People protest in solidarity with
dissident artists in Havana. – Reuters
YVON
GRENIER
Something
extraordinary is happening in Cuba these days — and I am not talking about the
absence of Canadians on its beaches.
Hundreds
of mostly young artists, independent journalists, and some academics, are
raising their voices against censorship. Some of them even call the regime for
what it is: a dictatorship.
Discontent
has been brewing in the island for some time, especially among young Cubans.
But the spark for this rapid escalation was a few arrests too many, as well as
the wider availability of social media over the past two years.
First,
there was the arrest and imprisonment of an irreverent rapper (Denis Solís) for
“disrespecting authority.” Solís is a member of a loose and mostly artist-based
collective named the San Isidro Movement. The “MSI” emerged in 2018, to protest
against new restrictions on freedom of expression.
Then,
Solís’ arrest, the video of which he made available on social media, prompted
some of his friends to go on hunger strike in the MSI headquarters, demanding
his release and calling peers to join them in protest. It was their turn to be
detained, by police in civilian clothes, who illegally broke into their
apartment for the alleged misconduct of violating the COVID-19 testing
protocol. The websites they were using to call for action were blocked by the
government — so much for the public health concern — but, apparently, too late:
digital nonconformity was already spreading wide in the community.
Arbitrary
arrests are common in Cuba: There were close to 2,000 cases in the first eight
months of last year. But this time, a straw broke the camel’s back. On Nov. 27,
up to 300 mostly young Cubans turned up in front of the ministry of culture,
calling for the release of Solís, greater freedom of expression, and …
dialogue with the minister of culture. Many more would have joined had the
place not been blocked by security agents.
In a
one-party communist state that criminalizes opposition, no collective and
public protest of this magnitude was ever attempted or tolerated in Cuba since
the revolution — with the possible exception of a repressed LGBTQ parade last
year.
This
appears to be a wide opposition movement. There are known dissidents (like
“artivist” Tania Bruguera), and a few irreverent but institutional cultural
figures, like film director Fernando Pérez and beloved actor Jorge Perugorría,
who offered support. In between, one finds a whole ecosystem of potential
dissidents, who are not (yet) advocating open confrontation with the so-called
“revolutionary” (in fact conservative) government. Many of them are independent
journalists and bloggers, like Carlos Manuel Alvarez (age 31), who publicly
called for “conversation … not just with a supporting actor like a
minister,” but directly with President Díaz-Canel.
Unavoidably,
protesters were cheered on by the usual suspects in the U.S. government; no
less predictably, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the event an
“imperialist reality show.” Official media called the protesters “mercenaries,”
and even “terrorists”. Two white members of the almost all-white ruling class
(Raúl Castro’s daughter, Mariela, and former Minister of Culture Abel Prieto) indulged
in tropical Trumpism, smearing the mostly poor, brown and black crowd as
“vulgar, tacky and miserable” (Mariela), and “marginals” and “criminals”
(Prieto). Even an occasionally dissonant but mostly official bard of the regime
like singer Silvio Rodríguez, whose songs were actually sung by the protesters,
publicly said that the government was handling this very badly.
All of
this may seem like a footnote compared to massive anti-dictatorial
demonstrations and violent crackdowns in Venezuela and Nicaragua — or even
anti-neoliberal demonstrations in democratic Chile and Peru. Cuba is a
dictatorship, but not one that systematically tortures or opens fire on crowds.
(This may change.) In addition to exporting its opposition (about 20 per cent
of Cubans live abroad), the government secures compliance most effectively with
neighborhood spy networks, public shaming (the infamous “acts of repudiation”)
and incarceration. This toolkit has been in full display in the past two weeks.
Change in
Cuba?
This may
just be a moment, an important one, in the awakening of civil society. Cubans
generally toe the line, and know what line not to cross. But the “little
police” in each and every Cuban, as they often call this mechanism of
self-control, is increasingly disrupted by other voices. Social media is a big
factor here, so the Cuban government may crack it down more. But it would be a
mistake. Young Cubans are already fed up, and crave change (or exile). If
artists can connect with them more broadly, this moment may lead to something
bigger.Yvon Grenier is a professor, department of
political science and resident fellow, Mulroney Institute of Government, St.
Francis Xavier University, Antigonish.
Non-governmental
organizations spend a ton of money trying to influence internal affairs in
Cuba. In January 2000, I published tax documents that gave some insight into
spending trends. See “NGOs sink millions of dollars into Cuba fight.”
I have reviewed a sampling of tax and audit documents filed since that time and
am sharing excerpts of those below.
Tax documents are useful because give specific figures for an NGO’s revenue and
expenses. Trying to find the same information on government spending websites
is sometimes difficult and confusing.
These documents show that some NGOs rely on several sources of government
funding, share money with each other and sometimes pass along grants to unnamed
“sub-recepients.” Tax records also make clear that hundreds of Cuban activists
receive money from U.S. government-financed NGOs every year as part of an
extensive democracy-promotion campaign.
Directorio
Democrático Cubano, Inc.
A February 2021 audit of the Directorio Democrático Cubano shows
that the Miami-based NGO spent $1,050,270 on radio programming, humanitarian
aid, civic activities and other programs in 2019. The audit, which found no problems or
irregularities, shows that the Directorio received:
$644,936 from the National
Endowment for Democracy, via the State Department
$111,637 from the
International Republican Institute, via the U.S. Agency for International
Development
$188,323 from the Grupo de
Apoyo a la Democracia, via USAID
$104,343 in donations
The NED
funds included $514,458 that went toward the Directorio’s Radio
Republica operation, which touts itself as the “Voice of the Cuban
Resistance.”
The Directorio is located at 730 NW 107th Ave. in Miami. The group’s
national secretariat is Orlando Gutierrez, who received a salary of $77,116 in
2018. Finance director Eddy Cento received $66,774, according to a 2019 Form 990 tax document.
Here’s
how the audit described the group:
Directorio Democratico Cubano, Inc. (“DDC”) is a not-for-profit organization
incorporated on November 14, 1995 and was granted tax-exempt status under
Section 501(C) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code on December 3, 1996.
DDC was established:
To rescue the Cuban national
culture by fostering the identification of the new generations of Cubans
and Cuban-Americans with the Cuban nation.
To promote freedom and
democracy for Cuba in the face of the current dictatorship.
To get the Cuban youth, both
inside and outside Cuba, actively involved in the process to promote the
respect for human rights and democracy in Cuba.
The above
is being accomplished by promotion of democracy through various venues. The
promotion of democracy is built on the principles of free flow of information
to the Cuban people, humanitarian aid to provide support to the political
prisoners and their families, and international activities.
Radio Republica
transmissions are essential in providing the Cuban people with information
and also provide an avenue whereby Cubans on the island can speak and be
heard by their fellow civic-minded brothers and help promote democracy in
Cuba. Radio Republica helps build a solid base in democratic principles by
providing information to people who desperately need it.
Humanitarian aid helps the
civil society with basic necessities and helps strengthen the non-violent
struggle for democracy. The assistance to the political prisoners and
their families, as well as to activists, in many areas, is essential to
secure their survival.
International activities
around the world to expose the lack of freedoms that exist in Cuba help
build an international solidarity movement to assist the civic leaders in
Cuba and speak out and denounce when the Cuban government unjustly imprisons
or tortures these civic leaders.
The Directorio reported that it paid 1,930 people a total of $48,628 for “civic activities,” the Form 990 document shows. That averages out to $25.20 per person. The group also gave humanitarian aid in the form of cash grants to 236 people. Six people received a total of $1,002 in equipment, and 125 people received $21,769 in food and medicine. The Form 990 reports paying $83,442 to two employees for radio programming, and $20,205 to 744 radio reporters. The record also shows that the NGO received $3,583,161 in federal funds from 2014 through 2018.
HAVANA —
Cuba has approved a reform that includes long-sought legal status for private
businesses that began operating decades ago under the title of “self-employed,”
state-run media reported on Wednesday.
Top officials have said for months they were planning changes to sort out rules for state-run companies and private cooperatives and businesses so they can function on an equal footing in the Communist-run country.
The Council of Ministers agreed the measure at its latest closed-door session, state-run media wrote, without detailing when it would become law.
The
reform would include legal status for the private sector’s thousands of
businesses from eateries and garages to construction and beauty salons and for
cooperatives.
“With
this decision we are approving how to organize the actors in our economy, which
goes much further than the simple recognition of some of them,” Communist Party
leader and President Miguel Diaz Canel was quoted as stating.
Unlike
Communist Party-ruled China and Vietnam, Cuba has been slow to implement market
reforms to its Soviet-style command economy.
But the government has picked up the pace in the face of a severe
economic crisis and food, medicine and other shortages it blames largely on
U.S. sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic, while admitting failure to reform is
also at fault.
Still,
Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz emphasized the state would remain the
dominant economic player, insisting “we are not privatizing the economy,”
according to the report.
Private
farmers and cooperatives have operated for decades in Cuba in agriculture. The
“self-employed” sector meanwhile – that includes businesses, their employees,
trades people and others such as taxi drivers – has expanded over the past
decade to include more than 600,000 workers.
Thousands more work in non-agricultural cooperatives, a new category
allowed in 2012. Authorities had suspended issuing new licenses for such
cooperatives but under the new reform will start issuing them once more. All in all, the private sector now makes up
around a third of the six million strong labor force.
Oniel
Diaz, co-founder of the private businesses consultancy AUGE, said approval
signaled a further expansion of the private sector was on its way, but it still
could take a while. “The wait
continues,” he tweeted.
(Reporting by Marc Frank; additional reporting by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Nick Macfie)
The French philosophe and
essayist Michel Montaigne often used the phrase “What do I know?” to express
the subjective limits of knowledge. What can any individual really know about
the world? About others who inhabit it? I pose this question to myself often.
It’s part of the job description for being a critical sociologist. I scratch my
head in puzzlement each time that I gather data to analyze my compatriots in
South Florida. What do I really know about Cuban Americans? Many will jump to
answer, “You know nothing. You are clueless,” and they might be right. But you
would think that after nearly thirty years of writing about and studying Cubans
in the United States I would know something about what makes our “moral
community” tick. But when faced with the question Que sais-je?,
which translates into a very Cuban, “Qué sé yo?” I have to admit that many of
the moving parts of the community remain a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside
a pastelito.
Take, for example, the resurgence of
pro-embargo sentiments among South Florida Cuban American. It’s a grim turn
even if not totally surprising given the Jarabe de Trump that many have savored
in recent years.
What is driving this macabre enthusiasm
to endorse an archaic, cold war policy designed in 1962 to isolate Cuba and
bring about regime change because, as stated in Kennedy’s infamous Proclamation 3447,
the country is “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the
Inter-American system; and, in light of the subversive offensive of Sino-Soviet
Communism with which the Government of Cuba is publicly aligned?” Seriously?
There is still support for a policy designed to “protect” the Americas from the
threat of “Sino-Soviet Communism?” Directed at Cuba? Does this policy remain a
vital element in the foreign policy of the United States? The world has
changed so much but we seem to have changed so little.
Maybe there is more behind this seeming
callous attitude of “que se jodan” exhibited by my fellow denizen of the Cuban
diaspora than sheer opportunism. After all, we are not all YouTube mavens
making a nice living peddling fear and disinformation. Most of us care about our
friends and relatives on the island. About half of us send money when we can
afford it and sending food via Katapulk is
becoming a thing. Many on the island depend on us, if not for survival, for support,
especially during this horrific pandemic period.
Maybe championing the embargo, in the
minds of those who do, is part of a larger plan. Maybe supporters see in the
embargo a part of a broader strategy to improve the lives of Cubans throughout
the island. Qué sé yo?
I want to understand why so many of us
insist on supporting a foreign policy implemented to punish and isolate when we
know that change in this globalized world is brought about by contact and
negotiation. Why do people support the embargo? Why do they support lifting the
embargo?
With the help of the colleagues at OnCuba News, I floated a questionnaire on their platform and various social media streams (FB, Twitter) to try to understand why Cuban Americans either support or oppose the nearly sixty-year-old sanction. This is not a scientific sample, but the 361 responses (as of May 19) allow us to create broad categories to describe the types of reasons shaping opinions.
To be honest, I harbor no illusions that the Cuban American vox populi will raise in an exilic chorus supporting the end to the embargo. I see no sign that we are willing, as a community to come to terms with our Big Lie. To recognize that the embargo, as a policy to motivate change in Cuba, has been a resounding failure and has not met the expectations of its supporters. It is a zombie policy which should have been killed by years of evidence verifying its failure but stays alive, eating the brains of Cuban Americans. Supporting the embargo is evidence that our community has been successfully recruited to brutalize the Cuban people by assisting the U.S. in its feeble attempt to project American power. I worry about the history we are helping to shape.
The only hope that I hold for seeing
the lifting of the embargo in my lifetime is for the U.S. government to act in
its best interest. In this unique case, the best interests of the United States
are aligned with the best interests of Cuba, its people and government.
Accepting this might not be easy for
those who have developed an identity based on opposition to the Cuban
government, but it is the reality we face. Let’s give in to a moment of
clarity. We cannot, with any credibility, demand changes in others when we, as
a community, remain so unwilling, or unable, to change.
At the age of 15, Camila Acosta
Rodríguez (Isla de la Juventud, 1993) won a scholarship to study at Havana’s
prestigious Vladimir Ilich Lenin Vocational High School, which she graduated
from in 2011. She went on to study Journalism at the University of Havana.
Before graduating in 2016, she did internships in various official media
outlets in the capital including Granma, the official organ of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.
These experiences did not give her
much in the way of journalistic practice. However, they did provide her with
two elements that have since proven essential in her professional development.
First, she realized at an early age that she couldn’t do journalism in a media
system structurally designed to serve as a channel for the party’s “ideological
propaganda machine.” Second, and quite ironically, these internships and her
subsequent period of social service as a reporter at Canal Habana provided her
with much freer access to the internet than she had had at the University of
Havana.
She took full and frequent advantage
of this crack in the wall of state-imposed censorship to spend endless and
“spectacular” hours searching for information on Facebook and YouTube. “For
that, the internships actually helped me tremendously,” she says with a laugh.
She resigned from Canal Habana after
just a year and a half because this short period of time was more than enough
for her to experience “first-hand all the censorship and lack of freedom of
expression one must accept when working in the official Cuban media. Being
exposed to that,” she clarifies, “also taught me how to criticize the official
media and defend my current position as openly against the island’s reigning political
system.”
Acosta has been working as an
independent journalist for less than two years, a task she began full-time in
August 2019 as a reporter for CubaNet. She has also made several
award-winning documentaries about Freemasonry in Cuba and has published her journalism in
other independent digital press outlets, including Periodismo de Barrio, El
Toque, OnCuba, the cultural magazine Árbol Invertido, Diario
de las Américas, and Diario ABC. Additionally, she is a member of 27N, a movement born on November 27, 2020 as a
result of the now historic spontaneous demonstration that took place that
evening in front of the Cuban Ministry of Culture.
Since fall 2019, Acosta has
experienced in flesh and blood nearly all the repressive strategies that the Cuban government’s state
security agents unleash against those who attempt to practice journalism free
of ideological control on the island.
She has been evicted from a series of
different rental apartments in Havana, fined for the crime of “reception,”
fined under Decree-Law 370 (against which she has been one of the clearest and most constant voices), interrogated and
strip-searched, arbitrarily arrested in public, “regulated” from traveling
abroad, placed under house arrest, and defamed both on social media and
national television. While arbitrarily detained, state security agents have
stolen money from her and broken or confiscated at least three of her cell
phones, which has become one of the most basic tools necessary to carry out her
work as an independent journalist. Finally, members of her family have been
summoned for interrogations of their own and threatened with reprisals if they
couldn’t get her to stop reporting.
Despite all this, Acosta has chosen
not only to stay in Cuba and continue working as a journalist but also to focus
ever more intently in her reportage on what she calls “the root causes of
Cuba’s problems,” which for her is “the prevailing political system in Cuba,
the dictatorship.”
That is to say, she wanted to go
beyond simply “playing with the chain” of the system by cataloging its endless
string of negative consequences without ever touching “the monkey,” the
totalitarian political system itself, which for her is the root cause of all
the problems. Here she cites the well-known Cuban expression that sets the
unwritten rules for “legitimate” criticism within a system
that still claims it’s a “Revolution”: “tú puedes jugar con la cadena, pero no
con el mono” (you can play with the chain but not with the monkey). “I wanted
to get to the causes,” she insists.
As a direct result of her playing
with this “monkey” again and again, of giving visibility to figures from the
political opposition through her interviews and investigative reporting, and of
making clear and repeated denunciations of state repression and of the island’s
reigning dictatorial political system itself, she quickly fell into the
crosshairs of the island’s extensive state security apparatus, which has tried
unsuccessfully to silence her.
However, their repression has
backfired. She is ever more emboldened.
Could you describe
your family and social origins? What kind of work do your parents do, and how
“integrated” was your family in the revolutionary process growing up?
My parents are working class. My
father is a farmer and my mother is a bookkeeper in a state-run cafeteria.
My mother’s family was always quite
integrated in this political process. My aunt, an internationalist doctor, is a
member of the Party. My maternal grandparents were also Party members for many
years. My grandmother even belongs to an “Asociación de Combatientes,” given
her past resistance against the Batista dictatorship. On my father’s side, it’s
just the opposite. My father’s brother had to go into exile in the United
States because he was the leader of a dissident organization on the Isle of
Youth. My paternal grandfather is from Matanzas, and in the 1960s they removed
him from his land because he supported the rebels in the Escambray mountains. In other words, that side of my
family is against the Cuban regime.
How “integrated”
were you when you were young? How would you describe your educational
experiences up through high school?
Since I was a child I was much more influenced
by my mother’s side of the family. In addition to the indoctrination I
experienced at school.
I was always a very good student. I
participated in all the student academic competitions, starting in elementary
school. In middle school, I became part of the group of students chosen to as
school leaders.
In the ninth grade they suggested
that I join the Union of Young Communists (UJC), which they did with the best
students, but I refused. By then I had become a bit suspicious of anything
ideological. I just wanted to study. I didn’t want to be linked to any
political-ideological issue. That’s why I rejected membership in the UJC.
Later, in high school, when I was in
eleventh grade, I decided to ask to join the UJC because I believed that it
would help me win a spot to study Journalism at the university, the major I had
already decided on. Many times, belonging to the UJC can help you get into the
major of your choice. But once a student at the University of Havana, I was
never really that active in the UJC. Of course, I did go to some marches and
other political activities that were mandatory. And at one point I think I was
even secretary of the UJC among my cohort because nobody else wanted that job.
I had to put in my time for a year, but I really didn’t do anything much. It
was all quite banal.
How and why did you
decide to study journalism at the University of Havana?
I am from the Isle of Youth (although
I prefer to say “the Isle of Pines”) and when I was 15 years old I came to
study in Havana, at the Vladimir Ilich Lenin vocational high school, because
there were no such schools on the Island. In my last year of high school, I
decided to opt for a degree in Journalism, because it was the major that most
aligned with my talents and sensibilities. I always liked the humanities and
found that I performed best in those subjects. I have also always liked to read
and stay informed. And I wanted to do something in which I felt useful, where I
could help other people and do something to transform my reality, my country,
the things that I believed should be changed.
Back then, what
were the things you wanted to transform or change?
I really didn’t see myself doing the
same thing every day, or doing an office job where I didn’t get any feedback.
Because I am one of those people who constantly sets goals in life. I always
try to improve myself spiritually and professionally. And I think that with
Journalism I have achieved that: I get feedback and spiritual nourishment from
the practice of my profession.
What social
concerns did you have when you were still unsure about the character of the
Cuban political system?
I did not understand that in a system
that was said to be so humanistic (the official discourse of promoting equality
or eradicating inequalities) there were so many inequalities. For me, in
practice, there were many contradictions: I saw that theory had nothing to do
with reality. I saw that there were mothers who could barely feed their
children. I myself suffered having to go without many necessities. I went
hungry when I was on scholarship and the Lenin vocational school, between the
ages of 15 and 18. When I started college, I barely had clothes to wear because
my parents are working class and didn’t have the resources to support me here
in Havana. My mother earned about 300 pesos a month, and a pair of shoes cost
me 500. Things like that, which I didn’t understand at the time, made me ask:
“How is this possible?”
My aunt, who is a doctor, had to go
on an international medical mission for a year when her daughter was just 3
years old. Later, when her daughter was about 7 or 8, she had to go back to
another mission, this time to Venezuela. And she was away from our family for
six years. She would come back once a year to visit, but only for a month. Her daughter
and I, we practically grew up together. I experienced all her pain, having to
be apart from her mother. And I also understood that my aunt had to do it
because it was the way she saw that she could get ahead financially. To help
her family.
In fact, during those years she was
the one who helped just about all of us to find clothes and shoes, to put food
on the table. And I used to ask myself: “How is it that a professional, a
doctor, has to go far from her country to survive economically, if this is her
country? This is where she studied. Here she can work…” And at the same time, I
saw how terrible the health service in Cuba was, the educational system. These
were things that I questioned.
Along with this family experience,
when I came here to Havana I realized the great social differences that exist
in Cuba. In the provinces, in the towns, at that time this was less evident.
For example, at the Lenin school, there were children of many political
leaders, of people with a lot of resources, and they dressed very well. And
they made fun of people like us, who came from the Isle of Youth, from small
towns, and who didn’t dress as well as they did. They discriminated against us.
In Havana, I also began to see that
many people could afford luxuries like going to bars and parties while I
couldn’t. Some students even drove to campus in their own cars wearing
expensive clothes. While there were others, like me, who could barely afford a
pair of shoes.
When I decided to study Journalism
and during the time I was studying for my major, I had these social concerns
but was unaware that Cuba was a dictatorship, for example. I didn’t even know
there were political prisoners. Little by little, especially after graduation,
with greater Internet access, I started to meet people from the opposition and
to open up to a world totally unknown to me.
After graduation, I think was my
awakening. Over time, I have been able to access many banned books that
broadened my horizons and helped me to better understand all those concerns
that I had had.
What are some
examples of the books you discovered at that time?
I have read Journey to the
Heart of Cuba by Carlos Alberto Montaner. I read Juan Reinaldo
Sánchez’s book, The Secret Life of Fidel Castro. I have also read,
for example, the book by Andrés Oppenheimer, Castro’s Final Hour.
It was very important to me. It inspired me tremendously. I have found it
difficult to find books by Rafael Rojas,
but I keep looking. I have also read the book by Comandante Benigno [Daniel
Alarcón Ramírez] Life and Death of the Cuban Revolution. Benigno
was one of Camilo’s guerrilla fighters, and later part of Ernesto Che Guevara’s
guerrilla force.
On the Internet, I have been able to
find many works on Cuban history. I have also interviewed many people as part
of my research project on Freemasonry in Cuba. There were even freemasons among
the Cuban political prisoners known as “los plantados.”
What attracted you
to the idea of being a journalist in a country like Cuba?
The constant exchange with people,
feeling that I was providing people with a social service. Since I became an
independent journalist, many people have approached me for help.
What kind of help
have they requested?
I have covered cases of families in Old Havana whose homes are in danger of collapse. And when I publish these articles, the authorities
are forced to visit these buildings and try to remedy the situation in some
way.
Another experience I had, last year,
was a family that contacted me through a friend, because the father of the
family had a son with chronic schizophrenia. This was around the start of the
pandemic when there was all this paranoia in Cuba of arresting and fining
people for not wearing a mask. So, this young guy, suffering from
schizophrenia, decides to go out for a walk. And the police catch him without a
shirt or a mask. They gave him a summary trial, without a lawyer and without
the presence of his family, and sentenced him to a year in prison. His father
had not been able to visit him during the whole process. He even took his
medical history to prove his condition, but the authorities did not take it
into account.
I did some investigative reporting on this case, and as I began to
inquire about all the violations that were being committed, in less than 10
days they released this kid. They called his father and handed him over without
further explanation. He is free. After being sentenced to a year in prison.
People have found, in the independent
press, a form of social denunciation. They can be heard in the face of so much
injustice. Those are the things that comfort me, make me proud of what I do.
And that’s why: the public service I provide thanks to the profession I chose.
What did you write
your thesis about and why? Who was your thesis director?
I graduated from the Communication
School at the University of Havana in 2016, and my thesis was a video
documentary on the history of Freemasonry in Cuba. My tutor was Maribel Acosta,
a tenured professor at the University.
Freemasonry was a subject that
interested me. First, I set out to put together a book of interviews. But then
I saw that there was material worthy of a documentary, because nothing of the
sort had been done before. In fact, in all modestly, mine was the first
documentary on the history of Freemasonry in Cuba.
Freemasonry has been quite momentous
in this country’s history. The first separatist conspiracies in the 19th
century were orchestrated by Freemasons. The Cuban flag and the national coat
of arms were both devised by Freemasons. The national anthem was written by a
Freemason. The Ten Years’ War was also hatched in Masonic lodges. José Martí was a Freemason. Later, during the years of the
Republic, the Masonic order continued to have tremendous influence.
Later as I delved more deeply into my
research on the history of the order in Cuba, I discovered that the female
branch of Freemasonry, for example, was something has been almost completely
ignored. Right now, I am finishing up my book on all this so I can enter it
into a journalism contest. I think the main contribution I make is on the
history of the order in the last 60 years, which is also unknown, unpublished.
How would you
describe your internships at different state media outlets during college?
They were all about the same
political-ideological question. I don’t think they contributed much to my
development. I do remember that at Granma what we did was
accompany older journalists in their coverage and see how they did things. And
they gave us advice.
However, we students spent most of
our time on the office computers. Sometimes we even skipped class so we could
go on-line. The Internet access they gave us at the university was negligible.
It didn’t allow us to do anything. Back then, I didn’t even know what Facebook
was. I had never had a laptop or anything like that. So, to walk into a
newsroom with so much connectivity, to find myself with access to all that, for
me it was something spectacular.
I remember spending hours and hours
on Facebook, on YouTube, watching videos, looking for information. For that,
the internships actually helped me tremendously.
If President
Biden wants to support human rights in Cuba and empower the Cuban people, he
can start by alleviating the food crisis by ending Trump’s prohibition on
remittances and restoring the right of U.S. residents to travel.
While
President Joe Biden dithers about when or whether to keep his
campaign promise to roll back Donald Trump’s economic sanctions on Cuba, people
on the island are going hungry. Cuba imports 70 percent of its food and its
foreign exchange earnings have plummeted due to the cut-off of remittances by
Trump and the closure of the tourism industry by COVID-19. Increases in world
market prices for food have aggravated an already
precarious situation, producing severe shortages and a looming humanitarian
crisis.
Hunger
has been a weapon in Washington’s arsenal against Cuba ever since Dwight D.
Eisenhower sat in the White House. In January 1960, Ike suggested blockading the island, arguing,
“If they (the Cuban people) are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”
In April 1960, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs
Lester D. Mallory proposed, “Every possible means
should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…to bring
about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Even
though the United States no longer prohibits the sale of food to Cuba, by
intensifying economic sanctions, Washington impedes Cuba’s ability to earn
enough money to buy adequate food supplies from anywhere.
President
John F. Kennedy imposed the most comprehensive economic embargo that the United States has ever imposed
on any country, including prohibitions on both food and medicine sales. The
core of that embargo has remained in place ever since.
From 1975
to 1992, Cuba could buy goods from the subsidiaries of U.S. companies in third
countries. Ninety percent of the $700 million in goods Cuba
bought annually was food and medicine. President George H. W. Bush, with
presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s support, signed the 1992 Cuban Democracy
Act, cutting off those sales just as the Cuban economy collapsed due to the
loss of Soviet aid. Cubans went hungry then, too. “Food shortages and
distribution problems have caused malnutrition and disease,” the CIA reported in August 1993.
The Trump
administration’s campaign of “maximum pressure” was designed to block
Cuba’s sources of foreign exchange earnings by limiting U.S. travel,
remittances, and Cuba’s earnings from the export of medical services. The goal,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told European diplomats, was to
“starve” the island to bring down the regime. So far, President Biden
has left all these sanctions in place.
Even
though the United States no longer prohibits the sale of food to Cuba, by intensifying economic
sanctions, Washington impedes Cuba’s ability to earn enough money to buy
adequate food supplies from anywhere. Moreover, by exacerbating food shortages,
forcing Cubans to stand in line for hours in the midst of the
pandemic, U.S. policy also impedes Cuba’s ability to control the spread of
COVID.
The
international community regards using food as an instrument of coercion to be a
violation of international humanitarian law. In 2018, the UN Security Council
voted unanimously to approve Resolution 2417, which condemns the deliberate
deprivation of food “in conflict situations” as a threat to
international peace and security. Resolution 2417 focuses on armed conflicts,
but the underlying principle is no less applicable to conflicts in which one
country has the ability to impose food insecurity on another, even without the
use of armed force.
The
international community has also made clear what it thinks of the U.S. embargo.
Since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has annually voted
overwhelmingly for a resolution calling on the United States to lift
the embargo because of its “adverse effects…on the Cuban people.” In
2019, the vote was 187 in favor, three against (the United States, Israel, and
Brazil).
The Biden
administration has yet to complete its review of Cuba policy, but officials,
when asked, never fail to say that it will center on democracy, human rights,
and “empowering the Cuban people.” In his confirmation hearing, Brian Nichols, Biden’s
nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs,
declared, “We should be focusing our efforts on what is best for the Cuban
people.”
No long,
drawn out policy review is needed to recognize that there is a food crisis in
Cuba due in part to U.S. policies, and that helping alleviate it is a moral
obligation—an extension of the responsibility to protect.
On Cuban
Independence Day, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken addressed the Cuban people directly,
assuring them, “We recognize the challenges many of you face in your daily
lives,” and pledged, “We will support those improving the lives of
families and workers.”
Fine
sentiments, but their sincerity is belied by the Trump-era sanctions that the
Biden administration has done nothing to change, sanctions that make the daily
lives of Cuban families harder. Having enough to eat is a basic human right,
too, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt affirmed when he included “Freedom
from Want” among his “Four Freedoms.” Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, which the United States signed, includes adequate food as a right.
If
President Biden wants to support human rights in Cuba and empower the Cuban
people, he can start by alleviating the food crisis by ending Trump’s
prohibition on remittances and restoring the right of U.S. residents to travel.
Remittances put money directly into the pockets of Cuban families. Restoring
the right to travel will help Cuba’s ailing private sector recover post-COVID.
The resulting inflow of foreign exchange currency will enable the government to
import more food, especially for marginalized populations—single mothers, the
elderly, and the poor—who have no direct access to hard currency.
There is
no excuse for delay. No long, drawn out policy review is needed to recognize
that there is a food crisis in Cuba due in part to U.S. policies, and that
helping alleviate it is a moral obligation—an extension of the responsibility to protect. Moreover, these are
actions Biden promised he would take during the presidential
campaign. Every day he delays is another day that Cubans go hungry.
It’s
April and the sun rises over Havana at 7:07 a.m. People are already sitting
outside their homes chatting about the weather reports coming from a TV that
caters to multiple families. Each day, 2 million Habaneros invigorate their
city’s economy by running unpaid errands, selling basic goods to people who
have received dollars from relatives in Miami, or getting to work for a
government-fixed wage in a state-run enterprise.
Until
recently, Cuba was mostly stuck in the past. But it’s changing fast. Over the
past two years, increased
internet access has transformed the lives of Cubans. Cuba has become home
to a thriving tech scene featuring YouTubers, influencers, artists
selling NFTs, filmmakers making movies about social media, and a large
group of local programmers shaping the digital conversation. They gather across
dozens of mobile applications, e-commerce outfits, and digital enterprises.
Erich
García Cruz is one of them. He is a 34-year-old programmer and pioneering
YouTuber who wakes up around 11 a.m. every morning to his two kids and wife at
a home in Havana’s Santos Suárez neighborhood. He makes breakfast — and plenty
of coffee — while he begins his day by checking his phone. García Cruz is lucky
because he’s one of just over 4.4 million people out of Cuba’s 11 million who have
accessed the internet on their mobile devices. Mobile data did not exist for the island’s inhabitants
until 2019 and SIM cards cost $40, a sum an average Cuban cannot spare. The
government-controlled monthly wage is just under $88.
Cuba’s
access to the internet came late compared to the rest of the world. But fast
forward to 2021, and these digital pioneers are experimenting with virtual
reality and toying with ideas of cyborgs. They are led by people like García Cruz
and a growing tech crew of young crypto-users, AI explorers, and experimental
techno DJs. They may be over 1,000 miles away from Washington, but this digital
lobbying strategy is proving fruitful. It could potentially prompt companies
like Google and big tech to seize the opportunity and advance their corporate
interests.
While
García Cruz chats over buttered toast with his family, a few blocks away, an
old-fashioned radio tunes into the Communist Party-run Radio Reloj. The
station provides live round-the-clock news updates. “Eleven fifteen minutes
García
Cruz has been a digital entrepreneur since 2015, when the internet was barely
arriving on the island. Back then, he hacked the state-controlled network
through leaky internet protocols and began navigating his very own internet
experience. Six years later, he knows this is only the beginning of what could
be a massive economic opportunity for the island.
“There is
a large segment of people in Cuba, who are seeing the internet as a platform
for entertainment and one in which they can chill or simply build human
connections. But I see the internet as a very powerful tool for entrepreneurship,
to do business, to automate processes in real life, and to make money,” García
Cruz told Rest of World. His mission is for everyone in Cuba to prosper
financially from the internet instead of being glued to it as if it were a
superfluous gaming console or a Facebook feed.”
Despite
his optimism, García Cruz is aware of the limitations that he and millions of
other internet users on the island face. They cannot fully access an array of
virtual products and services provided by American companies — like Venmo or
Google Earth — because of restrictions imposed by what they call
“counterproductive” U.S. sanctions.
“I was
born in 1986 and I never thought I would reach the point in my life where I am
at now. I have achieved many things in Cuba and I’ve become an influencer,”
García Cruz said. After spending years online, though, he is frustrated with
the way that sanctions limit his internet experience. “It’s mind-boggling that
I am personally prohibited from accessing hundreds of thousands of resources on
the internet because of restrictions imposed in 1962.”
For
García Cruz, the equation is simple. The only reason he can’t access a world of
resources is because he is a Cuban citizen. When he tries to register for
PayPal, Cuba is not among the list of accepted countries. He thinks that’s
wrong — and sad. “We’re entrepreneurs, not political activists,” he said.
Unlike
previous generations born under the embargo, García Cruz may hold a tool that
can pry open the blockade from within the island: his fame. With almost 2.4
million video views and nearly 59,000 followers, his YouTube channel, Bachecubano,
is arguably the most-watched tech channel in Cuba. His videos are also featured
in the island’s iconic paquete,
Cuba’s answer to pre-internet digital multimedia spread across the island
through hard drives hand-delivered to subscribers.
Julio
Lusson is another influencer in Cuba’s tech scene. He hosts a Telegram channel
where thousands of Cubans — both on the island and across the Florida Straits —
are planting the digital seeds for the 2020-born generation to reap.
“The
internet is the strongest tool I have,” Lusson told Rest of World. “The
internet right now means money, it’s investment – I benefit from it.” He lost
his job as a DJ during the pandemic and credits the internet to his survival.
Lusson hosts a YouTube channel featuring the latest in tech available to
Cubans; TecnoLike Plus has over 1.6 million views and over 18,000
followers.
The
Telegram group, which Lusson manages, is home to conversations all about the
latest tech gadgets popular among young Cubans. They talk about products like
the OnePlus Watch, the recent Apple Event, and about sending money to Cuba via
ETECSA. There are long audio conversations about how best to make the most of
gadgets locally. It’s a side effect of decades of scarcity; Cubans are the
ultimate resourceful collaborators.
his kind
of collaboration has led to speedy innovation at scale. In February 2019, Karla
Suárez and Rancel Ruana founded Bajanda, a Havana-based ride-sharing app. They launched
just two months after the Cuban state internet company ETECSA made data
services available to mobile users — before then, Cubans could only access the
internet from city hotspots and ETECSA-run internet cafes.
“The Internet is like a Pandora’s box: once you open it, there’s no turning back,” Ruana told Rest of World. “Cubans are seeing the cases of success and saying: If someone like him can develop a ride-sharing app, why wouldn’t I be able to create an app? They are seeing it’s possible to thrive from the internet.”
In less
than two years, homegrown apps that are common in most other Western countries
— ranging from food delivery to ride sharing — are now available to Cubans. And
though Ruana is confident about his business model, he requires better services
than the ones provided by ETECSA. “We have the privilege of having home
internet services called Nauta Hogar,” he said, “We are lucky to live in an area
where we can get that service.”
Unlike
Ruana, Adriana Heredia, another Habanera entrepreneur, runs Beyond Roots,
her Afro-Cuban products enterprise, solely on mobile data. It is an extremely
expensive endeavour for the young Afro-Cuban economist, who promotes Cuba’s
Afro-descendant culture and builds on the heritage of 3.8 million Afro-Cubans.
Internet prices are a recurrent setback for many, because the price to access
the internet bears no correlation when compared to the money an average Cuban
can make. Everyone wants cheaper connection prices.
In March, Lusson gauged the opinion of his more than 2,000 Telegram subscribers by asking in a poll: “Do you want the blockade to end so that more of Google’s services can be accessed in #Cuba?” Of the 431 that answered, the overwhelming majority –– 88% of votes –– responded “Yes”, 2% said “No,” and 10% chose “I don’t care!” (Most likely those members residing comfortably in the U.S.).Frustration about the internet access restrictions has boiled into action. Cuba’s tech crew is more cautious about its approach to lobbying than other politically-motivated activists. García Cruz made this clear in a March 23 Telegram message when he wrote: “Politics CANNOT be allowed to go hand in hand with ONLINE BUSINESS.”
In that same post, García Cruz went on to make a digital call-to-arms,
asking fellow members of the Cuban tech crew to tweet out against the blockade
that left Cubans without online payment solutions. He took special care to ask
people to “TAG THE CEOS of big companies, especially @BrettPerlmutter.” The
Cuban Twitter community quickly jumped on board and the hashtag #EEUUnblockMe
went viral.
The campaign was a success: Brett Perlmutter, head of Google Cuba, publicly
championed it later on Twitter the next day and invited García Cruz to tell him
more on 90 Miles, a podcast hosted by Susanna Kohly, co-founder of
Google Cuba.
“This is something that’s very painful for me, personally,” Perlmutter told
García Cruz on 90 Miles. “I’m sure it’s painful for every Cuban who lives in
Cuba and has to face the reality of the fact that many internet services that
are available to users around the world are not available to the Cuban people.
And they’re not available by way of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, which actually
censors information from reaching the hands of the Cuban people.”
Since 2015, Google, along with broader U.S. business coalitions, have been
working together with Cuban entrepreneurs to cross this divide. Today, Cuba is
connected to the internet thanks to a single submarine cable that runs from
Venezuela to the island. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has provided the
government with the majority of the network’s infrastructure, including cell
towers and 4G.
With increased internet access, the tech crew feels their hands would
suddenly be let loose to create, innovate, and prosper. Cubans — who are
hackers by nature after decades of shortages — are trusting that the
internet will be their endless economic opportunity provider.
While there have been numerous efforts to normalize relations between both
countries, including a September 2018 meeting in New York City between Google and
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, rapprochement stalled when former president
Donald Trump took office.
But Cuba’s tech crew appears to be taking an alternate route. By
intensifying their contact with Google via Perlmutter, instead of looking to
pressure Washington directly, their hope is that the tech giant will lobby the
U.S. on their behalf. It is an effort they will have to continue pushing with
the current administration; on April 16, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
said that President Joe Biden is not considering a change in policy towards
Cuba.
In spite of diplomatic uncertainty between the island and Washington,
Google’s annual programming competition, Code
Jam, is going forward uninterrupted. “It’s true that Google Code Jam is
available in Cuba,” Perlmutter tweeted on March 27. His words were again picked
up, disseminated, and praised by the Cuban tech crew, especially because the
Head of Google in Cuba had endorsed yet another voice in the local tech scene,
Rancel Ruana — the software engineer and founder of Bajanda.
“Hopefully other leaders in the tech world like you [Ruana] and Erich García
can share this news,” concluded Perlmutter in his tweet. And he penned the
hashtag #CubaIsACountry, which the Cuban Twitter community has made viral in
recent weeks.
The pattern has been made clear: The tech crew and the Head of Google in
Cuba play off each other in a digital effort to pressure leaders in the U.S. to
reevaluate restrictions for the improvement of the island’s internet
experience.
If the strategy were to succeed, it would be a win win for Google and local
developers. Perlmutter could make his turf the biggest digital market in the
Caribbean overnight, and the tech crew would suddenly have access to new
content and lucrative opportunities. With the help of big tech companies and coalitions, Cuban developers and
entrepreneurs could materialize the momentum they’ve quickly built and are
pushing forward. They just don’t want political rhetoric to get in the way. The
tech crew is pragmatic and can side with any company out there or even the
Cuban government, so long as they are offered the internet access they desire.
Ruana, the software engineer at Bajanda, has never been to the United
States, though he lives with the impacts of the sanctions every day. “I can’t
access certain platforms. I would like for there to be a relaxation of
restrictions to the average Cuban citizen, like me,” he said.
García Cruz finally goes to bed at 3 a.m. after hours of
creative flurry in front of his computer. Just three hours later, Heredia is up
brewing coffee while she reaps the digital fruits of her Afro-Cuban startup.
Even with its tenuous connectivity, Havana never sleeps — the tech crew can
only imagine what full internet access might mean for their island’s future.
As
President Joe Biden considers what to do about Cuba, he should resist the
seductive delusion embraced by so many of his predecessors that just a little
more U.S. pressure will bend Cuba’s communist regime to Washington’s will.
Sixty years of history is evidence to the contrary.
This
delusion has a long pedigree. As relations deteriorated in 1960, U.S.
Ambassador Philip Bonsal made a pitch for one last attempt at reconciliation.
The terse reply from his boss, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann: “Our best bet is to wait for a successor
regime.”
Washington
has been waiting ever since. For decades, successive U.S. presidents have
convinced themselves that Cuba is on the brink of collapse and tougher sanctions
can push it over. Dwight Eisenhower thought that cutting off U.S. imports of
Cuban sugar would roll back the revolution before the end of his term in
office. John F. Kennedy thought the Bay
of Pigs and the CIA’s secret war would do the trick. Lyndon Johnson hoped
to strangle the Castro regime by recruiting Latin America and most of Europe to
join the U.S. embargo. Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to terrorist attacks by
Cuban exile groups, and Ronald Reagan ratcheted up economic sanctions and put
Cuba on the terrorism list—all to no avail.
Despite
repeated failures, Washington officials keep convincing themselves that the
policy of pressure will work if we just keep at it. When the Soviet Union
disintegrated, they were certain that Cuba would be the next communist domino. In
August 1993, the CIA
concluded, “There is a better than even chance that Fidel Castro’s
government will fall within the next few years.” The obvious implication: there
was no point in seeking reconciliation with an adversary about to collapse.
When the
Cuban regime survived that depression, the rationale shifted: Fidel Castro was
the linchpin holding the system together; when he died, the regime would die
with him. In 2006, Fidel fell ill and transferred power to his brother Raúl
Castro, leading Thomas
Shannon, assistant secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration,
to predict the regime’s imminent end. “Authoritarian regimes are like
helicopters. There are single fail point mechanisms,” he explained. “When an
authoritarian leader disappears from an authoritarian regime, the authoritarian
regime flounders…. That’s what we’re seeing at this moment.”
But the
transition from Fidel to Raúl went smoothly, necessitating the invention of yet
another rationale for U.S. policy—Venezuela. Cuba was supposedly so dependent
on cheap oil from Venezuela that when the inept regime of Nicolás Maduro
collapsed (as it surely would under U.S. pressure), the loss of oil would
cripple the Cuban economy and bring down the regime. Yet despite a fifty
percent decline in oil shipments over the past decade, the Cuban regime is
still standing.
Barack
Obama was the only president to say out loud what everyone else in the world
has known for years—the policy of hostility is an emperor with no clothes. In
announcing his new policy of engagement on December 17, 2014, Obama called
the old policy, “an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance
our interests.”
Supporters of U.S. sanctions are never at a loss for creativity, however.
They denounced Obama’s policy for failing to bring democracy to Cuba in the two
years before President Donald Trump repudiated it, while celebrating the
resumption of sanctions that have failed for sixty years. Their rationale: Cuba
is (again) on the brink of collapse. Supposedly, the economic impact of the
Covid-19 pandemic and the retirement of Raúl Castro (who turned out to be a much more
effective leader than U.S. pundits predicted) are the one-two punch that will
finally knock out communism in Cuba. If the past is any guide, the odds on this
are not good.
President Joe Biden supported Obama’s opening to Cuba and promised during the 2020 campaign to resume engagement. But early signals from administration officials indicate that an internal debate is underway between those who favor returning to Obama’s policy, and those who would continue the policy of pressure, leaving many of Trump’s sanctions in place. There may be domestic political gains to be had by maintaining the status quo, but no one should pretend it will produce anything positive as foreign policy. Meanwhile, the Cuban people are the ones suffering its effects, not the Cuban government.
An effective Cuba policy requires a realist mindset that recognizes, once and
for all, Washington’s inability to impose its will on Cuba. Policymakers need
to give up the illusion that sanctions will produce victory, and get about the
hard work of engaging with a regime that we may not like, but that is not going
away any time soon.
In this month’s Meet the Investigators, Barbara Maseda tells of the challenges of finding data and documents in Cuba, a country where journalists are threatened and harassed and where information is kept hidden away.
The
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists collaborates with
hundreds of members across the world. Each of these journalists is among the
best in his or her country and many have won national and global awards. Our
monthly series, Meet the Investigators, highlights the work of
these tireless journalists.
This
month we speak with reporter Barbara
Maseda, who is the director and founder of Proyecto
Inventario, an open data initiative that helps journalists to
find data and documents to support their reporting in Cuba, a country without transparency
policies and with very poor internet access. Barbara shares valuable insights
into what’s happening behind the “iron wall” that the regime has built around
itself, and tells us that even though authorities actively intimidate Cuban
journalists — even threatening their families — she believes it’s because the
government is afraid of the power of their reporting.
Sean
McGoey: Welcome back to the Meet the Investigators podcast from the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. I’m your host, Sean
McGoey, and I’m an editorial fellow here at ICIJ. This month, my guest is a
journalist whose mission is to ensure that vital information is actually
available to the public, even when the government tries to prevent that from
happening.
Barbara
Maseda: My name is Barbara Maseda. I’m a Cuban journalist. And I run a project
called Inventario that works with data and information that is very hard to
come by in a country as closed as Cuba.
McGoey:
Here’s the rest of my interview with Barbara Maseda. What made you want to
become an investigative journalist?
Maseda:
When you grow up in a country where everything is a secret, it’s not very hard
to want to uncover those types of truths that are not out there for you to get
to know. When you see what our peers are accomplishing in other parts of the
world, you wonder why you don’t have that in your country. And it makes you
want to have that for your country, for your people.
McGoey:
What are some of the challenges that journalists face trying to do their job in
Cuba?
Maseda:
What we had was this iron wall that was keeping the island completely isolated
in terms of information from the outside world. This absolute control that the
government used to have makes it very hard for journalists to have access to
the bread and butter of our profession — sources who are going to give you
information.
For
starters, independent journalism that is not controlled by the government is
illegal. You cannot register a news organization. You’re not going to be
acknowledged as a reporter who wants access to a source. And if you have a
whistleblower in another country, we do not have the culture or history or the
condition for the emergence of this particular type of individual, who is going
to give you access to something that you’re going to follow and turn into stories.
There are
other countries where authoritarian regimes have a very tight grip [on] many
things and treat journalists in a similar way. But I think that in the case of
Cuba, it’s that the system is very cohesive, and there are no cracks in that
system — or we’re starting to see some of those cracks now. It’s a problem that
I think has been changing in the last few years with the emergence of the
internet.
McGoey: So given those conditions
that you describe, what was it like to study journalism in a country that seems
to be fairly hostile to the profession?
Maseda: I
did my undergraduate degree at the University of Havana, [in] the school of
communication. So my degree officially says that I have a bachelor’s in
journalism from a Cuban university.
But — and
this happens a lot in the Cuban space — we have labels or terms that mean
something very different outside of Cuba. So when you go to the school of
journalism, you would expect the standard reporting skills that you learn
anywhere else. And what really happens is that nobody ever tells you that your
role as a journalist is to hold the Communist Party to account.
It’s the
contrary, actually. You are trained to be a watchdog, but for the interests of
the establishment. And if you never question any of that training, you’re gonna
keep doing something for the rest of your life that is labeled as journalism,
but that in practice is not working in the public interest — is not work that
is holding the powerful to account.
What many people do, is you go outside of the Cuban borders and you try to get some training, or you try to get inspired by the work of others. After you spend so much time isolated, getting exposed to that kind of work can be really powerful.
La
noticia anunciada por el Gobierno cubano de que la zafra apenas alcanzó 816.000 toneladas de azúcar
no constituye sorpresa alguna, sino la confirmación de que el sistema es la
estampa misma del fracaso. A esta noticia hay que agregar que seguramente el
azúcar comenzará a escasear en la Isla, como lo hacen ya una larga lista de
alimentos y productos ausentes no solo en las tiendas en moneda nacional, sino
también en las de divisas.
Lo peor
de todo es que difícilmente el Gobierno tenga recursos para importar el
déficit de azúcar que cubra la demanda interna del país. El régimen ha
convertido al que fuera el mayor productor de azúcar del mundo en un
país importador.
Sin duda,
una mala noticia para una población que siente los primeros embates de una
hambruna ya presente en decenas de miles de hogares.
Como
suele ser costumbre, el régimen ha achacado la baja productiva al embargo de
EEUU. Lo cierto es que apenas 38 centrales participaron en la zafra, lo
cual representa el 24.35% del total de los centrales azucareros confiscados en
1959. La cifra de producción alcanzada en 2021 es la menor lograda en más de
130 años.
El
vicepresidente de la empresa AZCUBAdijo al diario oficial Granma que los
pobres resultados alcanzados en la zafra del 2021 fueron consecuencia de
“la crisis económico-financiera y energética, acentuada por la
intensificación del bloqueo económico, comercial y financiero del Gobierno de
EEUU y los efectos de la pandemia de la COVID-19”.
Cuando en
1959 el Gobierno cubano se adueñó de la industria azucarera más poderosa
del mundo a punta de pistola, sin pagar un centavo a los dueños de los 161
ingenios azucareros que fueron confiscados, nadie imaginó que 62 años después,
dicha industria se fuera a convertir en un amasijo de chatarra incapaz de
alcanzar los valores de producción que se obtenían cuando las zafras se hacían
con trapiches.
Fidel
Castro no solo robó y arruinó una industria que era la más moderna en aquel
entonces, y la que más producía, sino que arruinó la vida y el futuro de
millones de cubanos y la economía de un país.
¿Cómo fue
posible esta galopante involución en el tiempo?
La
génesis de la debacle de la industria azucarera pasa por la combinación
de varios factores que han incidido en su desarrollo. En primer lugar, hay que
señalar el tema de la propiedad de la tierra y la organización empresarial que
rige la industria. En segundo lugar, la base legal, es decir, las leyes que hoy
dan soporte al desarrollo de esa industria en la Isla. Y en tercer lugar, la
falta de visión estratégica de quienes hoy dirigen la industria; en otras
palabras, la falta de visión estratégica del Gobierno.
Hace un
siglo Cuba era uno de los productores de azúcar más importantes en el
mercado internacional. Sin embargo, el mal desempeño de su industria azucarera
acumulado en los últimos 62 años de economía centralizada empujó al país a
convertirse en un mercado importador de azúcar.
En 2018, la
producción de azúcar en la Isla apenas llegó a 1.1 toneladas métricas.
Dicha cifra representó un 16.3% menos que la producción alcanzada en 1905. La producción
de 816.000 toneladas lograda en 2021 confirma claramente el impactante declive
de la industria.
Figura 1. Serie histórica de la producción de azúcar (TM), 1905-2021.
Fuente: Havana Consulting Group a
partir de los datos publicados por la Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas e
Información (ONEI).
Esta
figura nos muestra claramente la debacle en la que se ha sumido la industria
azucarera cubana en los últimos 30 años, desde que desaparecieron los
mercados de la URSS y el campo socialista de Europa del Este.
En 1958 el país tenía 161 centrales funcionando a toda máquina y una fuerte presencia de inversión extranjera, sobre todo norteamericana. Del total de centrales en activo, 36 pertenecían a empresas norteamericanas, 121 estaban en manos de empresarios privados cubanos, tres eran de españoles y uno de franceses.
