The International Republican Institute has produced its seventh survey of public opinion on the economic reforms, on future reforms and utilization of electronic media. A variety of interesting results emerge but there are no major shifts of opinion since the previous few surveys which are reviewed comparatively in the presentation.
The full presentation is available here: Enquesta IR Feb-Mar 2012
By Juan O. Tamayo; jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com May 30, 2012
Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has filed a notice with the Interior Ministry demanding to know why she’s not allowed to travel abroad, the latest in a string of daring legal challenges to the communist government.
Sánchez said the notice filed Wednesday asks Interior Minister Abelardo Colomé Ibarra to explain why the ministry office that is in charge of exit permits never answered her Nov. 18, 2010 request for the reasons behind the refusals.
Colomé Ibarra now has 60 days to respond to her complaint of “administrative silence,” Sanchez said. If he doesn’t, she will file a lawsuit against the minister seeking a court order that he must reply.
“Of course, I know what’s going to happen. But I want to maintain that innocence of having hope,” Sánchez added, referring to the high probability that her complaints will go nowhere in a country where the courts faithfully follow the government line.
Cubans who want to travel abroad require a government permit, known as a “White Card” and regularly denied to dissidents. It has turned down several Sánchez requests to travel abroad to receive prizes, attend conferences or for other reasons.
She has repeatedly asked for an explanation at the Interior Ministry’s Office for Immigration and Foreigners’ Affairs, but received none. Her notice Wednesday elevated her question to the minister’s office.
“It’s a step before a lawsuit,” she told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana. “It is a legal, juridical opportunity in the hands of citizens, which allow an appeal against Cuban authorities when the authorities have not responded to a petition.”
Her notice was the latest in a handful of bold attempts by dissidents and others to use Cuba’s legal system to challenge official actions. The courts have knocked down almost all the cases, including some filed against police.
But the Cuban Juridical Association is still fighting a three-year-old case seeking the legal recognition of the Justice Ministry as a group of lawyers that provides legal advice on a nonprofit basis, usually to government critics.
CJA chief Wilfredo Vallín, who also is advising Sánchez on her case, took the first step required to register the group in April 2009 by asking the Justice Ministry’s Registry of Associations to certify that no other group had registered the same name.
The registry never replied so the 1992 graduate of the University of Havana Law School elevated his request to Justice Minister María Esther Reus. When she didn’t reply, he filed suit under Cuba’s Law for Civil, Administrative and Labor Procedures.
To his surprise, a three-judge panel first officially accepted Vallín’s complaint, and then ordered Reus to appoint lawyers to defend her. Cuba’s highest court, the Supreme Tribunal found a technical fault with one of his filings last year but allowed the case to continue and later ordered the minister to reply to Vallín’s initial request.
The Justice Ministry certified last June that no other group was registered with the same name or purpose as the CJA, but earlier this year it rejected the CJA’s application for recognition on technical grounds. Vallín has vowed to appeal.
Ministry officials had never officially recognized any dissident group, making them illegal and therefore subject to sanctions for the crime of “illegal association.”
Cuba’s justice system argues that the role of the law is to promote stability and the development of a “socialist society.” Dissidents put on trial are almost always convicted.
Lawyers are required to work for the government or government-approved Collective Law Offices, where criminal defense attorneys can be hired. But lawyers who spend too much time defending dissidents are sometimes fired from the law offices.
Arch Ritter, Yoani Sanchez and Reinaldo Escobar, Havana April 2012
By Juan O. Tamayo, Miami Herald, Posted on Mon, May. 21, 2012
Combinado del Este
The Cuban government-owned enterprise Provari is known on the island for making everything from bricks and construction blocks to mattresses, tourist handicrafts and the insecticide Lomaté — I Killed It.
What is less well known is that the vast majority of its workers are prison inmates — what dissidents denounce as “slave laborers” who work with few safety protections and receive meager wages or are not paid at all.
Prison labor in Cuba is extensive yet “like the dark side of the moon, not well known at all,” said Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
A Provari business prospectus claimed it had 150 production facilities around the island in 2001. Sánchez said it operates in virtually all of the estimated 200 prisons and labor camps in Cuba.
Prison labor is common around the world. In the United States, prisoners make license plates, government furniture and much more. Florida state prisons require inmates to work unless they are exempt for medical or other reasons. Most earn nothing, and canteen workers, barbers and a few others get only $50 a month.
“There’s no objection in principle to companies managing factories in prisons,” said Andrew Coyle of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London. But inmates should have equal salaries and work conditions. “This should not be forced or slave labor.”
But Cuba is a dictatorship, Sánchez argued, where the communist government can do anything and keep it secret. That includes exploiting inmate workers at will and punishing anyone who complains.
He added that he was specially concerned about the safety conditions in prison factories and singled out the Lomaté insecticide, manufactured in Havana’s Combinado del Este and other prisons around the island.
Farm workers seldom get special clothing to protect them from chemicals, and cane cutters rarely get proper boots to protect their feet from their machetes, said Joel Brito, a former safety expert in the island’s lone labor union, the Cuban Workers’ Central.
The Interior Ministry (MININT) and Ministry of the Armed Forces, which own a large number of manufacturing and construction enterprises, do not report industrial accidents to the National Statistics Office, Brito noted.
“There are no protective measures because there’s always a shortage of money. And if that’s the case in the general economy, imagine what it’s like for prisoners,” added Brito, who now heads a Miami group that monitors labor abuses in Cuba.
Questions about prison labor in Cuba arose recently amid reports that the IKEA furniture chain and an East German firm had hired the Cuban state-owned company EMIAT to use prison labor to manufacture tables and sofas in 1987.
One Cuban business report says EMIAT imports supplies and commercializes products for government-owned companies, including Provari. EMIAT and Provari — Enterprise for Various Products — share a Havana address in some of the reports.
A man who answered the phone at Provari’s Havana office, asked if the company uses prison labor, said, “Yes, the work is by prisoners.” He also confirmed the firm is owned by MININT, which is in charge of prisons, but declined further comment.
A Cuban government radio report on Provari’s work last summer said it was established 20 years earlier “principally with the objective of offering work to prisoners … and integrating them into work useful for society.”
Many prisoners work for the chance at fresh air and perhaps better food, and to avoid having their records marked “refused to work,” which would dash any hope for an early release, said Luis Enrique Ferrer, a dissident who spent eight years in prison.
Authorities allow only common criminals to work, fearing that political prisoners would publicize the work conditions, he added. Ferrer, who did not work in prison, was freed in 2010 and now lives in Miami.
But dissidents and independent journalists in touch with prisoners have published several reports over the years alleging problems at Provari’s prison workshops.
Journalists Jorge Alberto Liriano Linares reported in 2010 that 16 inmates suffered serious accidents at a Provari factory for construction materials at the Kilo 8 prison in eastern Camaguey Province, where he served part of his own13-year sentence.
Inmates in “this killer factory” are forced to work without salary, clothes, shoes or gloves, he wrote for the news service Hablemos Press. They work 10 hours a day and handle toxic chemicals “and because of that they suffer respiratory and skin diseases.”
Brito’s International Group for Corporate Social Responsibility in Cuba reported in 2010 that a factory in Prison 1580 near Havana was forcing inmates to work up to 12 hours a day making construction blocks and seldom paying the promised $10 a month.
Its 2009 annual report included complaints that inmates at the Nieves Morejón prison in Sancti Spiritus were paid a mere $2 per month, and that prisoners in Boniato in eastern Cuba were paid $1 per month — plus a promised bonus that was never paid.
Dissident Felix Reyes reported last year that prisoners at the Canaleta prison in eastern Ciego de Avila had complained that the gloves bought for them by the Provari factory there “were rotted and were missing fingers.”
Independent journalist Dania Virgen Garcia, who has written often about prison conditions, told El Nuevo Herald that she knew of prisoners who worked up to 16 hours a day, six days a week, and were paid nothing.
Sanchez and Ferrer said most of the overall prison labor in Cuba involves agricultural work like weeding fields, harvesting vegetables and picking fruit — some for sale, some for the prisons’ own consumption.
Provari uses the prison labor more for manufacturing, said Sánchez and García. It also has subsidiaries that build roads and government buildings, although it is not clear if they use prison labor.
A report last year in the government’s Guerrillero newspaper noted that the Provari branch in the western province of Pinar del Rio had the equivalent of $200,000 worth of sales in 2010, “mostly for products sold locally rather than export.”
The branch’s production included bleach and muriatic acid, beach chairs, cribs and playpens, clay and concrete construction blocks, paint and paint brushes, plastic tubes and ornamental plants, according to the report.
A large shop in a Havana women’s prison sews jeans for export under several brand names, as well as uniforms for the police and the military, García said. Sánchez said the Boniato prison, where he spent time in the 1990s, makes metal chain link fencing.
Other Cuban news reports noted that a Provari unit in eastern Ciego de Avila made 20,000 plastic molds, and that the enterprise and the Ministry of Construction were to provide the materials for a 2010 campaign to step up home construction.
The company also manufactures the Lomaté insecticide as well as lice and tick killers “and other products “for sanitary hygiene,” and was planning to build a 170-liter solar water heater, according to other media reports.
A business prospectus issued in 2001 listed some of Provari’s activities as carpentry using precious woods as well as textiles sold under the OESTE and HERCULES brands and the upholstery of office furniture sold under the brand name of OFIMAX.
The prospectus also said the enterprise was ready to do business “with foreign and national companies,” though the deal with IKEA appeared to have run into trouble.
The first sofas made for IKEA in 1988 reportedly had “quality problems,” and it was not clear if any part of the deal was ever carried out.
Luis Felipe Rojas
For Cuban journalist and blogger Luis Felipe Rojas, posting an entry on his blog Crossing the Wire Fences or even sending an email is a daunting task.
Every time he wants to access the internet, he has to leave his house in the early hours of the morning and travel 200 kilometres from his hometown of Holguín, in eastern Cuba, to the closest cybercafé. If he is lucky, and he is not stopped at a police checkpoint on the way, he will get to a computer in about three hours.
Once there, Luis Felipe has to show ID to buy an access card and pay six US dollars to use the internet for sixty minutes – that is almost a third of a monthly local salary.
Some days he finds websites containing information considered critical of the government are blocked or messages have disappeared from his inbox.
Internet access is so highly controlled in Cuba that critics of the government have come up with creative ways to ensure their stories get out.
Sometimes that involves converting articles into digital images and sending them via SMS to a contact outside of Cuba, to type and post on Luis Felipe’s blog. He also uses text messages for posting on Twitter but the lack of internet access means that he cannot see what others say to (or about) him.
Luis Felipe is part of a growing group of journalists and government critics who are finding new ways to by-pass state control in order to disseminate information about human rights abuses taking place in Cuba.
According to a recent report by Amnesty International, independent journalists and bloggers have faced increased threats and intimidation when publishing information critical to the authorities.
The ‘Hablemos Press’ Information Centre, an unofficial news agency monitoring human rights abuses across Cuba, recently reported that from March 2011 to March 2012 inclusively, more than 75 independent journalists have been detained, some, like Caridad Caballero Batista up to 20 times.
“After the mass release of prisoners of conscience in 2011, we have seen authorities sharpening their strategy to silence dissent by harassing government critics and independent journalists with short term detentions and public acts of repudiation,” said Gerardo Ducos, Cuba expert with Amnesty International.
On 25 March, Luis Felipe was detained in a local police station for five days in order to prevent him from travelling to attend an open-air mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI.
“The authorities attack us because we talk about the issues people face – that not everybody has enough food, that public services do not always work, that there are problems with the health service,” Luis Felipe said to Amesty International.
“I have been scared many times. Scared of going to the street, of being beaten up, of being locked up for a long time and not seeing my children. But fear does not stop me. I do not think a tweet from me is going to save anybody from prison but it does save them from impunity.”
May 2, 2012 Wednesday 6:56 AM GMT
After 50 years, Cubans hope to travel freely
BYLINE: By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press
DATELINE: HAVANA
After controlling the comings and goings of its people for five decades, communist Cuba appears on the verge of a momentous decision to lift many travel restrictions. One senior official says a “radical and profound” change is weeks away.
The comment by Parliament Chief Ricardo Alarcon has residents, exiles and policymakers abuzz with speculation that the much-hated exit visa could be a thing of the past, even if Raul Castro’s government continues to limit the travel of doctors, scientists, military personnel and others in sensitive roles to prevent a brain drain.
Other top Cuban officials have cautioned against over-excitement, leaving islanders and Cuba experts to wonder how far Havana’s leaders are willing to go.
In the past 18 months, Castro has removed prohibitions on some private enterprise, legalized real estate and car sales, and allowed compatriots to hire employees, ideas that were long anathema to the government’s Marxist underpinnings.
Scrapping travel controls could be an even bigger step, at least symbolically, and carries enormous economic, social and political risk.
Even half measures such as ending limits on how long Cubans can live abroad or cutting the staggeringly high fees for the exit visa that Cubans must obtain just to leave the country would be significant.
“It would be a big step forward,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the Virginia-based Lexington Institute. “If Cuba ends the restrictions on its own citizens’ travel, that means the only travel restrictions that would remain in place would be those the United States imposes on its citizens.”
The move would open the door to increased emigration and make it easier for Cubans overseas to avoid forfeiting their residency rights, a fate that has befallen waves of exiles since the 1959 revolution.
It could also bolster the number of Cubans who travel abroad for work, increasing earnings sent home in the short term and, ultimately, investment by a new moneyed class.
Scrapping exit controls should win Cuba support in Europe, which improved ties after dozens of political prisoners were freed in 2010.
But Peters and several other analysts said they doubt the new rules would bring about any immediate shift in U.S. policy toward Cuba, which includes a ban on American tourism. Those restrictions are entrenched and enjoy the backing of powerful Cuban American exiles.
“I don’t think it would lead to a drastic change in U.S. policy, but an accumulation of human rights improvements could lead to an incremental change,”
Peters said.
Cuba-born Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, said any discussion about immigration reform on the island is a peripheral issue.
“The kind of changes I’m interested in are not about immigration,” said Ros-Lehtinen, who heads the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “I’m interested in changes that affect fundamental freedom, democracy and respect for human rights.”
U.S. officials said they have been watching for an announcement for months, noting there has been such talk as far back as August. But nothing has happened, and they are skeptical that the Castro regime is truly committed to such reform.
Asked about possible reciprocal measures, one U.S. official said the Obama administration can’t promise anything because it doesn’t know what exactly Cuba plans to announce. The official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and demanded anonymity.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. “would certainly welcome greater freedom of movement for the Cuban public.”
Rumors of the exit visa’s imminent demise have circulated on and off for years.
The whispers became open chatter last spring after the Communist Party endorsed migration reform at a crucial gathering. But Castro dashed those hopes in December, saying the timing wasn’t right and the “fate of the revolution” was at stake.
Alarcon’s comments, made in an interview published in April, revived hopes that a bold move is coming.
“One of the questions that we are currently discussing at the highest level of the government is the question of emigration,” he told a French journalist. “We are working toward a radical and profound reform of emigration that in the months to come will eliminate this kind of restriction.”
But on Saturday, Vice Foreign Minister Dagoberto Rodriguez told exiles not to set their hopes too high, vowing the government would maintain some travel controls as long as it faced a threat from enemies in Washington.
Havana residents say they are anxiously waiting to see what the government does.
“The time has come to get rid of the exit visa,” said Vivian Delgado, a shop worker. “It’s absurd that as a Cuban I must get permission to leave my country, and even worse that I need permission to come back.”
Added Domingo Blanco, a 24-year-old state office worker: “It’s as if one needed to ask to leave one’s own house.”
Many Cubans are reluctant to talk about their own experience with the exit visa.
One woman named Miru, who has been trying to leave Cuba since 2006, shared her story on the condition her full name not be used for fear that speaking with a foreign journalist could land her in trouble.
“This has been a very long process,” she said of her odyssey, which began when her husband defected from a medical mission in Africa and sought asylum in the U.S.
First, she had to get a letter releasing her from her job at a government ministry a process that took five years. Only then could she apply for the exit visa. That was three months ago, and Miru still hasn’t received an answer.
Officials say her case is complicated but won’t give a specific reason for the delay.
“I am very anxious to see my husband again,” she said.
The exit controls are a Cold War legacy of Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union. They were instituted in December 1961 to fight brain drain as hundreds of thousands of doctors and other professionals fled, many for new lives in Florida. That was three months before the U.S. embargo barring most trade with the island went into full effect.
Over the years, it has become much easier for Cubans to obtain permission to travel, though many are still denied, and it is particularly hard to take children out of the country.
Also, the exit visa’s $150 price tag is a small fortune in a country where salaries average about $20 a month. In addition, the person the traveler wishes to visit must pay $200 at a Cuban consulate.
Those who leave get only a 30-day pass, and the cost of an extension varies by country. In the U.S., the fee is $130 a month. Those who stay abroad more than
11 months lose the right to reside in Cuba. Before 2011, any property would automatically go to the state.
“The Cuban government has monetized every part of the humiliating process of coming and going,” said Ann Louise Bardach, a longtime Cuba expert and author of “Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington.” “Getting out means running a gantlet, and it is all based on how much humiliation you can endure, and by the time they end up in Miami, people are filled with hate and dreams of revenge.”
Cuban officials have long portrayed the measures as necessary to counter Washington’s meddling. They accuse the U.S. of trying to lure away doctors by letting them walk into any American consulate and request asylum.
Cuban officials say even ordinary islanders are encouraged to leave by U.S.
regulations that automatically grant asylum to any who reach American shores, a policy Cuba says has encouraged thousands to attempt the dangerous trip on leaky boats and makeshift rafts across the Florida Straits.
It’s not clear how emigration reform will affect dissidents, who are routinely denied permission to leave and could still find themselves on some form of no-exit list.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece, dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez called the exit controls “our own Berlin Wall without the concrete … a wall made of paperwork and stamps, overseen by the grim stares of soldiers.” She has been denied travel papers at least 19 times by her own count.
Some hardliners in Florida predict any change will be merely a sleight of hand designed to export malcontents, ease a severe housing shortage and fob off legions of superfluous state workers.
But for hundreds of thousands of Cubans like Miru, the exit visa is a personal matter, not political. After six years separated from her husband, she clings to hope that she will finally obtain permission or benefit from a change in the law.
“I have followed all the rules of my country,” she said. “I’ll be so happy to leave.”
Associated Press writers Andrea Rodriguez and Peter Orsi in Havana, Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami, and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.
Follow Paul Haven on Twitter: www.twitter.com/paulhaven
Article printed from Generation Y: http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy
At times with good intentions – other times with not so good – someone tries to silence my complaints about the machismo in my country, telling me, “Cuban women don’t have it so badly… those in some African nations, where they are subjected to ablation, are worse off.” As an argument it’s a low blow, it hurts me in the groin, connects me to the cry of a defenseless teenager, mutilated, subjected to that ordeal by her own family. But the rights of women should not be reduced only to the power to maintain their physical integrity and to defend their biological capacity to experience pleasure. The clitoris is not the only thing we can lose, there is a long list of social, economic and political possibilities, which are also snatched from us.
As I live in a country where the paths of civic protest have been severed and demonized, I dare to offer in this blog a list of the violations that still persist against women.
In short, we want to have a clitoris and rights, to feel pleasure and to speak our opinions, to be known for our skirts, but especially for our ideas.
Family, Photo by Arch Ritter
Miriam Celaya, Citizen Journalist
By Arch Ritter
Since the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution, virtually all shades of opposition were perceived by President Fidel Castro as treasonous. Unfortunately the United States provided a handy pretext, fully exploited by Fidel, to characterize all opposition as treacherous support for the overthrow of the regime and the reversal of the “Revolution”. Divergent views competing with Fidel’s super-monopolistic visions, ideas, arguments, and conclusions were considered to be counter-revolutionary. Anyone holding these views was to be silenced, shunned, fired from any responsible job, incarcerated or squeezed into emigration. Ultimately, the expression of strong oppositional views led one to being labeled by the power of the monopoly media and political regime as a “gusano” or “worm”. Such de-humanization of citizens was truly despicable.
For a while I thought that the Government of Raul Castro had softened its stance on internal dissent. The “Bloggers” for example had not been imprisoned, though they were vilified and harassed. Within academia, some analysts such as Esteban Morales Domínguez had pushed the limits but avoided severe penalty. However, repressive actions have been building up in the last few years, leading to the preventative week-end arrests of some 100 political dissidents (Tamayo, 27 february 2012 ), and the attack in the media of some of the citizen journalists who publish their views through “Blogs.”
In the words of Yoani Sanchez in a recent essay “Some Yes, Others N0” regarding attacks on some bloggers:
….. Suddenly I see a photo in which the blogger Miriam Celaya and other acquaintances appear, surrounded with epithets such as “mercenaries” and “traitors.” The reason was their participation in a workshop on digital media, held at the home of an official from the United States Interest Section. ……. Whenever something like this happens, I wonder why the Cuban government keeps open a representation of the United States on the Island if — as they say — it is a “nest of provocation.” The answer is contained within the question itself: they would not be able to govern without putting the blame for the growing discontent on someone else. …..
Even more surprising, the next day … I see images of Raul Castro meeting with two important United States senators. But in his case they do not present him as a “traitor” or a “worm,” but as the First Secretary of the Communist Party. I know that many will try to explain to me that “he can because he is a leader.” In response to which, allow me to remind them, the president of a nation is just a public servant, he cannot engage in an action that is prohibited or demonized to his fellow citizens. If he is empowered to do it, why is Miriam Celaya not. Why not invite this woman, an anthropologist and magnificent citizen journalist who was born in 1959, the year of the Revolution itself, to some public center to relate her experience in working in the digital press, rather than relegate her to some locale provided to her by “others.”
In time, Cuba will accept one institution of the Westminster political system, namely the concept and reality of a “Loyal Opposition.” “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” provides the indispensable functions of open criticism which is necessary everywhere to prevent stupid mistakes, to correct errors as soon as possible, and to check the unfortunate human tendencies towards arrogance, corruption, political monopoly and domination. When an old regime becomes victim of self-importance, sclerosis, irrelevance, and intellectual exhaustion, the “Loyal Opposition” which in effect is the “government in waiting” is ready to provide a new team with a new vision, fresh ideas and renewed energy.
The Government of Raul Castro obviously is not yet ready to permit a loyal opposition to emerge. It is certainly easier to govern without having to face criticism or opposition. But whether Raul’s regime likes it or not, an opposition exists though tightly repressed, and it is gradually strengthening. If Raul Castro were truly interested in the long term health of Cuba, he himself would make moves towards such political pluralism. Unfortunately, he is unlikely to willingly abandon his monopoly of power.
Commentary from Miriam Celaya, from her an essay entitled “Declaration of Principles” in her Blog Sin Evasion:
A government that feels it must harass dissidents so openly must be afraid. After this new media attack I just have to reaffirm publicly my position in a declaration of principles: in my capacity as a free citizen I claim the right to attend the events I myself decide of my own free will, without asking permission of the government; I do not receive financing or a salary from any government, including Cuba’s, and I refuse to abandon these principles under any circumstances; I am the absolute owner of my actions and my ideas and I am willing to vouch for them; I also publish and will publish my work and my ideas wherever I see fit. The gentlemen farmers should come to understand that not all Cubans are slaves on their endowment. Number 59100900595, my official inscription number in this island prison, was freed years ago by my own will and conviction. I would rather die than return to the irons.
President Raul Castro with U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, left, a Democrat from Vermont, as U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, behind right, watches in Havana, Cuba, Thursday Feb. 23, 2012.
No surprises here. Once again, Cuba unfortunately comes last in the Hemisphere in a ranking regarding human rights. In this case. Reporters without Borders annual Freedom of the Press Report for 2011 comes to the conclusion that observers of Cuba are familiar with, namely that freedom of expression in Cuba exists only in the minds of the members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.
The full report can be found here: Reporters without Borders, Press Freedom Index, 2011-2012. The Website for the Report is here: http://en.rsf.org/. The Reporters without Borders coverage on Cuba is here: Cuba Page.
Below is a quick summary of the methodology used by RWB for the calculation of its index.
“The ranking reflects the situation during a specific period. This year’s index takes account of events between 1 December 2010 and 30 November 2011. It does not look at human rights violations in general, just press freedom violations.
To compile this index, Reporters Without Borders prepared a questionnaire with 44 main criteria indicative of the state of press freedom. It asks questions about every kind of violation directly affecting journalists and netizens (including murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment). And it establishes the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these press freedom violations. It also measures the level of self-censorship in each country and the ability of the media to investigate and criticize. Financial pressure, which is increasingly common, is also assessed and incorporated into the final score.
The questionnaire takes account of the legal framework for the media (including penalties for press offences, the existence of a state monopoly for certain kinds of media and how the media are regulated) and the level of independence of the public media. It also reflects violations of the free flow of information on the Internet.
Reporters Without Borders has taken account not only of abuses attributable to the state, but also those by armed militias, clandestine organizations and pressure groups.”
Rousseff Offers Closer Economic Ties, Reflecting Nation’s Bid for Greater Regional Leadership; Human Rights Remain Issue
Wall St. Journal, 1 February 2012
SÃO PAULO, Brazil—President Dilma Rousseff offered closer economic cooperation to Cuba during a visit to the communist island on Tuesday, marking Brazil’s highest-profile bid to transform its growing economic might into diplomatic leadership in Latin America.
Brazil’s state development bank is financing a $680 million rehabilitation of Cuba’s port at Mariel. Work on the port is being managed by the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht SA, which may also provide support for Cuba’s sugar industry, Brazilian officials have said.
Cuban President Raúl Castro, left, and his Brazilian counterpart, Dilma Rousseff, review the honor guard at Revolution Palace in Havana on Tuesday.
Ms. Rousseff’s closer engagement of Cuba—she is visiting the island before a trip to the White House— is the latest example of Brazil’s strategy to expand its regional influence by offering subsidized loans to poorer nations. In recent years, Brazil has disbursed tens of billions of dollars around Latin America, and as far away as Africa.
But none of these efforts have the same symbolic resonance as in Cuba, which has opposed the U.S. since shortly after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution and remains a lightning rod in U.S. domestic politics and a sticking point for U.S. relations with other Latin nations.
“This is about growing Brazil’s soft power on the international scale and raising Brazil’s role in the world,” said Matthew Taylor, a Brazil specialist at the American University’s School of International Service. “Brazil is taking on a bigger role in the hemisphere in terms of aid and finance, and by helping out Cuba they really draw attention to this new role they are playing.”
Although the U.S. has been the predominant power broker in Latin America since the introduction of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, experts say the U.S. doesn’t oppose Brazil’s bid for regional influence. Many analysts say they believe Brazil could become a stabilizing force in a region known for political and economic volatility.
In Cuba, for example, Brazil may provide a more moderate alternative to the impoverished island’s main economic benefactor, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Mr. Chávez, a self-described foe of the U.S., delivers some 100,000 barrels of oil and refined products to Cuba a day in exchange for the services of Cuban doctors for Venezuelans in poor neighborhoods, along with other barter arrangements.
Cuba, meanwhile, is desperate for economic lifelines. Raúl Castro, who has taken over the presidency from his ailing brother Fidel, has experimented with limited economic overhauls in order to bring life into a moribund economy, where citizens are still issued ration books that allow them access to some basic foods at subsidized prices.
“The more normal Cuba’s economic relations are, the easier normalization with the U.S. will be in the future,” said Archibald Ritter, an expert on the Cuban economy at Canada’s Carleton University.
“I would imagine that the U.S. would privately hope that Brazil will play a mediating role in issues that concern us, like human rights,” said Cynthia Arnson, the director of the Latin American program at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Still, during Tuesday’s visit, Ms. Rousseff criticized the existence of the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, where terror suspects are held, and the U.S. trade embargo, which she said contributes to poverty on the island.
And it is unclear how far Ms. Rousseff might go to nudge Cuba toward a more democratic society. She declined requests for meetings by Cuban dissidents, and has said she won’t press the Castro brothers on the island’s human-rights record.
“Human rights aren’t a stone to be thrown from one side to another,” she said in Havana on Tuesday. This week, Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said human rights aren’t an “emergency” issue in Cuba. Last month, Cuban political prisoner Wilmar Villar died in jail after a 50-day hunger strike. Activists said he was protesting being jailed for taking part in a political demonstration. The Cuban government has said Mr. Villar was a common prisoner and wasn’t on a hunger strike when he died of complications from pneumonia.
As a young woman, Ms. Rousseff participated in a Marxist guerrilla group in Brazil that was inspired by the Cuban revolution. But the fact that she was jailed and tortured by Brazil’s military dictatorship had raised hopes that she might be more sympathetic to the plight of political prisoners than her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who over the years disparaged Cuban hunger strikers.
Observers said the case of Yoani Sánchez, a Cuban blogger who criticizes the Castro regime, may offer clues to changes in Brazilian human-rights policy. Brazil granted Ms. Sánchez a visa, and observers said if Cuba allows her to visit, then Ms. Rousseff may be using engagement to yield some human-rights advances.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Ms. Sánchez said she hoped Ms. Rousseff would meet with human-rights activists in Cuba and in so doing keep faith with “the many voices of democracy rather than opt for a complicit silence before a dictatorship.”
For generations, Brazilian leaders have yearned for prominence in foreign affairs commensurate with its population of 190 million and sprawling geography. The country has lobbied, unsuccessfully, for decades for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Such aspirations were the butt of jokes during generations of economic and political turmoil. That started to change a nearly a decade ago, when Brazil began an economic expansion that lifted millions out of poverty and transformed the resource-rich nation into what some economists estimate is the world’s sixth-largest economy—a notch ahead of the U.K.
Bloomberg; 30 January 2012
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was inspired by Cuba’s revolution to take up arms against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, is making the two-day visit to Havana as Castro takes steps to ease state control of the economy.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was inspired by Cuba’s revolution to take up arms against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, is making the two-day visit to Havana as Castro takes steps to ease state control of the economy. Photographer: Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will meet today with her Cuban counterpart, Raul Castro, to promise more trade and investment as human rights issues intrude on her first state visit to the communist island.
Rousseff, who was inspired by Cuba’s revolution to take up arms against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, is making the two-day visit to Havana as Castro takes steps to ease state control of the economy. Tomorrow she’ll travel to Haiti, where Brazil is leading a United Nations peacekeeping force.
Dilma Rousseff befor a military court, 1970
The death this month of jailed dissident Wilman Villar after a 50-day hunger strike has drawn attention in Brazil’s media to Castro’s rights record and the government’s refusal to criticize it. While Rousseff has so far ignored requests for a meeting from pro-democracy activists, her government last week granted a tourist visa to Yoani Sanchez after the Cuban blogger invoked the president’s experience surviving prison and torture in an appeal to be allowed to leave the island.
“Rousseff is going to be in a very awkward situation by choice,” former Brazilian Foreign Minister Luiz Felipe Lampreia said in a phone interview from Rio de Janeiro. “She didn’t have to go to Cuba.”
Rousseff vowed to make human rights a priority of her foreign policy, and in condemning abuses in Iran distanced herself from the policies of her predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Urged on by his Workers’ Party, some of whose leaders were exiled in Cuba, Lula refused to criticize Fidel Castro or his brother’s government while in power from 2003 to 2010. Following a visit in 2010, which coincided with the death of another hunger striker, the former union leader compared the country’s dissidents to “criminals” in Sao Paulo jails.
While Rousseff, 64, is unlikely to address Cuba’s human rights situation publicly, she’s able to talk productively to Castro about his government’s record behind the scenes, said Julia Sweig, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.
“There won’t be the kind of back-slapping that we saw when Lula was there,” said Sweig, who is the author of several publications on Brazil and Cuba. “Precisely because of Dilma’s history and her explicit sensitivity to human rights I think she is well positioned for political dialogue.”
Cuba’s government relies on beatings, short-term detentions, forced exile and travel restrictions to repress virtually all forms of political dissent, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report this month. Cuba denies it’s holding any political prisoners and considers dissident activity to be counterrevolutionary.
In the run-up to Rousseff’s arrival, Brazilian newspapers published almost-daily interviews with Sanchez and activists from groups including the Ladies in White, in which they called for a meeting with the president’s delegation.
Any such requests will be studied by Brazil’s Embassy in Havana, the foreign ministry said in a statement. Rousseff’s agenda doesn’t include any meetings with activists, and underscoring the commercial nature of the visit, her human rights minister is not among the cabinet officials and business leaders making up her delegation.
Cuba’s rights record won’t necessarily improve if Rousseff speaks out, Brazil’s Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said.
“There doesn’t appear to be an emergency in Cuba,” Patriota said Jan. 27 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There are other situations that are very worrisome, including Guantanamo,” he said, referring to the U.S. detention camp for suspected terrorists on Cuba’s southeastern tip.
While Cuba isn’t among Brazil’s 30-biggest commercial partners, trade between the two countries has been expanding at a 30 percent annual pace since 2006, reaching $642 million last year, according to Brazil’s Foreign Ministry. Together with China and Venezuela, which provides the country with subsidized oil, Brazil has emerged as one of Cuba’s biggest foreign investors.
Rousseff will visit today the deepwater port at Mariel, which is undergoing a nearly $1 billion renovation led by Odebrecht SA with funding from the Brazil’s state development bank. The Salvador, Brazil-based construction and raw materials conglomerate said yesterday that it will also sign an agreement to expand a sugar-cane mill operated by state-controlled Azcuba.
Brazil’s role in helping Cuba create jobs, contrasting with longstanding hostility from the U.S., reinforces positive, albeit slow-paced changes taking place on the island of 11.2 million under Castro, said Sweig.
Since the 85-year-old Castro began handing power to his brother in 2006, the former defense minister has taken steps to open up the economy, which placed 177 out of 179 countries, ahead of only Zimbabwe and North Korea, in a ranking this month of economic freedom by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
For the first time in a half-century, Cubans can now buy and sell property and cars. After the 80-year-old Raul Castro began slashing state payrolls with a goal of eliminating 500,000 jobs, they’re able to seek self-employment as janitors and taxi drivers.
The overhaul comes amid declines in tourism and the price of nickel, the country’s biggest export, caused by a global economy whose prospects for recovery have dimmed, according to International Monetary Fund projections. The government expects Cuba’s gross domestic product to expand 2.7 percent this year, below the IMF’s 3.6 percent forecast for Latin America and the Caribbean region.
Political change has been slower. Speaking at a Communist Party summit on Jan. 29, Castro vowed to maintain single-party rule, adding that multi-party democracy would buoy U.S. “imperialism” in Cuba.
Still, the government last year freed the remaining 12 political prisoners that made up the so-called Group of 75 journalists and rights activists who were jailed during a 2003 crackdown. The Roman Catholic Church helped negotiate the release, and Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit the once anti-clerical island in March.
The 36-year-old Sanchez, a critic of Castro’s government on a blog called Generation Y, referred to Rousseff’s persecution by Brazil’s 1964-1985 dictatorship in her appeal for a visa to attend a screening in Salvador of a documentary she appears in. Sanchez has been blocked from traveling abroad for the past four years.
“I saw a photo of young Dilma, sitting on a bench blindfolded as men accused her,” Sanchez wrote Jan. 24 on Twitter. “I feel that way right now
Yoani Sanchez
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