Estados Unidos. El teniente coronel golpista organizó una marcha frente a la embajada de México, ofendido porque Fox no aceptó el calificativo de "cachorro del imperio''.
En México, un legislador cubano negaba el viernes que su país tuviera injerencia en la política externa venezolana. Oxímoron es en español la palabra que se usa cuando el adjetivo contradice al sustantivo. Pocos ejemplos mejores que legislador cubano. ¿Quién legisla en Cuba sino el comandante en jefe? Un legislador de facto y cientos de miembros de la Asamblea Popular, presididos por Ricardo Alarcón, para levantar la mano y decir que sí.
El presidente argentino Néstor Kirchner llegará hoy Caracas para entrevistarse con su colega Chávez, en el momento más indicado. Cuando se están dirimiendo diferencias con México y cuando Argentina necesita el apoyo de Washington para su negociación con el Fondo Monetario Internacional.
Como llega a Caracas un domingo, tal vez alcance a participar en Aló Presidente y lucirse junto a su anfitrión. El viernes se sumaron al circo de tres pistas el ex dictador Pinochet y el ex jefe de la policía política chilena coronel Contreras. Ambos se incriminaron mutuamente y Pinochet dijo que no sabía a cargo de quién estaba la temida DINA.
Todo entretenimiento para la platea. Uso indiscriminado de adjetivos y descalificación de personajes para sumar a los apoyos internos. Al parecer, los pueblos del continente prefieren oír historias sobre las maldades imperiales que discutir soluciones viables y prácticas que alivien su pobreza y su de- sempleo.
Sobre esa ola navegan los artistas, histriónicos, ocurrentes, agresivos, pero incapaces de elaborar el plan más simple, por aquello que decía Winston Churchill: "Cualquier plan es mejor que ningún plan''.
Kirchner y Chávez vienen de ganar sus elecciones y gozan de popularidad entre su gente. Castro lleva cuarenta y seis años haciendo el mismo show, con algunas variaciones. La comunidad latinoamericana lo escucha, con más o menos atención, pero lo escucha.
Es decir, que las ciudadanías agobiadas de América Latina tienen parte de responsabilidad por lo que les pasa. Quien no es parte de la solución es parte del problema y hoy existen más problemas que soluciones.
Mientras tanto, silenciosamente, un hombre eficiente y trabajador llamado Ricardo Lagos, presidente de Chile, firmaba el viernes un acuerdo de libre comercio con China y espera firmar otro con el Japón. Sin insultos ni adjetivos, con seriedad y trabajo, Lagos y los suyos son parte de la solución del futuro de su país. Y un ejemplo que, aunque no se ve ni se sigue, es un ejemplo a seguir.
Y fue justamente un chileno, el escritor Jorge Edwards, quién afirmó en Bogotá que estar inventando enfrentamientos es ''una tontería fenomenal'' cuando los países tienen problemas urgentes. Pero es la misma gente que reclama soluciones la que elige y apoya a dirigentes con más dotes para el teatro que para la gestión pública.
Sin tratar de profundizar enfrentamientos, sería más que saludable que los países del continente que tratan de encontrar un camino de progreso aíslen, o directamente rompan, con aquellos que como Cuba y Venezuela aumentan su número de pobres con los decibeles de discursos de confrontación con cualquiera por cualquier motivo.
Yno se trata de alinearse con los Estados Unidos o no. Este problema está al sur del río Grande y allí debe ser resuelto. Los problemas de Washington no son los que América Latina y su gente debe arremangarse y poner manos a la obra. Con la seriedad que la situación impone.
***@herald.com

http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y05/nov05/21o10.htm

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Message: 13
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:42:40 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Donde estan los negros?

SOCIEDAD
¿Dónde están los negros?
Luis Cino

LA HABANA, Cuba - Noviembre (www.cubanet.org) - Dicen que en Cuba no hay racismo. El socialismo lo eliminó de un plumazo. Es un problema resuelto. Otro de los logros de la revolución.

Ese es un asunto que no se discute. Menos aún entre cubanos blancos. Un escobazo ocultó bajo la cama el polvo que había en el piso. A buen recaudo de las miradas indiscretas.

Desde la Independencia, los cubanos nos hemos negado testarudamente a aceptar la existencia del problema racial.

También bajo la cama fueron a parar los casi tres mil negros masacrados en 1912. Allí ya habían ocultado el cadáver de un inconveniente general mambí que casualmente era negro, Quintín Banderas.

En la bola negra que alguien impuso a Fulgencio Batista para vetar su ingreso al Miramar Yacht Club, más que su origen de clase y su ilegitimidad como presidente de facto, pesó el color de su piel. La tez rubicunda del falso Mesías que lo derrocó pareció una bendición del cielo a la burguesía criolla.

Al triunfo de la revolución, exclusivos playas y hoteles segregados fueron eliminados. Nicolás Guillén cantaba en su poema Tengo:

Tengo, vamos a ver
Que siendo un negro
Nadie me puede detener
A la puerta de un dancing o de un bar.

En los primeros años era inconcebible que un negro fuera desafecto al régimen revolucionario. ¿Cómo era posible semejante abominación?

La revolución había "bajado a los negros de los árboles y les había cortado la cola". Así, como lo oyen. La frase, paternalistamente cruel e intrínsecamente racista, se repitió hasta la saciedad. No se sabe quién la acuñó. No fue el Comandante en Jefe. No por anónima dejó de ser reiterada, como si para los negros no existieran opciones que no pasaran por el marxismo leninismo.

¿Les digo la verdad? En Cuba, la discriminación racial no se acabó. Pregunte a los negros si no lo cree.

El racismo siempre ha estado prendido a la vida cubana. Como una mala hierba. Bien arraigado en los prejuicios. Acuñado en estereotipos comunes del imaginario colectivo.

Los negros sólo sirven para la música y los deportes. Fuera de ahí, búsquelos en juergas, borracheras y rumbantelas. Son vagos, escandalosos, incompetentes y ladrones.

Además del deporte y la música, para algo tenían que servir. Hay toda una mitología sexual en torno a ellos. Las negras son calientes. Los negros son desmesurados atletas eróticos.

De la famosa película Fresa y Chocolate trascribo un bocadillo que no tiene desperdicio. Lo dice Diego, el protagonista gay, a David. Escuchando a María Callas, toman té hindú en tazas de porcelana de Cebres que una vez pertenecieron a la familia Loynaz del Castillo:

"¿Racista yo? ¡Niño! Yo sé muy bien lo que vale un negro. Pero no son para tomar té. Es una lástima. Das un pestañazo y zas, desapareció el negro y la porcelana de Cebres".

Elementos de origen africano han devenido en símbolos de la nacionalidad: la música, los bailes, expresiones del habla popular, los cultos sincréticos.

Los jerarcas culturales descubrieron el filón. Para ellos, los negros eran poco más que folklore y brujería. Ahora los convirtieron en carnada para atraer turistas. Sus dólares salvarían al comunismo cubano. Para ello, inventaron los diplobabalaos, los collares de santería sin aché y las letras del año de utilería de la Asociación Cultural Yoruba.

Negros y mulatos conforman, según cifras oficiales, el 63% de la población cubana. Los no blancos pueden ser muchos más. En el censo nacional de población, a los cubanos les es posible escoger su raza. Los que no tienen pronunciados rasgos negroides suelen declararse blancos.

El abigarrado mestizaje cubano crea una amplia categoría intermedia de personas que no son blancas ni negras. "Pasan por blancos". Su identidad racial neutralizada promueve la discriminación a la vez que niega su existencia.

En la Cuba para turistas, apartando los ojos del escenario y la pista de baile, uno pudiera acabar preguntándose donde están los negros.

No los busque en los puestos vinculados al turismo o a las corporaciones con capital extranjero. En ellos se exige "buena presencia", al parecer, casi según los patrones hollywoodenses de los años 40.

Tampoco están en las altas esferas de poder. El 85 % de los miembros del Politburó son blancos. Entre los demás dirigentes del Estado y el partido único los negros y mulatos se pueden contar con los dedos. Son las excepciones que confirman la regla.

En el cine y la televisión, raramente los negros son protagonistas. Ellos tienen reservados los papeles de esclavos.

Sin embargo, son la mayoría de la población penal en las más de 200 prisiones diseminadas por el país.

Históricamente, ha sido un aberrante círculo vicioso. Los negros han sido relegados. Les han negado oportunidades. Las estrategias de supervivencia de los más desafortunados han sido interpretadas como pruebas adicionales de su pretendida inferioridad. Se creó el axioma de su supuesta propensión a delinquir.

Despiertan la suspicacia de las rondas policiales. Son las principales víctimas de redadas y operativos de la PNR.

"Es como si no hubiera jineteras blancas. Como si los blancos no robaran ni fumaran marihuana", me dijo un desolado amigo rasta de Mantilla que ha optado por encerrarse en su casa a oír reggae. El sabe de registros en la vía pública, de calabozos y de actas de peligrosidad.

En Cuba, no hable con los blancos (o los que lo parezcan) de discriminación racial. Los hará sentir incómodos. Le dirán que el racismo no es un problema aquí. No faltará quien le diga que hablar de eso trae divisiones que sólo benefician al enemigo imperialista.

Si quiere saber, recorra las calles habaneras. Hágalo sin ideas preconcebidas ni aires de solidaridad tercermundista. Siéntese en la esquina, entre en los solares. Tal vez así descubra donde están los negros.

http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y05/nov05/23a7.htm


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Message: 14
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:43:28 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Castro's ailments stir plans for future

Posted on Wed, Nov. 23, 2005

Castro's ailments stir plans for future

Re the Nov. 16 story Castro has Parkinson's disease CIA has concluded: I am a former senior Commerce Department official in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Currently I am senior research associate at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.
Fidel Castro's affliction with Parkinson's disease has been an open secret for several years. However, he suffers from other health problems that are contributing to a progressive decline in his physical and mental condition. In addition to pulmonary problems (the reason that he gave up smoking his trademark cigars), Castro has suffered from repeated episodes of cerebral ischemia or transient ischemic attack (TIA) for more than a decade.
TIA results in partial, usually temporary, paralysis, with stroke-like symptoms. Castro is on heavy doses of hypertension drugs and tranquilizers, but his risk of stroke -- leading to incapacitation or death -- is high.
The Cuban government is actively planning for the transition to a regime nominally headed by Raul Castro. He and other key officials are keenly aware that Fidel Castro's departure will immediately raise the Cuban people's expectations for better economic conditions, which could lead to a popular uprising if left unfulfilled for long.
To avoid political chaos and preserve its privileges, the successor regime is expected to quickly liberalize the Cuban economy, adopting an authoritarian market approach similar to the Chinese and Vietnamese models. Realizing the need for large-scale foreign direct investment to provide jobs and rebuild Cuba's decrepit infrastructure, the new government will probably make an early overture to the United States for normalization of relations.
TIMOTHY ASHBY, Miami

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/13237915.htm


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Message: 15
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:44:38 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: How should US prepare for a post-Castro Cuba?

How should US prepare for a post-Castro Cuba?
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

MIAMI - From the Bay of Pigs to poison cigars, American attempts to rid the world of Fidel Castro have repeatedly been met with embarrassment and failure.
After 46 years, Mr. Castro's wheezing revolution has even outlived his cold-war ally, the once-mighty Soviet Union.
Now, amid reports of Castro's fragile health and conflicting expectations about the shape of a post-Castro Cuba, the US government is facing a choice about how aggressively it should press for democratic reforms in Havana after Castro's reign. Top Cuban officials, for their part, are reacting with alarm and bracing for a possible new round of American meddling.
Those in favor of taking bold action - namely, trying to stop Raul Castro from stepping into his brother's shoes - cite post-9/11 concerns that any failing or hostile nation may become a launching pad for terrorists seeking to attack the United States.
Those urging a more restrained approach stress Washington's less-than-impressive record in Cuba. Some point to the deadly insurgency in Iraq two years after what Bush administration officials had assumed would be a quick US military victory.
Many Cuba experts say Iraq and Cuba are completely separate scenarios, noting that political instability in Cuba is unlikely to result in the kind of protracted rebellion under way in Iraq.
But others say the same kind of flawed planning that caused Washington to fixate on Saddam Hussein's removal at the expense of other strategic imperatives is at play in US plans for Cuba after Castro.
"This is the same thinking that has led us astray before, and now in Iraq," says Damian Fernandez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University here.
"A policy that is only defined based on the personality of Fidel Castro or [his brother] Raul Castro is misguided," he says. "It blinds us to real concerns that will affect US national interests and the future of Cuba."
The Bush administration has developed a 400-page plan for how to confront the challenges of post-Castro Cuba. In August, it appointed a Cuba "transition coordinator" at the State Department to carry out the plan.
The post-Castro plan addresses everything from water quality to drafting a new constitution to how best to punish Castro's foreign allies. But what has made the plan most controversial is its focus on proactively subverting efforts by Castro to transfer power to his brother, Raul.
"The Castro dictatorship is pursuing every means at its disposal to survive and perpetuate itself through a 'succession strategy,' " the plan says. "US policy must be targeted at undermining this succession strategy."
The plan is consistent with requirements of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which bars US assistance to any Cuban government that includes Fidel or Raul Castro. But it carries the requirement one step further by calling for direct action "hastening Cuba's transition" toward democracy.
Some Cuba watchers write off the tough talk in the post-Castro plan as little more than a domestic political tactic. They say it was aimed at shoring up President Bush's flagging support among Cuban-Americans in Miami during last year's presidential election, when the plan was unveiled.
The plan amounts to a statement of goals rather than a blueprint for US action, many analysts say. "The proposed elements do not add up to 'hastening transition in Cuba,' " says Daniel Erikson, a Cuba expert at Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.
"The reality is the United States does not know that much about how to build democracy in the developing world," he says.
Others see the plan as a useful means of maintaining political pressure on the Castro regime while sending signals of encouragement to regime opponents and dissidents on the island.
"From Franco [in Spain], to Duvalier [in Haiti], to Somoza [in Nicaragua], to the communists in East Germany, they all had a succession strategy. They all thought somebody from their party would continue in power. But that hasn't happened," says Frank Calzon of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington. "I'm sure Cuba is not going to be an exception to that worldwide rejection of dictatorship."
Nonetheless, most Cuba experts doubt Castro's death will bring an immediate transition toward more democratic government. Instead, they say, Raul Castro is most likely to follow his brother as the next leader of Cuba.
"There are a few academics out there who assert that inevitably the reformers will win the post-Fidel struggle. I don't think so," says Juan del Aguila, a political scientist and Cuba expert at Emory University in Atlanta. "There is no reformist political faction in evidence now."
Any would-be reformers among Cuba's top officials who call for liberal democracy would be purged, he says. "They would immediately become nonpersons."
Brian Latell, a retired Cuba expert at the Central Intelligence Agency, agrees that Raul Castro will probably emerge as Cuba's new leader. He makes the point in his new book, "After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader."
But Mr. Latell says Raul Castro will not have the free hand that his brother has enjoyed in defending the revolution at the expense of the Cuban people. "After Raul takes over there will be a very, very widespread and deeply based pent-up demand for change - for political, social, and economic decompression," Latell says. "I think Raul is going to have to deal with that. Those are going to be among his gravest challenges."
Such pressures alone won't be enough to force democratic reforms, Latell says. "My guess is that [Raul] is going to adopt a Chinese model, remaining tough politically - no democracy, no opposition parties - but [pushing for] a fairly wide economic opening," he says.
"Of course it is a slippery slope," the retired intelligence officer says. Raul Castro "knows what happened in the Soviet Union so he's going to have to be very careful."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1123/p01s04-usfp.html


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Message: 16
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:40:04 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: 16 Dec 2005. European Parliament awards Sakharov Prize. Cuban leader angered

16 Dec 2005. European Parliament awards Sakharov Prize. Cuban leader angered

STRASBOURG. 16 Dec 2005. The European Parliament presents its prestigious annual Sakharov Prize, recognizing human rights, at its plenary session. The prize will go to a group of Cuban activists, angering Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who share the prize with a Nigerian human rights lawyer and a French organisation dedicated to defending journalists.
The Cuban Damas de Blanco -- Ladies in White -- are a group of wives, mothers and sisters of the imprisoned political opponents of the communist leader.
In an October 26 statement, the European Parliament, which awards the prize annually, said the group of Cuban women has been protesting peacefully every Sunday since 2004 against the continued detention of their husbands and sons, who are political dissidents in Cuba. The women wear white as a symbol of peace and the innocence of those imprisoned.
The Cuban leader accused European nations of being "corrupt, immoral, exploitative hypocrites", suggesting they created colonialism and unfair trade, which they "keep in place even today", according to AFP.
It is the second time within three years that MEPs have granted the prize to Cuban activists, after the opposition leader Oswaldo Paya received the award in December 2002.

The official Sahkarov prize ceremony is scheduled for 16 December, and the Cuban women will need government approval to leave the island in order to attend.

The two other 2005 winners of the Sakharov prize are the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders, and Hauwa Ibrahim, a leading Nigerian human-rights lawyer.
The 18-year-old award, intended to honour individuals or institutions that have made significant contributions to the cause of human rights, comes with a 50,000 euro prize. Previous winners include: Nelson Mandela (1988) Alexander Dubcek (1989) Aung Saan Suu Kyi (1990) Adam Demaci (1991) The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1992) The Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje (1993) Taslima Nasreen (1994) Leyla Zana (1995) Wei Jingsheng (1996) Salima Ghezali (1997) Ibrahim Rugova (1998) Xanana Gusmão (1999) Basta Ya! (2000) Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Izzat Ghazzawi, Don Zacarias Kamuenho (2001) Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002) The United Nations (2003), Belarusian Association of Journalists (2004).
The award comes with $60,341 (50,000 euros) in prize money. UPDATED Nov/05

http://www.newsahead.com/content/view/1107/71/


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Message: 17
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:32:22 +0100
From: "PL" <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cuban electricity rates soar

Cuban electricity rates soar
Consumers may see bills rise by as much as 300 percent

HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) -- Cuba raised heavily subsidized electricity rates
by as much as 333 percent Wednesday to save power and deal with chronic
energy shortages.
A decree signed by President Fidel Castro increased the cost of electricity
for small consumers from 20 to 30 cents of a Cuban peso ($0.01) per
kilowatt-hour (kwh).
Cubans who consume more than 300 kwh a month will see their rate rise from
30 cents to 1.30 pesos ($0.06) next month.
"The lack of concern about electrical consumption is evident in our country
due to the very low rates," the decree published in the ruling Communist
Party newspaper Granma said.
Power outages are frequent in Cuba whose thermoelectric generators built
decades ago are obsolete and do not produce enough electricity to meet
demand at peak consumption.
Castro warned last week that rates would have to go up in a speech in which
he attacked private businesses, such as family restaurants, for benefiting
from subsidized electricity and using up too much power.
Foreign companies, which pay a higher rate and will not be affected by the
new increase, praised the move as realistic.
"It's a step in the right direction, to get people who can afford it to pay
for electricity, as opposed to everybody not having any," said a foreign
company executive.
"They cannot afford to subsidize everybody, and the fact is that everybody
was getting very little electricity," she said.
Cubans who earn meager wages of $15 a month on average were worried they
would not be able pay their electricity bills.
In a separate announcement the government also announced Wednesday wage
increases of between 75 and 200 pesos ($3.4 and $9) for 2.2 million workers,
and a nine percent raise in pensions. In May Castro doubled Cuba's minimum
wage to 225 pesos ($10).
"Electricity prices had to go up. There is so much waste," said a Havana
housewife who asked not to be named. "But people are worried because salary
increases are not enough."
Copyright 2005 Reuters

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/11/23/cuba.electricity.reut/index.html






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Message: 18
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 12:57:37 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Castro toma medidas de ``categoría 5''

Posted on Thu, Nov. 24, 2005

Castro toma medidas de ``categoría 5''

ISABEL SANCHEZ / AFP
LA HABANA

Un alza en las tarifas eléctricas, aumentos en pensiones y salarios son
el primer paquete de medidas dictado por el gobernante Fidel Castro para
centralizar aun más la economía, en su guerra contra el derroche, la
desigualdad social y la corrupción que amenazan la revolución cubana.

Tres decretos divulgados en los medios de comunicación oficiales
anunciaron alzas escalonadas en las tarifas eléctricas para sancionar a
quienes consumen más de 100 kilovatios/hora, así como aumentos de
pensiones y salarios --el mínimo es de $9 dólares y el promedio de $15--
según categorías académicas.

Dirigidas mayormente a los profesionales, las alzas salariales parecen
ideadas para paliar el creciente cisma en la sociedad cubana, donde los
médicos a menudo dejan sus trabajos en el gobierno para desempeñarse en
otros más lucrativos de taxistas.

Castro, quien dijo que las medidas serían de categoría cinco, como los
huracanes, justificó las nuevas tarifas en los altos precios del
petróleo y en el despilfarro, y los aumentos de salarios y pensiones en
la necesidad de cerrar la brecha social abierta en la crisis económica
tras la caída en 1991 de la Unión Soviética.

''Existen grandes desigualdades de ingresos entre los que reciben
pensiones y salarios relativamente bajos y los que se benefician de
grandes ingresos monetarios derivados de especulaciones, desvíos de
recursos y otras formas de enriquecimiento ilícito'', subrayó el
documento firmado por el gobernante.

Las medidas eran esperadas desde que el pasado jueves, en un discurso de
casi seis horas, trazó un nuevo rumbo de la revolución, con base en una
''batalla ética'' y en una mayor centralización de la economía estatal.

Su blanco son los ''nuevos ricos'' (agricultores privados, comerciantes,
dueños de restaurantes, arrendatarios de habitaciones a extranjeros),
que viven del mercado negro y las ilegalidades, y que nacieron en la
crisis de los años 90.

Los aumentos salariales, que se suman a otros de mayo y julio, supondrán
un incremento medio mensual de 43 pesos cubanos ($1.80) a partir de
diciembre para 2.2 millones de trabajadores.

Las pensiones mínimas pasarán de 150 pesos cubanos ($6.25) a 164
($6.80), --lo cual beneficiará a más de 1.2 millones de jubilados--, en
tanto que las prestaciones de la asistencia social mínima quedarán en
122 pesos ($5).

''La batalla es de vida o muerte'', sentenció Castro hace una semana, al
prometer que ``Cuba avanza aceleradamente hacia la reducción de
desigualdades e injusticias que aún hoy se aprecian, tras el Período
Especial (crisis)''.

Ante la estrepitosa caída de la economía cubana tras la desaparición del
bloque soviético, el gobierno legalizó el uso del dólar, permitió las
remesas del exterior en divisas, autorizó el trabajo por cuenta propia y
algunos servicios privados y dio prioridad al turismo.

''No somos neoliberales'', advierte ahora Castro. Otras medidas están
por venir, pues hace una semana anunció un firme control de los recursos
estatales y vislumbró el cierre de los pequeños espacios abiertos a la
actividad privada.

También anunció la desaparición de la libreta de racionamiento y dijo
que atacará a los taxis colectivos privados.

Sugirió una futura revaluación de la moneda local frente a la divisa
convertible ($0.80 por un peso convertible o CUC), lo cual afectaría las
remesas.

El economista opositor Oscar Espinosa Chepe afirmó que la corrupción es
''un cáncer en crecimiento'', y el dirigente disidente Manuel Cuesta
pidió reformas a profundidad''.

http://www.miami.com/mld/elnuevo/news/world/cuba/13246575.htm



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Message: 19
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 12:58:46 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cubanos amanecen con anuncio de paquete de medidas

Posted on Wed, Nov. 23, 2005

Cubanos amanecen con anuncio de paquete de medidas

ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press

LA HABANA - Los cubanos amanecieron este miércoles con el anuncio de un
paquete de medidas económicas que incluyen aumentos en las tarifas
eléctricas, pero también incrementos en los sueldos y pensiones.

Estos decretos se dan a conocer menos de una semana después de un
discurso del presidente Fidel Castro, quien lanzó una campaña contra la
corrupción y los "nuevos ricos" que alimentan el mercado negro y se
"aprovechan" de las necesidades de los asalariados, dijo.

El primer decreto, firmado por Castro, realiza un extenso análisis del
impacto del aumento del petróleo sobre la situación energética de la
isla y destacó las "grandes desigualdades" entre quienes reciben un
salario en pesos cubanos (unos 10 dólares mensuales) y aquellos con
altos ingresos, quienes al fin de cuentas pagan lo mismo por la luz pese
a usarla incluso para sus negocios privados.

Señaló que a partir de diciembre los que gasten menos de 100
kilowatt/hora continuarán pagando 9 centavos de peso cubano (0,004
centavos de dólar), pero la tarifa irá aumentando el costo por kilowatt
a medida que suba el consumo, de modo que si alguien consume 300
kilowatts podría pagar unos 19 dólares por mes.

Todo intento de falsear los relojes contadores se responderá "con
medidas enérgicas que pueden incluir hasta la suspensión del servicio",
advirtió el decreto.

Otra de las medidas, firmada por el Consejo de Estado, establece aumento
de salarios en forma escalonada, "de acuerdo a la complejidad del
trabajo" y se incrementarán los sueldos de quienes cuenten con
especializaciones, tengan una labor calificada o estén en empresas
altamente eficientes. Esta norma beneficiará a más de 2 millones de
empleados.

De igual manera se mantendrán los estímulos en pesos convertibles
recientemente revaluado (se cotiza a 1,08 cada dólar). Siempre con
carácter mensual.

En Cuba circulan tres monedas: el peso convertible para transacciones
comerciales, el peso cubano (en el cual se pagan los sueldos y los
servicios públicos con una tasa de 20.24 por dólar) y el dólar sólo para
operaciones bancarias.

El tercer decreto dispuso a su vez una elevación de las jubilaciones y
pensiones mensuales.

Modificadas también en mayo pasado, estas asistencias sociales pasarán
en el caso de los retiros de 150 a 164 pesos cubanos. A quienes recibían
190 les corresponderá 202 unidades de la misma moneda.

Otro tanto ocurrirá con los subsidios familiares (maternidad, enfermedad
o invalidez) pues el pago mensual se elevará de 112 a 122 pesos cubanos.

El beneficio impactará a más de un millón y medio de personas, destacó
la resolución.

El sistema en la isla contempla fuertes subsidios a los servicios,
además de contar con una libreta para obtener los productos
alimenticios. La educación y la salud son gratuitos y la mayoría de los
trabajadores almuerzan en sus centros de labor.

Sin embargo, la población suele quejarse de las dificultades para cubrir
bienes sólo accesibles en pesos convertibles (como ropas o artículos de
higiene personal), sobre todo a partir de la crisis económica en los 90
y el reforzamiento de las sanciones estadounidenses.

http://www.miami.com/mld/elnuevo/news/world/cuba/13243617.htm



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Message: 20
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:37:02 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cuba sube tarifas para ahorrar luz

energía.
Cuba sube tarifas para ahorrar luz

Decreto firmado por Fidel Castro se emite por aumento al gasto
innecesario de la electricidad.Los aumentos serán cobrados en enero de
2006 y fluctúan en un 15% hasta un 333%.


El gobierno cubano decretó un aumento de las tarifas eléctricas de hasta
más de un 300% para promover el ahorro y desalentar el exceso de consumo
a personas que "despilfarran" la luz, informó ayer el diario oficial Granma.

En un decreto firmado el martes por el presidente Fidel Castro se
atribuye el incremento al gasto innecesario de la electricidad
ampliamente subsidiada por el Estado.

Los aumentos, que comenzarán a regir desde el consumo de diciembre
venidero y serán cobrados en enero de 2006, fluctúan en un 15% para los
usuarios que gastan 100 y 150 kilowatios por hora hasta un 333% para los
que superen los 300%, según la normativa.

En el decreto se especifica que para los primeros 100 kilowatios/hora se
mantiene el precio actual subsidiado.

El decreto suscrito por Castro advierte que "todo intento de burlar o
falsear los datos de los relojes contadores o el consumo fraudulento de
electricidad, deberá ser respondido por medidas enérgicas que pueden
incluir hasta la suspensión del servicio".

"Es evidente en nuestro país -añade- la despreocupación de la ciudadanía
en cuanto al gasto de electricidad dados los ínfimos precios del mismo",
dice uno de los considerandos del decreto.

Hasta el presente la electricidad en la isla tenía un precio único de
nueve centavos de pesos cubanos (cuatro centésimos de dólar) por
kilowatios/hora, que se estableció como política de beneficio social.

http://www.prensa.com/hoy/negocios/412042.html



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Message: 21
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:37:58 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Sube en hasta 333 pct costo de electricidad en Cuba

Sube en hasta 333 pct costo de electricidad en Cuba
Miércoles 23 de Noviembre, 2005 4:55 GMT

Por Esteban Israel

LA HABANA (Reuters) - El presidente cubano, Fidel Castro, aumentó el
miércoles el precio de la electricidad en hasta un 333 por ciento, en
una drástica medida contra el derroche de energía en la isla.

En un decreto fechado el 22 de noviembre pero publicado el miércoles,
Castro atribuyó el incremento al gasto innecesario de la electricidad
fuertemente subsidiada.

"Es evidente en nuestro país la despreocupación de la ciudadanía en
cuanto al gasto de electricidad dado los ínfimos precios de la misma,"
dijo el decreto.

El aumento escalonado en cinco franjas de consumo va desde un 50 por
ciento para quienes usan entre 100 y 150 kilowatios por hora y hasta un
333 por ciento para los que superen los 300 kilowatios por hora.

Los nuevos precios serán aplicados desde diciembre y oscilarán entre 0,3
y 1,3 pesos cubanos (1,35 y 5,4 centavos de dólar) por kilowatio hora.

QUIEN CONSUME PAGA

Las nuevas tarifas buscan estimular el ahorro entre los cubanos,
acostumbrados a pagar sólo nueve centavos de pesos (cuatro centavos de
dólar) por kilowatio hora.

Observadores extranjeros aplaudieron la decisión del gobierno y dijeron
que los nuevos precios son ahora más realistas.

"Es un paso en la dirección correcta. El gobierno no puede permitirse
subsidiar a todo el mundo. Ahora, quien consume paga," dijo un ejecutivo.

Una familia media en La Habana consume entre 150 y 400 kilowatios hora
-según utilice o no un equipo de aire acondicionado-, por los que pagaba
hasta ahora entre 19 y 78 pesos (entre 0,85 y 3,5 dólares) mensuales.

Los nuevos precios permitirán fiscalizar a emprendedores como los
propietarios de los restaurantes privados, a los que Castro acusó la
semana pasada de cobrar en moneda fuerte y pagar sus cuentas eléctricas
subsidiadas en pesos.

"Existen grandes desigualdades de ingresos entre los que reciben
pensiones y salarios relativamente bajos y los que se benefician de
grandes ingresos monetarios derivados de especulaciones, desvíos de
recursos y otras formas de enriquecimiento ilícito," dijo el decreto.

INQUIETUD EN LA CALLE

En las calles de La Habana, la noticia fue recibida con inquietud.

"Tendremos que empezar a prestar más atención y no dejar las luces
prendidas. Aunque, por otro lado, esto puede implicar menos apagones,"
dijo la empleada de una cafetería.

Los apagones son frecuentes en Cuba, cuya matriz energética depende de
obsoletas plantas termoeléctricas que el gobierno ha prometido
reemplazar por nuevas y más eficientes centrales de ciclo combinado.

"Lo que no nos gusta a los cubanos son los bandazos (medidas extremas).
Estamos en contra del robo y el invento, pero que nos traten de pegar al
piso con estas medidas," dijo Berta, una ama de casa.

En su decreto, Castro explica el aumento de electricidad por el alza del
precio del petróleo.

"En los últimos años cuando los costos se han multiplicado varias veces,
las tarifas eléctricas se han mantenido inalterables," dijo.

El alza de la electricidad fue acompañada el miércoles por incrementos
de los salarios y jubilaciones.

El gobierno comunista de la isla busca aumentar el poder adquisitivo de
los 11,2 millones de cubanos y acortar la brecha entre quienes tienen
acceso a moneda fuerte y quienes no.

(Reporte adicional de Anthony Boadle y Nelson Acosta)

http://lta.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-23T205444Z_01_N23386308_RTRIDST_0_LATINOAMERICA-ENERGIA-CUBA-SOL.XML



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Message: 22
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:38:45 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cuba Raises Pay, Castro Attacks 'New Rich'

Cuba Raises Pay, Castro Attacks 'New Rich'

By ANITA SNOW, Associated Press WriterWed Nov 23, 3:26 PM ET

Cuba announced a major increase in government salaries Wednesday, saying
days after President Fidel Castro declared war on the nation's "new
rich" that it wanted to reward workers with high productivity and
advanced university degrees.

The Communist Party daily Granma said on its front page that
higher-level workers unaffected by a minimum wage increase in May would
be eligible for productivity payments and bonuses for having a master's
or doctorate.

The announcement appeared aimed easing state workers' lives in a country
where many have been engaging in illegal side activities to make ends meet.

Castro last week announced a crackdown on Cubans who make a living
stealing gasoline and other state goods, as well as those the government
reluctantly licensed as self-employed tradesmen or private restaurant
owners during tougher economic times.

In a speech, Castro complained that the "new rich" corrupt state workers
and take advantage of cheap utilities and other subsidies while enjoying
hefty profits from their private ventures.

"It is a fundamental principle of the revolution to raise workers'
income, beginning with those perceived to have the lowest salaries, and
from there progressively eliminate the social differences that increased
during the special period," the party daily said, referring to the
measures adopted during the severe financial crisis brought on by the
Soviet Union's collapse.

Cuba also announced it would increase its heavily subsidized utility
rates for households using large amounts of electricity. Households
registering less than 100 kilowatts monthly will continue to pay a
fraction of a cent each month.

The wage increases announced Wednesday seem small in U.S. terms but will
likely be welcomed by higher-level government workers.

Cuba's minimum wage was increased by more than 100 percent in May, from
about $5 to about $11. More than 1.6 million workers benefited from the
raise but several million higher-level employees did not.

Granma said these would be the first pay increases in 23 years for some.

Although low by international standards, Cuban salary figures can be
misleading in a country where most people do not pay for their housing,
utilities or transportation. Health services and education are free,
other government services are heavily subsidized and everyone receives
about a third of their food each month for less than $3.

Government employees with a master's degree or similar achievement level
will receive between $1.50 and $4 more each month. Doctors will get as
much as $7.40 extra in each monthly paycheck.

Employees in workplaces with especially high productivity will be
eligible for extra bonuses ranging from $3.70 to $9.90 a month.

Pensions for retired people, which were increased to $7.40 a month in
May, will now be increased to a minimum of $8.

The government's social assistance payments for families with members
who are unemployed, disabled, handicapped or on maternity leave will
also be increased.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051123/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cuba_salary_increases_1



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Message: 23
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:40:49 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Chavez shows $100bn spending plan

Chavez shows $100bn spending plan

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) -- Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has
unveiled an ambitious $100 billion, five-year investment plan financed
mainly by windfall oil revenues to fund national projects from bridges
and infrastructure development to harbors and factories.

Chavez, a left-winger who advocates tight state control over the economy
of the world's No. 5 oil exporter, said the spending would be outside
the ordinary state budget and included $10 billion a year from state oil
firm PDVSA and $5 billion from a special fund also financed by oil income.

"The plan from 2006 to 2010 is for around $100 billion for those five
years, and that is apart from the budget," Chavez told supporters in the
western oil city of Maracaibo. "With this $100 billion, or $20 billion a
year, we are going to push special projects."

A self-proclaimed socialist revolutionary, Chavez has promised to use
oil revenues to finance projects for the impoverished majority. But
critics say his economic model is vulnerable to a slide in world oil
prices and has failed to create sustainable growth by copying Cuba-style
communism.

Chavez said the state-run petrochemicals firm would provide $2 billion a
year in financing while $3 billion will come from tax revenues above
those foreseen in the ordinary budget.
Rapid expansion

Venezuela, a key supplier of crude to the U.S. market, has seen its
economy expand rapidly, helped by soaring petroleum prices and
government spending, including funding for social, education and health
programs for the poor.

Earlier this year, lawmakers supporting Chavez approved the $6 billion
FONDEN development fund that is financed yearly by part of the dollar
oil revenues that normally go into central bank foreign reserves.
Critics worry local currency spending from the fund will quicken inflation.

A fierce opponent of the U.S. government, Chavez has often attacked the
central bank for not helping finance his projects for the poor and
blasts capitalism as the road to hell. He says he wants to introduce a
21st century socialism.

Strict state-run foreign exchange controls and a fixed exchange rate
have limited access to dollars and pushed the central bank's hard
currency reserves to more than $30 billion. Chavez says they should be
kept at around $25 billion.

Since winning a recall referendum last year, the former soldier has
accelerated his social reforms, including a land redistribution campaign
and worker co-management programs for failing companies. Critics say
those measures spook investors.

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/11/23/venezuela.chavez.reut/



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Message: 24
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:42:05 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cuba announces major salary rises

Cuba announces major salary rises
By Stephen Gibbs
BBC News, Havana

Cuba has announced a major increase in government salaries as it tries
to reward workers with high productivity and advanced university degrees.

The bonuses will boost some government salaries by up to 50%.

Cuba's Communist Party daily newspaper says that the pay rises will be
the first some civil servants have been awarded in 23 years.

Workers with masters degrees will receive a bonus of up to $4 a month.
Doctors will get an extra $7.

The raw figures might seem low but in Cuba - where the average monthly
salary is around $15 - the rises will be welcome.

Perhaps all the more so because they come at the same time the Cuban
government is launching a campaign against those that supplement their
salaries through illicit means.

Rich targeted

President Castro has vowed to clamp down hard on rampant robbery from
state enterprises.

In a speech last week he also blamed many of the country's woes on what
he described as Cuba's new rich - principally intermediaries and
independent restaurant owners who have profited from this economy's very
limited opening up to private enterprise.

They, it appears, are being targeted in another move announced - a
staggered price rise of up to three times for heavy consumers of
electricity.

Cuba's decrepit electrical infrastructure has in recent years proved
insufficient to power the whole country.

The government says that the entire population needs to be made aware of
the cost of energy, particularly those that use it to run their own
businesses.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4465452.stm

Published: 2005/11/24 06:58:49 GMT

© BBC MMV



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Message: 25
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:43:10 +0100
From: PL <***@pandora.be>
Subject: Cuba raises salaries of skilled workers

Posted on Thu, Nov. 24, 2005

CUBA
Cuba raises salaries of skilled workers
The Cuban government announced major pay raises, mainly for doctors and
other highly trained professional workers.
BY FRANCES ROBLES
***@herald.com

Less than a week after declaring an assault on Cuba's ''new rich,''
President Fidel Castro raised salaries Wednesday, bringing total wage
hikes this year to 25 percent.

Aimed largely at highly skilled professional workers, the raises appear
designed to address the growing schism in Cuban society, where doctors
often give up their government salaries in favor of more lucrative jobs
driving taxis.

Castro addressed the new measures on state television Wednesday night,
The Associated Press reported, saying the raw salary figures don't take
into account the broad range of free and heavily subsidized services
that Cuban workers enjoy. ''If we count everything . . . the salaries
are more than $1,000,'' he declared.

The move followed a speech last week in which Castro vowed to crack down
on people who line their pockets with stolen government goods. He railed
against those who pilfer and resell gasoline and promised to cut back on
private enterprise.

''The Cuban government is really trying hard to refocus very
aggressively on equity,'' said Daniel P. Erikson, director of the
Caribbean program at the Inter-American Dialogue. ``The social equality
that existed for decades disintegrated so dramatically in the '90s, it
had gotten out of hand.''

But the announcement of higher pay and pensions came with a downside.
The government increased electricity rates among heavy users to stave
off an energy crisis and encourage conservation.

The measures form another swing in Castro's economic policy, which,
after moving to allow more private enterprise during the first half of
the 1990s, now seeks to cut back on things like farmer's markets, where
prices are not controlled by the government.

The trick, experts said, is to do that and at the same time diminish
domestic discontent.

''There's not a lot of economics in this,'' said international economist
Jorge Pérez López. ``These are diversionary tactics.''

Among the announcements published Wednesday in the Communist Party daily
newspaper Granma:

o People with a master's degree or its equivalent will receive a
$4-a-month raise; doctors will see a $7.40 raise.

o Nearly 5,000 job categories were moved to higher pay grades.

o Highly productive workplaces will be eligible for bonuses of up to
nearly $10 a month.

o Some state workers will see their first raise since 1982.

The pay hikes follow a similar raise in May, when the minimum wage went
from $5 a month to about $11, costing the state $3.2 million a year.

''Cuba is advancing rapidly toward the reduction of inequality and
injustices,'' Castro said in a recent speech.

''The salary increases are not going to be enough,'' said Jorge Piñon, a
research associate at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and
Cuban-American Studies. ``Wait until people have to pay for food at
market prices.''

''Subsidizing electricity created a wasteful society,'' Piñon added.
'And now it's like Castro is finally throwing out his 37-year-old son to
the street and saying, `It's time for you to earn your living and see
what it takes to survive.' ''

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/13247661.htm


"Castro's Medical Mercenaries
Susan Kitchens, -Forbes- 11.14.05


While clinics crumble at home, bereft Cuban doctors are dispatched on El Jefe's goodwill missions. But their purpose, it turns out, is more than just charity care.
At 4 A.M., hours before a pink sun would climb above the hills near Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, Leonel Córdova was jerked awake. "Get up! Get up, now!" screamed the figure bursting through the door. Córdova, a doctor from Cuba, sat up on the couch. A policeman from the brutish African state, muscles bulging under his jacket and khaki-colored trousers, towered over the medic, pointing a gun barrel in his face. Córdova could hardly breathe. There was at least one other cop in the small, dark room now, with a gun trained on another Cuban, a dentist named Noris Peña.

The two Cubans had committed a potential act of treason: Though promised to faltering Zimbabwe on behalf of the Cuban government, they had left the mission days earlier, escaping to a local's home. That morning, with the door flung open in the predawn chill, Peña shivered in her T shirt and shorts. Her heart pounded as the cops steadied their guns and then motioned for the two to get into a waiting jeep. "I felt like we were going to die," she recalls, five years later.

Córdova, 36, and Peña, 30, are two of at least 60,000 Cubans who have, for decades, been dispatched as part of what Fidel Castro terms his "humanitarian medical missions." Of late this effort has grown more pointed, with new medical degrees being churned out and ever more doctors, nurses and dentists dispatched abroad--even as the state of care in Cuba itself deteriorates. What is El Jefe up to?

Few of the médicos see as much drama as Córdova and Peña did. Most quietly complete multiyear stints, sometimes in remote regions, in dozens of countries in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia, such as Sri Lanka and East Timor. They then return home, many times to even more poorly equipped hospitals and clinics in Cuba.

But a disturbing picture emerges from the ranks of those who, like Córdova and Peña, never go back. These two "deserters," as Cuba labels them, ultimately managed to slip to freedom, joining perhaps hundreds of others who've taken refuge in Canada, the U.S. or Europe. Most don't want to be located or identified, preferring not to bring further trouble onto themselves or family still in Cuba. FORBES interviewed nine.

Castro dispatched his first medical brigade to Algeria in 1963 and has since boasted that in spite of a U.S. trade embargo Cuba managed to provide these trained missionaries to the world. He delighted in offering 1,500 doctors to help America deal with Hurricane Katrina. (Washington said it didn't need the help.)

The Cuban missions have multiple aims. At some level, certainly in the minds of the medics themselves, this is humanitarianism. It is also a chance to practice in their field with resources absent at home.

But for the Castro regime there are geopolitical and financial objectives. Shipping out the doctors bolsters support for Cuba in international circles such as the United Nations, where it faces periodic human rights censure. And extending social services to the poor assists ideologically aligned despots like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has the largest Cuban contingent, some 22,000 at last count.

Physicians have been diverted to presidential palaces in the cases of the ailing 81-year-old Mugabe and onetime Sandinista boss Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, according to Alcibiades Hidalgo, a ranking Cuban government official who defected to the U.S. in 2002. Saddam Hussein was treated for a spinal tumor by at least one Cuban surgeon while ruling Iraq, Hidalgo has written.

And then there's the money: Castro's doctors help to keep the Cuban regime equipped with hard currency. While a number of the destination countries are destitute, others make cash or in-kind payments to Cuba, and Castro maintains a firm grip on such inflow, say those who study Cuba's economy.

Doctors exiled from Cuba say that in exchange for their mission work they earned a third or less of what Havana got for their services from foreign governments. The balance may amount to hundreds of millions of dollars for the state till, perhaps destined for handling by foreign banks (see box, p. 130).

At their clinics for the dirt poor abroad, these medical emissaries get a further shock: They see drugs in use that are manufactured in Cuba--such as ones to treat asthma or heart disease--but are unavailable at home. "People I knew in Cuba needed these medications," says one doctor who recently fled a mission in Venezuela and wouldn't talk on the record. ("Deserter" families still in Cuba are routinely punished, losing apartments or jobs. To retain such leverage, the government prefers not to send unmarried doctors.)

Aside from tourism and nickel Cuba has little to offer the rest of the world in exchange for cash. What Castro lacks in salable goods he can make up for with Cuba's highly literate population of 11 million, especially those in medicine. In the last five years enrollment in Cuban medical, dental and nursing schools has more than doubled to 50,000, according to Cuban state statistics.

Outside of the schooling achievement most promises of Castro's 1959 revolución, including good health care for all, have been shunted aside. "At first I believed in the revolución and everything it stood for," says one Cuban doctor, Alejandro Ramos, 62, who when younger went on a medical mission to Angola. "But when things begin falling apart, you start to see there is no hope, no future, if you stay in Cuba. You become desperate to find a life for yourself and your family." Years later, in 1994, he escaped to Miami by boat with his family. Now a nurse at Coral Gables Hospital, Ramos is part of a group that assists doctors who've fled. (At his age he elected not to obtain certification here as an M.D.)

Even in South Africa, one of the better postings over the years for a Cuban doctor, the negation of professional status can become too much. "People used to tease me because I was a ‘principal medical officer,'" says Alfredo Hevia, 37. "And medical officers, people below me who were fresh out of school, were driving BMWs. And they would ask, ‘Why don't you get a car?'"

Though he was happy to have served a neglected patient population for two years in South Africa, Hevia slipped into U.S. exile in 1999. Cuba seized nearly all the modest pay it had sequestered for him. Hevia now is an internist at Baptist Hospital in Miami.

A Pair in Flight

Leonel Córdova's story is extraordinary enough to have received notice in the south Florida press as it played out four years ago. But it shares origins in the experience of other young doctors in Cuba after the fall of its Soviet benefactors. As Córdova graduated in 1992 from Havana's High Institute of Medical Sciences, life in Cuba was changing for the worse. Starting as a family practitioner in Havana, he was making a few dollars a month in pesos. In earlier years, with billions of dollars in food, oil and other basics coming in from Cuba's big Communist ally, such meager pay would have gotten him by. But then staples became scarce. Castro blamed the U.S. embargo.

By the mid-1990s Cuba's vaunted medical program was crumbling as well. Hospital patients asked relatives in Miami to send bedsheets, pillowcases and cotton balls because Cuba's hospitals had none. Hospital hallways were dark because staff stole the lightbulbs in order to resell them. Some doctors complained they couldn't write prescriptions: no paper or pens. Córdova's frustrations mounted. Some days, he turned patients away. "You can make a diagnosis, but there's no medication to treat it," he says. "No penicillin, no aspirin. It is like a bad joke."

Yet at certain hospitals, such as Cira García in Havana, the shelves were well stocked with drugs and top-of-the-line equipment. Cira García strictly treated foreigners with hard currency and Cuba's ruling elite--doctors' families not included.

Life for Córdova, with a wife and two young children, was growing mean. People relied on cunning, often stealing--not just lightbulbs but chickens, vegetables and soap--to resell. In earlier years Córdova had been able to buy a refrigerator. Now he put the fridge to use, selling ice cream treats for 3 cents each, and chickens on the side. Doctor pals did similarly. By this time Córdova was earning about $20 a month from the government, the average medical salary in Cuba. Still not enough.

Yet as a physician Córdova did have one out. He could go abroad on a mission. Córdova had heard that by working overseas he could earn $100 per month--though a portion would be deposited in a Cuban bank account, touchable only on completion of the typical two-year stint.

In early 2000 Córdova flew to Harare with 100 other medics. It was his first trip outside of Cuba, and his government still clearly controlled his every move: During a layover in London the Cubans were not allowed to exit the plane.

Córdova soon grew close to Peña, also in the group. But he also got frustrated again: For weeks he and at least some others in the mission weren't able to see patients; paperwork holdups, they were told. The country's increasingly autocratic Mugabe was facing his last real election, with a population upset that its own doctors and nurses were seeking better conditions elsewhere. Touting Cuban medical help was just a cover, Córdova thought.

He and Peña chose to flee. They got in touch with a UN refugee representative, John Adu, to whom they'd been referred by diplomatic contacts, and he promised to help them leave Zimbabwe. First, however, they told their story to a Harare newspaper, the Daily News. It was published on the front page the next day. "We were sent here under the policies of Fidel Castro so that he can appear to the world as a good man. He sent us here for his political goals," Córdova was quoted as saying.

Knowing they could not return to their quarters, Córdova and Peña sought refuge at a Zimbabwean friend's home. For days they met at the UN office with Adu to try to arrange asylum. Then, on the morning of June 2, their safe house's door was burst open by the Zimbabwean cops. The two had become an embarrassment to two regimes.

They were taken to an immigration office for hours before being whisked away for a flight to Johannesburg and on to Havana. But at the stop a South African lawman got nosy. Córdova scribbled a distress note. The officer could only advise the pair to raise a stink on boarding the next plane to avoid leaving Africa.

At the Air France flight they recall doing so, yelling, "We are being kidnapped!" and the like. The captain refused to take off, the Cuban pair says, and they were returned to the terminal and days later to Harare. (Air France declines to comment.)

Zimbabwe's immigration boss met them for a 40-kilometer drive outside of the capital to a region called Goromonzi. A one-story detention center was hidden behind a clump of trees. Córdova and Peña were locked up and their shoes were taken away. Once a day they ate grits with dried fish, served in a big pan that all the prisoners shared, eating with their fingers. Peña lost so much weight that her once-tight-fitting jeans hung on her hips.

During a month in jail the two befriended some guards and persuaded one to call the friend they'd stayed with in Harare. He contacted John Adu of the UN, who said he'd been looking for them.

With Adu's help the Cuban pair left Zimbabwe in July 2000. They arrived in Miami via Sweden; a Christian charity, Church World Service, lent them enough for tickets to the U.S. Once in America, Peña found work in Atlanta; Córdova got a job at Miami's Mercy Hospital, prepping patients for surgery. Meanwhile he studied to qualify to practice and made plans to get his wife and kids out of Cuba.

But within a year Córdova's wife was killed in a motorcycle accident near home that police said was a hit-and-run. He blitzed the Cuban government with appeals for his orphaned kids, ages 4 and 10. They were freed, and later that year Córdova and Peña, who'd stayed close, were married. The family now lives in New Jersey. He got certified to practice medicine in the U.S. this summer and is working as a pediatrician at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

Oil for Doctors

Venezuela is Cuba's biggest and most important doctor deal, worth an estimated $1 billion to the island nation last year, second only to its tourism intake. At least 22,000 doctors have been sent there in the last five years.

The terms of the deal were hammered out between Fidel Castro and his friend and political ally Venezuelan President Chávez. An agreement signed in 2000 guaranteed that Venezuela would ship 53,000 barrels of oil per day to the Caribbean island, according to Cuban government reports; Cuba agreed to pay for the bulk of the shipment in cash and "services," including medical help.

But as crude prices climbed, Cuba failed to meet the cash portion of its obligation. So it began sending more of its workforce, including teachers and physical therapists, but primarily doctors. The pact was later revised, with even more oil now for Cuba, nearly 100,000 barrels per day, says Carmelo Mesa-Lago, emeritus economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh. And Chávez pays for the Cuban doctors. "It is a real bonanza for Fidel Castro," says Mesa-Lago.

What's more, some of the oil, he says, never even reaches Cuban shores: Crude is sold to buyers in Central America, with the proceeds, most likely in U.S. dollars, transferred to the Cuban central bank.

None of that matters to the people of Parroquia Caucaguita, just beyond view of the gleaming skyscrapers of Caracas. One of many shantytowns that house a large portion of the city's 5 million people, it gives a taste of the poverty of the Venezuelan countryside beyond.

In the barrio the Cubans are regarded as heaven-sent. "I don't care if I never see a Venezuelan doctor for the rest of my life," says Aida Márquez, a petite 72-year-old. She shook a plastic bag in the air. "Because of the Cuban doctors I get free medicines!" Another patient, Gilma López, 60, says one Cuban doctor diagnosed her as having an eye disease; she was sent to Cuba, gratis, where she got several days of treatment. "We ate seven meals a day, got free medicines, and we didn't have to pay for anything," she says.

"This is the first time that the government has been able to aid the poor population in Venezuela," chimes in Mirna Mucura, a social services staffer for Chávez's health department. "Past administrations never cared about doing anything like this."

But the presence of Cuba's doctors in Venezuela polarizes an already divided land. In July the Venezuelan Medical Federation protested in downtown Caracas, demanding that the médicos be expelled. The group, whose 60,000 doctors serve a nation of 25 million, says Venezuela doesn't need the medical help.

The Venezuelan doctors ask why Chávez doesn't put oil money into the country's own underfunded public health system. And some question the credentials of Castro's newly minted medical corps. Venezuela's El Nacional newspaper (hostile to Chávez) reported that 96 Cuban doctors in Brazil were sent home after a judge there ruled they weren't eligible to practice.

In addition, Venezuelan doctors complain that their salaries haven't budged in four years, while many are losing work to the Cubans. The imported doctors are resented in anti-Chávez quarters for being central to a growing Cubanization of the country under its radical leader. But they win favor with the lower-class families who keep Chávez in power. Chávez survived a hotly contested referendum on his tenure last year, says Eric Driggs, a researcher at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies, after Castro sent in thousands of docs in the months leading up to the vote. A Chávez defeat would have been dire for Castro because the opposition had pledged to halt Venezuela's oil shipments.

When Otto Sánchez, a family practitioner, arrived in Venezuela in 2003, his duties included showing films that praised Cuba's health care system. "The films made it look like it was a very efficient program," says Sánchez, 39.

Propaganda was one task, self-preservation another. Where he was posted, Sánchez says, he locked up for the day just as the sun set. "You could not go out after that, for fear of being shot," he says. Cuban doctors are known in these neighborhoods as particularly good targets for thieves because they are paid in cash and are not permitted to open bank accounts. An attempted cover-up of one killing led indirectly to his pursuing a six-month escape to the U.S. He now lives in Miami and works with an organization, Solidarity Without Borders, that helps other doctors flee. His wife, also a doctor, and son, 9, remain in Cuba.

Venezuelan officials say they need the outside help for rural areas, that the Cubans are properly certified at home and that Chávez has said he intends to boost domestic doctor pay this year.

A few days of calls to Cuba's diplomatic mission in New York ultimately got a reply, not for attribution, that the global medical missions long predated any oil considerations. Any further comment to FORBES required an appointment, we were told.

Although economic conditions have improved somewhat for average Cubans since the dreariest days of the 1990s, doctor shortages and clinical privations remain a way of life. Another recent defector from a medical mission in Venezuela says that in his home city there were once seven clinics; now there is one.

In a society that was to have closed the gap between rich and poor, ordinary Cubans who have waited for years for, say, cataract surgery are often bumped aside so that patients flown in from other countries, presumably with cash, may be treated instead. Castro's people joke among themselves, says one longtime Havana resident, that if they are going to receive any type of medical attention, they'd best get themselves to where they can find some of those Cuban doctors.

[b***@yahoo.com]

How ironic that PL (i.e., Paul Lamot) and PM (i.e., Pedro Martori),
following the cues of the counterrevolutionaries in Little Havana and
elsewhere .whose views they reflect (or, perhaps, setting an example
for them), should use the term “medical mercenaries” to describe the
Cuban VOLUNTEER doctors. Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors (even this
Forbes' written slander-fest states 60,000+), teachers, engineers,
etc. have served, with several dozen “Third World” countries
receiving the benefit of the their services, including approximately
20,000 Cuban doctors presently serving Venezuela’s poor and
working-class people.

As an antonym (i.e., OPPOSITE) to altruistic, etc., Webster’s
dictionary defines “mercenary” as “working or acting merely for
money or other reward; venal.” Other dictionaries describe
“mercenary” (noun) as a hireling or someone who enlists in a fighting
force for the sake of money or other reward. Each definition fits
Uncle Sam’s Cuban hirelings to a “T”. Although the Cold War and the
embargo were / are not formal, declared military hostilities, the
United States government and its allies have been trying to overturn
the Cuban government and social / socialist reforms for more than 45
years as part of its war. The “dissidents” (e.g., “independent”
“journalists,” etc.) serve as Washington’s troops in the
ideological, public relations, etc. aspects of the war against the
Cuban Revolution

Unlike the Cuban counterrevolutionaries themselves, who have been
denying receipt of funds from the United States, the media (since they
are so vehemently against the Cuban Revolution that they consider such
United States government funding of “dissidents” as positive)
regularly report on these “dissidents’” collaboration and
renumeration from the United States Interest Sections (i.e.,
Washington’s quasi-embassy in Havana). Moreover, (especially the case
of “the 75”) they have been filmed in the act of receiving those
funds; unknown to them, some pro-revolutionary people (including those
under the employ of the Interior Department, i.e., Cuban government
security) “infiltrated” these “dissident” organizations and relayed
their observations to the Cuban government or pro-revolutionary Cuban
organizations One section of the Helms-Burton Act explicitly
allocates money for promotion of dissidents’ activities; the
quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy does not hide its
multimillion dollar budgetary allocation for promotion of
“democracy”/”dissidents” in Cuba.

Unlike the Cuban “dissidents” themselves, who generally deny
receiving U.S. funding, PL has repeatedly confirmed that “dissidents”
receive money, etc., from the United States government since (PL
claims) they need the money to “survive.” Let’s assume (arguendo)
PL’s claim (offered by him to ostensibly rebut other sources which
cite figures for payments that are an order of magnitude higher) that
dissidents receive “only” the equivalent of U.S.$50 per month as
correct. In multiple messages (posted with the aim of showing how
little Cuban workers, pensioners, etc. receive, including during this
week), PL states that typical Cubans receive equivalent in Cuban pesos
of about U.S.$10-$15 per month -- or even less if they are pensioners.
(Although my messages and PL’s messages are almost always within the
same ballpark when estimating Cuban salaries, PL’s deliberate
deception is omission of the Cuban government’s offsetting of those
quite minimal monetary payments with free health care, free education,
subsidization of virtually every necessity through combination of the
“ration card” system and price-setting policies.)

PL’s drastic underestimation of U.S. payments to Cuban “dissidents”
is an (unwitting) admission of that the “dissidents” are well-paid
mercenaries: Those with an iota of math ability can divide $50 / month
(i.e., PL’s drastic underestimation, used here arguendo) by $10-$15 /
month (i.e., what PL somewhat accurately cites as a typical Cuban
salary) and reach the conclusion that “dissidents” receive more than
3-1/2 to 5 times what a typical Cuban – who WORKS for a living –
receives.

One can have his cake and eat it, too; the “dissidents” have been
“guests of honor” and/or “personal guests” of (former
quasi-Ambassador) James Cason at many functions, gathering, etc. held
at the U.S. Interest Section and reported by the (especially United
States) media. I assume that cake was part of the menu of those
functions.

The opponents of the Cuban Revolution (whether living in Miami’s
Little Havana or functioning as foreign public relations volunteers)
should remember when they use the term “mercenaries” that the pot
shouldn’t call the kettle black`d.

-- Barry Schier

[Observador]

It goes to prove one thing, the cuban people will do just about
anything to get the hell out of totalitarian cuban dictator.

Post by b***@yahoo.com
How ironic that PL (i.e., Paul Lamot) and PM (i.e., Pedro Martori),
following the cues of the counterrevolutionaries in Little Havana and
elsewhere .whose views they reflect (or, perhaps, setting an example
for them), should use the term “medical mercenaries” to describe the
Cuban VOLUNTEER doctors. Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors (even this
Forbes' written slander-fest states 60,000+), teachers, engineers,
etc. have served, with several dozen “Third World” countries
receiving the benefit of the their services, including approximately
20,000 Cuban doctors presently serving Venezuela’s poor and
working-class people.
As an antonym (i.e., OPPOSITE) to altruistic, etc., Webster’s
dictionary defines “mercenary” as “working or acting merely for
money or other reward; venal.” Other dictionaries describe
“mercenary” (noun) as a hireling or someone who enlists in a fighting
force for the sake of money or other reward. Each definition fits
Uncle Sam’s Cuban hirelings to a “T”. Although the Cold War and the
embargo were / are not formal, declared military hostilities, the
United States government and its allies have been trying to overturn
the Cuban government and social / socialist reforms for more than 45
years as part of its war. The “dissidents” (e.g., “independent”
“journalists,” etc.) serve as Washington’s troops in the
ideological, public relations, etc. aspects of the war against the
Cuban Revolution
Unlike the Cuban counterrevolutionaries themselves, who have been
denying receipt of funds from the United States, the media (since they
are so vehemently against the Cuban Revolution that they consider such
United States government funding of “dissidents” as positive)
regularly report on these “dissidents’” collaboration and
renumeration from the United States Interest Sections (i.e.,
Washington’s quasi-embassy in Havana). Moreover, (especially the case
of “the 75”) they have been filmed in the act of receiving those
funds; unknown to them, some pro-revolutionary people (including those
under the employ of the Interior Department, i.e., Cuban government
security) “infiltrated” these “dissident” organizations and relayed
their observations to the Cuban government or pro-revolutionary Cuban
organizations One section of the Helms-Burton Act explicitly
allocates money for promotion of dissidents’ activities; the
quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy does not hide its
multimillion dollar budgetary allocation for promotion of
“democracy”/”dissidents” in Cuba.
Unlike the Cuban “dissidents” themselves, who generally deny
receiving U.S. funding, PL has repeatedly confirmed that “dissidents”
receive money, etc., from the United States government since (PL
claims) they need the money to “survive.” Let’s assume (arguendo)
PL’s claim (offered by him to ostensibly rebut other sources which
cite figures for payments that are an order of magnitude higher) that
dissidents receive “only” the equivalent of U.S.$50 per month as
correct. In multiple messages (posted with the aim of showing how
little Cuban workers, pensioners, etc. receive, including during this
week), PL states that typical Cubans receive equivalent in Cuban pesos
of about U.S.$10-$15 per month -- or even less if they are pensioners.
(Although my messages and PL’s messages are almost always within the
same ballpark when estimating Cuban salaries, PL’s deliberate
deception is omission of the Cuban government’s offsetting of those
quite minimal monetary payments with free health care, free education,
subsidization of virtually every necessity through combination of the
“ration card” system and price-setting policies.)
PL’s drastic underestimation of U.S. payments to Cuban “dissidents”
is an (unwitting) admission of that the “dissidents” are well-paid
mercenaries: Those with an iota of math ability can divide $50 / month
(i.e., PL’s drastic underestimation, used here arguendo) by $10-$15 /
month (i.e., what PL somewhat accurately cites as a typical Cuban
salary) and reach the conclusion that “dissidents” receive more than
3-1/2 to 5 times what a typical Cuban – who WORKS for a living –
receives.
One can have his cake and eat it, too; the “dissidents” have been
“guests of honor” and/or “personal guests” of (former
quasi-Ambassador) James Cason at many functions, gathering, etc. held
at the U.S. Interest Section and reported by the (especially United
States) media. I assume that cake was part of the menu of those
functions.
The opponents of the Cuban Revolution (whether living in Miami’s
Little Havana or functioning as foreign public relations volunteers)
should remember when they use the term “mercenaries” that the pot
shouldn’t call the kettle black`d.
-- Barry Schier

[Barry Schier]

If that premise were to be true (as Observador alleges) that the
motivation is that "the Cuban people will do just about
anything to get the hell out of totalitarian cuban dictator[ship]", why
was the United States government (which obstensibly is for "freedom"
for Cubans) so adamantly opposed to the Cuban government offer to send
1,586 Cuban doctors to the hurricane-ravaged areas of the United States
Gulf Coast (i.e., New Orleans and vicinity) AT NO CHARGE?!!!

If, as the opponents of the Cuban Revolution allege, the Cuban
government fears "defections" of Cubans who go abroad, the United
States would be the last place that the Cuban government would make an
offer to send people to for free --- an offer not made just once, but
repeated several times by Cuban President Fidel Castro himself. "It
goes to prove one thing" -- that opponents of the Cuban Revolution have
political reasons behind their pathological lying re there allegedly
being a "totalitarian Cuban dictator[ship]" from which there is no
escape, blah-blah-blah.

-- Barry Schider

[PL]

Post by Barry Schier
If that premise were to be true (as Observador alleges) that the
motivation is that "the Cuban people will do just about
anything to get the hell out of totalitarian cuban dictator[ship]", why
was the United States government (which obstensibly is for "freedom"
for Cubans) so adamantly opposed to the Cuban government offer to send
1,586 Cuban doctors

(snip)

People sent while their families are kept hostage like in Zimbabwe and South
Africa you mean.
If Castro wanted to allow doctors to go to Cuba he should let the more than
1000 Cubans that hold valid entry visas to the USA emigrate.
Get real Barry, to Castro doctors are "rental assets" that earn him over 750
million dollar a year.

PL

[krp]

Post by Barry Schier
If that premise were to be true (as Observador alleges) that the
motivation is that "the Cuban people will do just about
anything to get the hell out of totalitarian cuban dictator[ship]", why
was the United States government (which obstensibly is for "freedom"
for Cubans) so adamantly opposed to the Cuban government offer to send
1,586 Cuban doctors to the hurricane-ravaged areas of the United States
Gulf Coast (i.e., New Orleans and vicinity) AT NO CHARGE?!!!
If, as the opponents of the Cuban Revolution allege, the Cuban
government fears "defections" of Cubans who go abroad, the United
States would be the last place that the Cuban government would make an
offer to send people to for free --- an offer not made just once, but
repeated several times by Cuban President Fidel Castro himself. "It
goes to prove one thing" -- that opponents of the Cuban Revolution have
political reasons behind their pathological lying re there allegedly
being a "totalitarian Cuban dictator[ship]" from which there is no
escape, blah-blah-blah.

Small problems for your pathetic attempt at obfuscation. The life risking
defections continue.
The people Cuba wants to get rid of are the ones considered "misfits" IN
Cuba. The active dissidents. Homosexuals (that the Cuban government HATE),
criminals, and the people with mental problems.

IF Cuba were any of the rather asinine things YOU claim then there would not
be any laws against Doctors, Engineers etc leaving freely. Why is it so
near impossible for a Cuban to get an exit visa. For example as a "tourist?"

It would be NICE if any of the things you try to imply (that Cubans CAN
travel freely) were in ANY respect true!

[PL]

How ironic that PL should use the
term ?medical mercenaries? to describe the Cuban VOLUNTEER doctors.

(snip)

You mean indentured labor that Castro hires out.
Lots of doctors are pressed in to "service" Barry.
Deal with reality.

Unlike the Cuban ?dissidents? themselves, who generally deny receiving
U.S. funding, PL has repeatedly confirmed that ?dissidents? receive
money, etc., from the United States government since (PL claims) they
need the money to ?survive.? Let?s assume (arguendo) PL?s claim
(offered by him to ostensibly rebut other sources which cite figures
for payments that are an order of magnitude higher)

Barry, unlike you I don't need someone to tell me what to think.
I also have no problem about telling the truth about Cuba.

that dissidents
receive ?only? the equivalent of U.S.$50 per month as correct. In
multiple messages (posted with the aim of showing how little Cuban
workers, pensioners, etc. receive, including during this week), PL
states that typical Cubans receive equivalent in Cuban pesos of about
U.S.$10-$15 per month -- or even less if they are pensioners.

and you don't deny it.

The facts about Castro's "rent a doctor" scheme: 750 million dollars a
year of earnings from indentured labor.

PL

[Barry Schier]

Unfortunately, the quote marks that I used for deliberate emphasis of
the IRONY the word "only" and other words in PL's post came up as
question marks in most Web-browsers.

"Arguendo" does NOT mean one doesn't deny the falsity of a claim:
"Arguendo" means assuming a premise SOLELY FOR THE SAKE OF DEBATE /
ARGUMENT -- as an initroduction to say, "even if this total false claim
were to be true, then ...." So here's the longer version of: "Let's
assume (arguendo) PL's claim (offered by him to ostensibly rebut
other sources which
cite figures for payments that are an order of magnitude higher) that
dissidents receive "only" the equivalent of U.S.$50 per month as
correct. In multiple messages (posted with the aim of showing how
little Cuban workers, pensioners, etc. receive, including during this
week) ... " the payoff for those "dissidents" "is more than 3-1/2 to 5
times what a typical Cuban - who WORKS for a living - receives".

Longer version of that already too long sentence, which expresses the
same idea: "Let's assume (even though, in realtiy, it is totally
hogwash) that PL's claim (offered by him to ostensibly rebut other
sources which cite figures for payments that are an order of magnitude
higher) that dissidents receive "only" the equivalent of U.S.$50
per month were to be true (which is about as likely as pigs flying). In
multiple messages (posted with the aim of showing how little Cuban
workers, pensioners, etc. receive, including during this week) ... "
the payoff for those "dissidents" "is more than 3-1/2 to 5 times what a
typical Cuban - who WORKS for a living - receives.. That's a longer
way of saying those whom PL and the rest of the counterrevolutionaries
claim to be "dissidents" fit the definition of mercenary to a "T".
About five times the common salary of one's countrymen plus an expense
account as renumeration for (ideologically) fighting for one's
country's enemy -- THAT'S what a MERCENARY is.

The very idea of VOLUNTEERS being "indentured labor[ers]" is too absurd
to merit a serious response.

-- Barry Schier

[Fortinbras]

Post by Barry Schier
"Arguendo" means assuming a premise SOLELY FOR THE SAKE OF DEBATE /
ARGUMENT -- as an initroduction to say, "even if this total false claim
were to be true, then ...." So here's the longer version of: "Let's
assume (arguendo) PL's claim (offered by him to ostensibly rebut
other sources which

Pero que va, que querra este burro por estos lados. Porque no escribe en algun
lenguaje que sepa usar.

saludos cordiales

Fortinbras

[Barry Schier]

Use of simpler language is indeed a reasonable request.
As is my request that the virulent opponents of the Cuban Revolution
stop making arguments that refute that refute their other ridiculous
arguments.

Returned cordial greetings,
-- Barry Schier

[Fortinbras]

Post by Barry Schier
Use of simpler language is indeed a reasonable request.
As is my request that the virulent opponents of the Cuban Revolution
stop making arguments that refute that refute their other ridiculous
arguments.
Returned cordial greetings,
-- Barry Schier

Esto si esta claro. Viva Chavez, viva Fidel.

saludos cordiales

Fortinbras

[Miguel]

Post by Fortinbras

Post by Barry Schier
Use of simpler language is indeed a reasonable request.
As is my request that the virulent opponents of the Cuban Revolution
stop making arguments that refute that refute their other ridiculous
arguments.
Returned cordial greetings,
-- Barry Schier

Esto si esta claro. Viva Chavez, viva Fidel.
saludos cordiales
Fortinbras

Cuando gritas esas barbaridades estas gritando: Viva la tirania! Viva
el totalitarismo! Viva las violaciones de derechos humanos! Viva la
infamia! VivAa la mentira!

[Barry Schier]

Y: Viva Batista! Viva la CIA! (La misma cosa. Es la voz de los
gusanos.)

-- Barry Schier

[krp]

Post by Barry Schier
Y: Viva Batista! Viva la CIA! (La misma cosa. Es la voz de los
gusanos.)

¡Viva el despotricar insensato del imbécil!

[m***@msn.com]

Post by Barry Schier
Y: Viva Batista! Viva la CIA! (La misma cosa. Es la voz de los
gusanos.)
-- Barry Schier

Mira que hablas basura.

Mentira!

La gran mayoria del exilio ha dicho siempre Abajo Batista!

Referente a la CIA, esa es una organizacion del gobierno de Estados
Unidos y yo, como ciudadano de esta nacion, la respeto. Ojala no
hubiera necesidad en este mundo de ese tipo de inteligencia. Ojala que
no existieran gobiernos totalitarios que quisieran destruir la
democracia.de EEUU y del mundo.

[PL]

Post by Barry Schier
Unfortunately, the quote marks that I used for deliberate emphasis of
the IRONY the word "only" and other words in PL's post came up as
question marks in most Web-browsers.

(snip)

Get a life.

Post by Barry Schier
PL's claim (offered by him to ostensibly rebut other sources which
cite figures for payments that are an order of magnitude higher)

which Barry doesn't quote as usual..

Post by Barry Schier
that
dissidents receive "only" the equivalent of U.S.$50 per month as
correct. In multiple messages (posted with the aim of showing how
little Cuban workers, pensioners, etc. receive, including during this
week) ... " the payoff for those "dissidents" "is more than 3-1/2 to 5
times what a typical Cuban - who WORKS for a living - receives".

What Barry actually want is that people are left at the mercy of Fidel
Castro who controls all aspects of life in Cuba.
Castro can remove work, housing, education, .... even food at will from any
of those that oippose him.
NOT receiving help from abroad would therfore condemn people to abject
misery for the only crime of not agreeing with Fidel.
In a famous example the mother of Raul Rivero lost her pesniosn suddenly as
she was "dead".
Just one of the many ways that dissidents are harassed.
On Feb. 24, an international panel of media professionals awarded Rivero the
2004 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize


"Raul Rivero is an independent journalist.
He tries to provide an alternative to the total domination by the state
media.
He can't get published in Cuba, so his work is mostly read or broadcast in
Miami.


"Our approach is not that we are an opposition, but simply that we
will not be cheerleaders for the government. We want to describe reality."


He has been detained many times.


But he says the government tries to silence him in other ways:
recently his 70-year-old mother went to collect her pension.
The official at the desk told her "This person is dead."


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/2496335.stm


Do you deny that Castro controls access to food, education, work,
housing, .... in Cuba.?

By the way: you are a bloody hypocrite to use the starvation wages for
Cubans as a basis.
People that are marganilised when the are harassed by the state system and
are forced to buy food at market prices, ...
$50 a month when you are risking life and limb is hardly a lot.
Your claim that they are "mercenaries" is proposterous.

Post by Barry Schier
Longer version (snip)

God spare us.

PL