"A call to dialogue"

Palabra Nueva published an interesting interview with Cardinal Jaime Ortega last week; the text is here (pdf), AP’s coverage is here, and Cuban Colada translated excerpts here.

At the Havana Note, Tom Garofalo wrote a very useful explanation of the meaning behind some of the terms the Cardinal used when he expressed his desire for dialogue in the interest of the common good of the Cuban nation.

Cardinal Ortega focused mainly on the situation inside Cuba, discussing Cuba’s sharp economic difficulties, and stating his view that there is basically a “kind of national consensus” on changes that are urgently needed to address them.

He is not swooning over President Obama. He makes a modest assessment of the new President’s actions toward Cuba, saying that “important steps were taken that modified some counterproductive measures imposed by the previous Administration.” But when it comes to dialogue, he said:

“…with time the campaign proposal was changed. The old policy prevailed again: to begin at the end. I am convinced that the first step should be to meet and talk and, as the dialogue advances, steps could be taken to improve difficult situations or to overcome the most critical points.”

In other words, President Obama has it backwards.

And Cardinal Ortega gives the issue of U.S.-Cuba dialogue more importance than one might guess.

The remarks cited above came in response to this question: “Do you truly believe that the conflict with the United States affects the lives of Cubans in a decisive way?” His answer began, “I believe a Cuba-United States dialogue would be the first step needed to break the critical circle in which we find ourselves.” That sounds as if he’s saying that the state of Cuba’s relationship with the United States affects the country’s internal dynamics. He wouldn’t be the first Cuban to express that opinion, but it would be interesting to know why he thinks that is the case.

Finally, the Cardinal described the coverage of Orlando Zapata’s death as a “war of words of the communications media of the United States, Spain, and others.” He went on to say that the coverage constituted “a form of media violence” to which the government reacted “in its own way.” I understand and support the Cardinal’s idea that dialogue all around would be a good idea. But news is news, and coverage of it isn’t “violence.”

House hearing today

The House Ways and Means Committee’s Trade Subcommittee holds a hearing this morning on U.S. policy toward Cuba. The announcement includes the witness list and a link for public submissions for the record.

Odds and ends

• “I am living my dream,” says former Cuban player Leslie Anderson, now signed by the Tampa Bay Rays, in this profile by St. Petersburg Times columnist John Romano. Anderson is in training and could make his way through the minors and join the Rays later this year. And the Red Sox are in the process of signing a 23-year-old catcher, Adalberto Ibarra of Camaguey, and putting him into their farm system; Globe story here.

• Herald: Sentencing for Cuban agents Walter and Gwendolyn Myers is set for July 16. They appeared in court and prosecutors say they have had 50 to 60 meetings with U.S. officials to explain how they worked.

• The Texas Tribune on hopes for increased trade for the state and the port of Houston.

Quotable

“The embargo…which is opposed by the whole world is a stupidity…and serves as an excuse for castrismo to justify the failure of a hallucinatory system, full of administrative inefficiencies and political brutality. Nonetheless, in Miami it is defended tooth and nail, perhaps because many persist in the idea that a settling of scores is more important than liberty in Cuba.”

– Former political prisoner Nicolas Perez Diaz-Arguelles, in an El Nuevo Herald op-ed in which he also says, “To dialogue with the Castros is to imagine that oranges can grow on a ceiba tree,” and refers to Cardinal Ortega as “hypocritical and always wrong.” (Translation mine.)

Odds and ends

• AP on the very slow development of golf courses in Cuba.

• Posada Carriles’ trial has been delayed again but as Tracey Eaton points out, there’s plenty of time before the guy turns 90.

• Also from Tracey Eaton: notes on the state security agents that posed as dissidents until they unmasked themselves in 2003, following the arrest of the 75. Eaton has photos of two whom he interviewed.

• The Herald’s Alfonso Chardy on the Reagan-era agreement that allows some of those who came to the United States from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift to be sent back, including the story of one Cuban American who met that fate.

• The Guardian on the impact and high cost of mobile telephony in Cuba.

• Granma on efforts to produce the farm tools needed by all the new farmers who received land grants in the past year.

• No one knows the timing but serious economic change could come soon in Cuba, the political counselor in the U.S. Interests Section says. Cuban Colada translates parts of an article published in Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Dia.

Obama Administration's first Cuba policy address?

CSI Havana

Thinking of the experience of USAID detainee Alan Gross in the Havana airport, a reader sent me this video of a Cuban television program that depicts some of the screening and surveillance at Jose Marti International. You can draw your own conclusions.

The program, Tras la Huella (“Following the Footprints”), is a crimestoppers show, each episode showing uniformed and plainclothes personnel of the police and Interior Ministry solving one crime. It’s easy to find episodes on YouTube by searching the program’s name, or “tras la hueya” as some posters have spelled it.

Odds and ends

• The Herald has a terrific report on Humberto Rios, a Cuban who won a prize for innovating and spreading organic farming techniques. He accepted the award in San Francisco, but it’s not clear if his $150,000 in prize money can be wired to him.

• The Economist looks coolly, and former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda a little less so, at la coyuntura.

• Cubaencuentro: Arturo Lopez Levy looks at the exchange between Carlos Alberto Montaner and Silvio Rodriguez and finds Montaner’s “laundry-list” approach wanting.

• TIME: A look back at the Elian Gonzalez saga, ten years later.

• LA Times: Casa Don Rolando, a restaurant well worth visiting.

• Livan teaches us: old guys can still play.

• Europa Press: A Spanish official visits Cuba and gets assurances that 23 million Euros owed to companies from Asturias will be paid. Payments to these and other companies were frozen last year.

• Another hunger strike has begun, this one by Yamil Dominguez, a Cuban American with U.S. citizenship who is in Cuban prison. According to CubaNet and Spain’s El Mundo, he was convicted in 2007 of offenses related to alien smuggling, but he claims that he only took his yacht to Cuba because a storm forced him off his Miami-Cancun course. Dominguez’ demand is for his own freedom.

• Progreso Weekly translates the article (cited earlier here) by Cuban historian Esteban Morales about corruption.

Etecsa charges less, hopes to earn more

“Although cellular phone rates are still high for most people,” a Granma report begins, the Cuban phone monopoly Etecsa is cutting rates “with the objective of increasing access to these services and the traffic of phone calls on the network.”

Here’s the deal: per-minute rates for calls on prepaid cell phone accounts will be 0.45 convertible pesos (which I believe is unchanged from the current rate), except for 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., when a 0.10 convertible peso rate will apply. Also, international long distance rates will fall for both cellular and fixed-line accounts; rates will be 42 percent to 75 percent lower. Calls to the western hemisphere will now cost 1.60 convertible pesos per minute except for the United States (1.845) and Venezuela (1.40), and calls to the rest of the world will be 1.80 per minute.

Also, a “calling party pays” scheme will be introduced. Now, both parties to a call pay 0.45 per minute. Now, a caller will be able to signal the other party that he will pay all the charges for the call, so it will cost nothing for the other party to answer. There will also be a way for the person receiving the call to pay all the charges. In either case, the charge will be 0.60 per minute.

Other information from a press conference with communications ministry official Maximo Lafuente:

• There were 43,343 cellular accounts in 2003, and 838,370 as of the end of last month, with more than 600,000 added since 2008.

• 70 percent of Cuban territory with 77 percent of the population has signal coverage.

• Cuba has roaming agreements with 306 carriers in 128 countries, and 2.2 million people used those services in Cuba last year.

Juventud Rebelde story here. An earlier item on cellular rates here, noting that activation fees for new accounts have fallen from 120 to 60 to 40 convertible pesos.

The Estefans and The Community

I can’t say I understand the stir caused by the Estefans hosting President Obama at their home last week for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, unless the idea is that Cuban Americans are supposed to be a one-party group.

At any rate, South Florida Daily Blog examines the issue at some length, and for the record here is Gloria Estefan’s introduction of President Obama at the reception and Emilio Estefan’s interview with Telemundo in Miami. In it, he says that President Obama sees this as a “historic moment” in Cuba.

Quotable

“The concert of the Puerto Ricans of Calle 13 was able to attract 100 times more Cubans than the total of all who participated in the seven days of marches of the Damas de Blanco and the counter-marches of the government.”

– From “Any given Sunday,” on the blog of the BBC’s Fernando Ravsberg, describing Cubans at leisure a few Sundays ago.

Carlos Franqui, R.I.P.

He was a revolutionary who edited the magazine Revolución and broke with the Revolution itself, leaving Cuba in 1968. Obits from AP here and El Pais here and here.

From his book Family Portrait with Fidel, some of Franqui’s recollections from 1964:

"I went down to the old tropical market, but it didn’t exist any more. No more fish. No more fruit. No more flowers. Where was it all? The socialist market was empty, bureaucratic, and ugly. The whole city was becoming Haitianized. You now saw chickens and turkeys in coops on balconies; there were vegetable gardens wherever there was some open land. Once upon a time only the Chinese had these mini-gardens; now everyone did. The salt in the air was destroying the walls of the houses because no one bothered to paint any more. It was early in the day, and the first lines had already formed, people looking for bread or for the cup of coffee they would never find. No neon signs, no lights, fewer cars than I had remembered. Buses were now a rarity, and taxis were impossible to find. Women came carrying pails of water.

"As day dawned, it dawned on me that I was in real danger. In my mind’s eye, I could see the past like a film. I reviewed it all and found no way out of what I had done, no way out of where I was. I should have thought things over when we came down from the mountains into Santiago at the beginning of January in 1959. Fidel said he would miss the war. I knew I wouldn’t, but I knew I would miss something else – the future I had fought for. Everything was different, but nothing had changed. Only the power had changed hands. The people still had to work and obey."

[Photo from La Razon]

Fishing fleet

Odds and ends

• EFE: Like many thousands of other Cubans, dissident Martha Beatriz Roque has acquired Spanish citizenship.

• Herald: “A Chilean executive questioned by Cuban prosecutors in a corruption case has been found dead in Havana, the latest twist in a burgeoning scandal that has snared two Fidel Castro protégés and several other Cubans.” Reuters reports a Cuban government statement on the cause of death.

• El Nuevo Herald has compiled the long exchange between Madrid-based author Carlos Alberto Montaner and Silvio Rodriguez, the singer-songwriter who lives and works in Cuba. Some interesting nuggets in there, but the most interesting fact may be that the exchange took place at all. Granma and other Cuban media mention Montaner from time to time and always trash him – but today Granma publishes a bill of particulars, which may be a sign that the exchange is getting some attention in Cuba.

• Cuban historian Esteban Morales takes aim at “counterrevolutionaries” in an article published by the artists and writers union – but it’s corrupt high-level officials that he has in mind. AP story in English here, Morales’ article in Spanish here.

President Obama in Miami

President Obama goes to Miami today to raise money for the Democratic Party at the city’s arts center and at a high-dollar reception in the home of Gloria and Emilio Estefan.

Herald report here. AP rounds up the mixed opinion among Cuban Americans. And the Herald’s editorial page urges the President to resume people-to-people exchanges with Cuba, which means reversing President Bush’s more restrictive travel regulations.

Joe Garcia enters the District 25 race

Former Miami-Dade Democratic Chairman and (now) former Obama Administration Energy Department official is making another run for Congress in Miami-Dade’s District 25. He lost to incumbent Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart by a 53-47 margin in 2008, but District 25 is an open seat following Rep. Diaz-Balart’s decision to run in an adjacent district.

Garcia’s announcement speech, on YouTube, is here.

The Republican candidate is likely to be David Rivera, a well-funded incumbent state legislator.

The Herald’s political blog, Naked Politics, has lots more. My earlier thoughts on the race here.

Speaking of the United States...

Secretary Clinton’s statement that “the Castros do not want to see an end to the embargo and do not want to see normalization with the United States” reminded me of a recent interview of Juan Antonio Blanco, a former professor and member of the staff of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. The interview, in Spanish on YouTube, is here and here, and in the second part he addresses the same question as Secretary Clinton:

Blanco: I remember that I had some pretty heated discussions precisely because when I arrived at the Central Committee I began to make proposals that in my opinion could improve the relationship with the United States. Some of them had to do with this question – we’re going to look at the real human right problems that we have in the country, we’re going to discuss it, we’re going to try to give it some kind of solution. I saw that some of my bosses hadn’t been paying much attention until one day when there was a big argument, an argument that got ugly. One of them called me outside to the parking lot of the Central Committee and said to me, look, you’re new, but we know that Fidel Castro isn’t interested in solving the problem of the relationship [with the United States]. He wants to contain the conflict within certain parameters so it doesn’t get out of control, but he isn’t interested in really solving this problem.”

Interviewer: So you think he has lived off this hostility with the United States?

Blanco: Absolutely.

[Translation mine.]

Speaking of the retail sector...

As discussed here and here, the Cuban government’s action regarding barber shops and beauty shops begins to address problems that had been identified long ago in the retail and service sectors. (This post notes some of the discussion of the issue in letters to the editor.) The sector’s problems were described at length in a three-part series that appeared in late 2006 in Juventud Rebelde that makes for interesting reading. I don’t have the links to the original articles, but the texts of all three are pasted here (pdf).

The articles aren’t a statement of government policy by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m sure they must be a political benchmark for Cubans who read them – and who would naturally ask how far reforms will go, and whether the solutions will be in proportion to the problems described in the state media.

Secretary Clinton on Cuba

Secretary Clinton answered a question about Cuba last Friday, where she asserted her “personal belief that the Castros do not want to see an end to the embargo and do not want to see normalization with the United States, because they would then lose all of their excuses for what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years.”

This drew a Cuban response in the form of a commentary aired by Radio Reloj, the retro all-news AM station with the constant tick-tock sound in the background. The response said that Secretary Clinton “mixed ignorance and falsehoods,” which we can set aside, and issued an interesting challenge:

“Since the Revolution, according to Hillary Clinton, depends on the excuses that the embargo provides, suspend it for 12 months and then we’ll see what happens.”

Wouldn’t that be interesting.

Secretary Clinton also theorized, as President Clinton used to do, that every time there’s a possible U.S. opening toward Cuba, “you can almost chart how the Castro regime does something to try to stymie it.” At a certain point, that becomes a formula for doing nothing, for putting control of U.S. policy in Havana’s hands, and for avoiding hard questions. Such as: Given the nature of Cuba’s government and its repressive record, what kind of relationship serves U.S. interests – between our governments, and between our societies?

There were two other nuggets.

On Haiti, the United States “actually helped some of the Cuban doctors get medical supplies who were already operating there” after the earthquake.

And she described detainee Alan Gross as “an American who was passing out information and helping elderly Cubans communicate through the Internet.”

Odds and ends

• Another quake last night, this time 45 miles south of Bayamo, magnitude 4.6. Map here, details here, Cuban civil defense announcement in Granma here, with no report of damage.

• The Cuba Study Group’s Tomas Bilbao on defending the status quo in U.S. policy toward Cuba.

• Politico notes House passage of a resolution recognizing Cuba’s independence 112 years ago today.

• ESPN on another Cuban southpaw, making his debut with the Mets.

The state lightens its burden

It took a while, but the Cuban government appears to be launching a solution to problems it identified long ago in its small state retail enterprises.

Reuters broke the story here, and it has to do with ending state control of barbershops and beauty salons. That may seem like small potatotes – and it obviously is small potatoes in terms of Cuba’s overall economy – but the idea behind it is important if you consider this clarification in the middle of the Reuters story:

“Cuba and North Korea are the world’s only remaining Soviet-style command economies in which the state controls more than 90% of economic activity. Other communist countries such as China and Vietnam have long since liberalized retail trade, services and small business.”

More than three years ago, a series of articles in Juventud Rebelde detailed the problems in small state retail and service businesses: petty corruption, pilferage, bad service, and lack of consumer protection. In several cases, the paper reported that there was no functioning supply system, so workers in barbershops or shoe repair shops would buy their own supplies, set their own prices, and decide on their own how much revenue to leave in the government’s cash register at the end of the day.

The articles also discussed possible solutions: fixing the supply system, putting more decisions in the hands of workers, and giving workers a “direct relationship with profits.”

So the solution, reportedly in the process of implementation in hundreds of smaller barber and beauty shops around the country, is effectively to end the state enterprise and give workers an offer whereby they can operate on their own. The terms are that they pay a monthly fee that amounts to 15 percent of their average revenue, they pay utilities, they buy their own supplies, they set their own prices, and they keep their profits.

Now we have an idea what Cuba’s economy minister meant last December when he said the government is undertaking “experiments…to lighten the state’s burden in the provision of some services.”

From the report, it sounds as if each worker will be licensed individually, so this is not a move to a cooperative model.

Nonetheless, it moves some economic activity across the line from the state sector to the private sector. In Cuba, that’s a big deal.

And considering that the government is fixing just a small part of a retail service sector that it has shown to be riddled with problems, this could point to more changes ahead.

A hunger strike suspended

Uncommon Sense: Jailed dissident Darsi Ferrer suspends his hunger strike after his medical and legal demands were addressed; EFE Spanish story here.