Pope Benedict XVI’s call for changes in Cuba and the world should also focus on churches, according to members of Cuban civil society who, independently of their beliefs or ideologies, recognised the impact of the pope’s visit to this socialist country.

Pope Benedict in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“It is evident that Cuba increasingly does not match the image that many have of it being frozen in space and time,” the retired pastor of the Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba added, via email.

García, who is also director of the Christian Centre for Reflection and Dialogue in Cuba, acknowledged what he called the Catholic Church’s “capacity for dialogue” with the government. “This might be the right time to reach out,” said the retired pastor, who is one of the promoters of an incipient inter-religious dialogue in Cuba.

Fourteen years after Pope John Paul II’s visit, which was considered a turning point in relations between the Catholic Church and the Cuban state, Benedict found a society that is increasingly heterogeneous, Catholic intellectuals Roberto Veiga and Lenier González acknowledged in a joint response to questions from IPS.

According to the editors of Espacio Laical, a magazine of the Havana archdiocese’s lay council, by outlining “how much remains to be done to achieve a better country,” the pope promoted truth and life, marriage and the family, freedom and justice, dialogue and social inclusion, forgiveness and reconciliation.

The “challenge” of this proposal, they added, consists of the need for “a methodology of relating to and accompanying an extremely diverse society, in which movements are taking shape that defend agendas related to religious, environmental, immigration, sexual orientation, gender and political issues.”

In addition, they said, there is the challenge of including “Cubans on the island and in the diaspora.”

“Some émigrés do not want any ties with their homeland or political groups, on either end of the spectrum, and do not agree with dialogue and consensus as a methodology for building the country,” the two editors said in their response.

The word “dialogue” is at the centre of many analyses on this issue, including among communists and sexual rights activists, such as Dr. Alberto Roque, who published an article on his blog, HOMO@sapiens.cu, questioning whether or not the Catholic Church also “perceives itself as part of the world” that must change.

In an email to IPS, Roque said the changes needed include the Church’s willingness to modify its positions on abortion, homosexual relationships and women’s subordination, and to eliminate its fundamentalist influence on certain governments.

“Religious believers and all churches should be part of a dialogue that will improve the nation that we want,” Roque said.

Taking a more critical stance, feminist blogger Yasmín S. Portales told IPS that with the current “strengthening of the Cuban Catholic Church’s political positions,” it is becoming the “government’s only interlocutor,” a situation that is generating “tensions within civil society” by undermining the legitimacy of other actors.

For Portales, author of the blog En 2310 y 8225, one of the results of this tendency could be “an increase in obstacles for the struggle against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and a threat, in the medium or long term, to the Cuban state’s commitment to defend the sexual and reproductive rights of all its citizens.”

However, only a minority of those who participated in an informal survey conducted by IPS on the social networking site Facebook said the Catholic Church could have a real impact on the rights achieved by the Cuban population decades ago, such as free, safe abortion and birth control.

But the situation could be different in the case of rights yet to be won, such as current proposals for legal reforms to benefit sexual minorities, which from the outset make concessions to the most conservative and patriarchal sectors by proposing legal unions instead of marriage, and excluding the possibility of adoption.

Along those lines, physicist and blogger Rogelio M. Díaz, creator of the blog Bubusopia, referred in a conversation with IPS to what he said was a stepping-up by the Catholic Church of “discourse that monopolises all spirituality and ethical and family values, as opposed to other possible positions.”

For her part, journalist Dixie Edith said the revival of values that were hit hard by the economic crisis of the 1990s must not involve a bolstering of patriarchy. “The family is in crisis, but the solution is not to return to the past; it is finding new and more equitable forms and relationships,” she told IPS.

Opinions expressed on Café 108, a participatory section of the IPS website in Cuba, highlighted the stronger relations between the Catholic Church and the state, the support for changes needed on the island, and for national reconciliation, and condemnation of the economic sanctions imposed by the United States more than 50 years ago.

Moreover, there were more than a few reminders that Cuba is not a Catholic-majority country; it has a large number of religious believers of all types, and of atheists, which is why certain spaces for dialogue and social influence should not be reserved for a single church, or dominated by it.

In that sense, Roberto Méndez, a consultant with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, told IPS that the pope preferred to limit his public comments to the ethics that derive from Christian tradition, and that “can be a bridge of understanding between believers and non-believers.”

“It should not be expected that this visit in and of itself will bring spectacular changes to social and political life; that is a question for the Cuban people themselves. However, I do think that it will significantly help Church-state relations and strengthen the Catholic presence in public life,” he said.

An image of the Virgin Mary next to Cuban flags in the Plaza de la Revolución. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González and Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 29 2012 (IPS)

Debates in civil society, tension with internal opposition groups, demands from outside the country and inevitable comparisons with John Paul II’s visit to this socialist island in 1998 surrounded Benedict XVI’s visit 14 years later to a very different Cuba.

“Religion is culture; I like to learn about new things,” said a woman engineer who was in the Plaza de la Revolución Wednesday, at the behest of her workplace, even though she is not a religious believer. Like her, a man who was leaving as the pope celebrated mass in the plaza, stressed “These are different times.”

The first papal visit came as Cuba was emerging from the depths of a crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the East European socialist bloc. President Fidel Castro was still at the helm, and John Paul’s visit seemed to usher in a new era marked by dialogue.

Benedict, on the other hand, came to a country that, led by Raúl Castro, is undergoing a process of reforms marked by unprecedented economic realism, which is radically changing the country and creating uncertainty with regard to both the present and the future.

However, for some observers, some things never change: Raúl, like Fidel, showed respect for the pope’s opinions without failing to express his own. And Benedict, like John Paul, elegantly criticised the U.S. embargo and called for reconciliation among “all Cubans.”

“We have found many and profound areas of agreement, even if, as is natural, we do not think alike on all matters,” Castro said when bidding the pope farewell on Wednesday afternoon, after stating the need for mutual respect, dialogue and cooperation.

The pope, for his part, urged “the blossoming of all that is finest in the Cuban soul,” to be able “to build a society with a broad vision, renewed and reconciled”; a society where nobody should be excluded because of “limitations of his or her basic freedoms,” “indolence” or “a lack of material resources.”

He added: “Possible discrepancies and difficulties will be resolved by tirelessly seeking what unites everyone, with patient and sincere dialogue, and a willingness to listen and accept goals which will bring new hope.”

Symbolically, while John Paul held mass in Havana from one side of the Plaza de la Revolución, with the National Library in the background, Benedict did so at the foot of the monument to national hero José Martí, where platforms are traditionally set up for revolutionary rallies.

In that historic site, blown by the winds of the fifth Wednesday of Lent, the pope assured that both Cuba and the world “need change, but this will occur only if each one is in a position to seek the truth and chooses the way of love, sowing reconciliation and fraternity.”

In his homily, which centred on the idea of “truth,” the pope questioned those who “prefer short cuts,” deny that “there exists a truth valid for all” or “wash their hands” like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and “let the water of history drain away without taking a stand.”

“On the other hand, there are those who wrongly interpret this search for the truth, leading them to irrationality and fanaticism; they close themselves up in ‘their truth,’ and try to impose it on others,” the pope said, emphasising that “Faith and reason are necessary and complementary in the pursuit of truth.”

The homily complemented the messages read by the pope when he arrived on Monday the 26th for a three-day visit that included two masses, a visit to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba, an official meeting with Raúl Castro and a last-minute meeting with Fidel Castro.

While Benedict’s remarks were not lacking in references to marriage and the family, he barely mentioned a matter important to some in civil society, who defend women’s reproductive rights and promote respect for sexual diversity, including legal same-sex unions.

Among the Catholic Church’s aims was Benedict’s request that President Castro declare Holy Friday a holiday in Cuba, and the possibility of strengthening religious freedom.

Coming at what is perhaps the best moment in relations between the local Catholic hierarchy and the government since the 1959 revolution, the pope’s visit was preceded by tensions provoked by dissident groups which, in mid-March, occupied several Catholic churches to make their political demands heard.

In a similar attempt, a man got past security in Santiago de Cuba’s Plaza de la Revolución moments before the pope said mass, shouting “down with Communism”. Online footage of the incident showed that as he was removed from the plaza by security, he was struck by at least two individuals in the crowd.

“There’s a right for people to express their opinions, but there also is the right not to be disturbed in one’s religious activities,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told reporters regarding the incident, which has not been mentioned in the Cuban media.

Amnesty International, meanwhile, issued a press release on Wednesday saying that, in the interest of silencing any demonstrations during the pope’s visit, arrests were stepped up, homes were surrounded and the telephone lines of activists and opposition groups were disconnected.

Benedict abstained from publicly repeating his opinion about the exhaustion of communism, expressed before his arrival in Mexico on Mar. 23. However, the archbishop of Miami, Florida, Thomas Wenski, said that Marxism is a “spent ideology,” in a mass that he celebrated at the cathedral in Havana on Tuesday Mar. 27.

Some 300 mainly Cuban-American pilgrims from Miami who attended the mass applauded Wenski, shortly before a flotilla organised by the anti-Castro group Democracy Movement that stopped out at sea about 20 km from Havana and shot off fireworks to demand respect for human rights in Cuba.

“What does the pope bring us in Cuba?” Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega asked in his greeting to Benedict at the beginning of the Wednesday mass in the Cuban capital. “Let’s leave the answer up to our people,” the archbishop of Havana added, summing up the expectations surrounding the pope’s visit.

* With reporting by Patricia Grogg.

By Dalia Acosta and - -
HAVANA, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

Thirteen hurricanes, three of which had a major impact on housing; increased access to goods and services; and the start of the so-called “updating” of the country’s economic and social policies are a few of the aspects that make Cuba different from what it was a decade ago.

Juan Carlos Alfonso, director of ONEI’s Centre for the Study of Population and Development. Credit: Dalia Acosta/IPS

The expert, who has more than 35 years of professional experience, comes up every day against opinions and anecdotes that attempt to describe things in the country by generalising on the basis of local or personal experiences.

“What occurs in my home, or my apartment building, is not what occurs all over the country. The reality is very diverse; you can’t extrapolate,” he said.

Q: What new information can the 2012 census reveal? A: All information provided by the census is new. In addition to examining the evolution of a number of general indicators – sex, age, educational level, marital status and others – it will supply more in-depth information on issues such as internal migration, access to postgraduate education, water – availability and consumption – and housing, including the physical structure and inhabitants.

In some cases, it will have nothing to contribute, but it will nonetheless provide valuable information about the impact of social and economic policies on the population; the characteristics of the population, housing and other information.

Q: Will it be useful for assessing the real state of housing, following the impact of the 2008 hurricanes? A: Cuba received a truly severe impact. Since the previous census, in September 2002, 13 hurricanes have hit the island, including three devastating ones in 2008. At the same time, much has been built over these years, not just by the government but also by the population.

However, everybody extrapolates from their own experience: in one part of Havana, 20 people might be living together in one home, but that is not the situation in other parts of the country.

In the case of housing, especially in cities and rural areas that are close to cities, an expansion has been noted. In fact, between 2002 and 2012, housing growth may have outstripped population growth; Cuba has had very low fertility rates since 1978. I am not talking about distribution or urban planning quality, such as access to water and sewage services or paved streets.

Q: Civil society actors criticised the findings of the last census, saying that the real proportion of black and mixed-race people is larger than what was registered. Could there be a big difference between the reality and the census results? A: In Cuba we do not count ethnicity or race, but skin colour. The first known population register dates back to 1774. Since then, until the last one in 2002, all 18 censuses have counted skin colour.

At some point, this issue was addressed as race or racial structures – in 19th century censuses, and during the republican period – but it has always been done based on skin colour, because the concept of race is very complex from the perspective of its anthropological and genetic measurement.

The census takers receive training in marking the box to show whether the person in front of them is white, mixed-race or black. Obviously, this can be biased, just like the answers that people give; there are also those who say they are younger, and those who say they are older. In a census, all information is obtained from people’s personal statements.

However, the reality is that in the last 40 years, skin colour has been counted more than 35 times in different surveys and studies. All of the findings coincide: 64-65 percent of the population has white skin; 24, 25 or 26 percent are mixed; and 10 percent have black skin. The tendency indicates an increase in the mixed-race population, and a decrease in the black and white populations.

Now, their distribution throughout the country varies, as does the idea that people have about their surroundings.

Suffice it to observe the public that fills the baseball stadium in Santa Clara (a central city with a mostly-white population) and in Santiago de Cuba (an eastern province with a large black population). Municipalities on the outskirts of the capital also have large concentrations of black and mixed-race populations.

All of this is counted with transparency and rigour, because skin colour is an important indicator linked with social, economic and labour differences.

Q: Some have raised the possibility of collecting data on sexual diversity, in the census. Is it possible that aspect may be included? A: This is a request we received from the National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), after a trial run of the census had already been carried out. It is a very socially important issue, but we are talking about a question that has not been prepared or tested.

We should not forget that the census is conducted by volunteers, most of them young students, who have not been trained to handle such a sensitive issue. Furthermore, many non-heterosexual individuals have not revealed their sexual orientation to their families.

In short, we believe that this data should be obtained in a different type of study, using individual interviews, which will guarantee privacy, ethics and respect. The census is not for that; it is for describing broader issues. If there is a desire to study one of these issues in depth, it can be done using surveys and studies, and that was our response to CENESEX.

Q: Every time there is a study of this type, questions come up about how information that could go beyond certain legal boundaries will be used. Does Cuba guarantee the anonymous character of the information? A: The information obtained by the census is for counting and producing statistical summaries and information; that is established by decree. The census does not give or take away legality, nor does it have any negative influence on people. It is based on personal statements and is totally anonymous. Once the questionnaires are processed, the individuals surveyed become numbers.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta and - -
HAVANA, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

More than 15 years after the “deactivation” in Cuba of the Association of Women Communicators (MAGIN), its members remain united in an informal network that transcends any specific political situation and has become a reference for the new generations.

“We were not personally involved, but its history has come down to us. MAGIN is a reference, legacy and motivation to continue working despite the obstacles,” said Helen Hernández, one of three journalists who have been organising a discussion circle on gender and culture called “With a Sceptical View” since 2011.

“MAGIN no longer exists, but it lives on in the memories and actions of the women who were its members,” Hernández, author of the 2011 book “Mujeres en crisis. Aproximaciones a lo femenino en las narradoras cubanas de los noventa” (Women in Crisis: Women’s Issues in the Work of Cuban Women Writers of the 1990s), told IPS after attending the first public revival of an experience that changed the lives and work of those involved.

After the MAGIN experience, writer Daysi Rubiera published a book on sexual violence in Cuba; researcher Gisela Arandia promoted the project “Color cubano”, focusing on race issues; psychologist Norma Guillard began working with sexual diversity groups; and film-maker Belkys Vega made important documentary and fictionalised films about AIDS in Cuba.

Historian Julio César González Pagés, one of the few men involved in the initiative, devoted himself to rescuing the history of women and feminism in Cuba. He also founded the Ibero-American Masculinity Network, an academic space that is considered one of the most important in today’s debate on gender issues in Cuba.

“It was like a little bug that is born, generates a discussion and then begins to spread all over,” anthropologist and former MAGIN member Leticia Artiles commented to IPS about the group’s impact, which spanned radio and television, literature, research in diverse areas and especially women’s studies.

In what more than a few people saw as “an act of justice,” this revival of MAGIN took place during the international colloquium “Women, Channels of Collaboration and Associations in Latin American and Caribbean culture and history”, which ended on Friday the 24th at the cultural institution Casa de las Américas.

Covered with a veil of silence since its “deactivation,” as it was referred to in 1996, to avoid more definitive words like “shutdown,” the Association of Women Communicators was created in March 1993 after the First Ibero-American Women and Communication Conference was held in Havana.

During one of the most difficult moments of the economic crisis that Cuba endured after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its main aid and partners in the European socialist bloc, a group of women communication workers who attended the conference identified the need to work for gender awareness in the media.

Responding to the initial invitation of journalist Mirta Rodríguez Calderón, who subsequently continued her work from her new home in the Dominican Republic, more than 100 women joined, including journalists, artists, scientists and local and national government officials. As a name for the group, they chose the name “magin,” which means intelligence.

However, by 1996, the association had not yet received approval of its application for registration, and its members were informed that it could no longer operate.

“The more or less formal statement that was made the day they summoned us, after talking about the intentions of the United States to infiltrate the Revolution using its intellectuals, was that we were not going to be given legal status because it was not opportune,” Rodríguez Calderón told IPS via email.

The main argument brandished by those who made that decision was related to the so-called Track II of the 1992 U.S. Torricelli Act, which promoted people-to-people contact and academic, cultural and civil society exchange as a way of encouraging changes to Cuba’s political system.

But the real reason, according to various former MAGIN members, may have been “jealousy” on the part of entities accustomed to having a “national monopoly” over certain issues, or the transgression implied by a project such as this in a society organised in a top-down, heterosexist way, with a deeply-rooted patriarchal culture.

“How could a group of prominent women journalists get involved like that in a transgressive, innovative process? Crises tend to generate development, and MAGIN was the fruit of that innovative development. But the social structure was not ‘ready’ for that leap,” Artiles said.

Psychiatrist Ada Alfonso has a similar opinion. “The fact that in the early 1990s a group of women were conducting self-esteem workshops to talk about our orgasms, among other things, was very transgressive. Even today, in 2012, we don’t speak completely freely about our bodies,” she said.

In just three years, MAGIN organised 50 workshops on different issues and worked on projects that included a publishing collection, a quarterly magazine, a press bureau to produce informational materials with a gender-based approach, and training workshops, along with other ideas recalled by editor Pilar Sa Leal, the group’s recognised executor.

After the association formally shut down, Rodríguez Calderón moved to the Dominican Republic, where she organised exchange activities and founded the publication A primera plana (APP), with contributions from Cuba.

Meanwhile, back in Cuba a group of former MAGIN members prepared and circulated by email La Hoja de APP bulletin.

According to one of the founders, Irene Esther Ruíz, beyond the energy that was deployed, there was “a magic” that helped “illuminate the obscure areas of knowledge,” and to understand “that other women were not your rivals, but your counterparts.” In fact, “that magic was responsible for a sense of belonging that still remains,” she said.

As Cuban writer Sonnia Moro said, “MAGIN was deactivated, but the ‘women of MAGIN’ live on.”

Excerpt:

More than 15 years after the “deactivation” in Cuba of the Association of Women Communicators (MAGIN), its members remain united in an informal network that transcends any specific political situation and has become a reference for the new generations.
“We were not personally involved, but its history has come down to us. MAGIN is a reference, legacy and motivation to continue working despite the obstacles,” said Helen Hernández, one of three journalists who have been organising a discussion circle on gender and culture called “With a Sceptical View” since 2011.

“MAGIN no longer exists, but it lives on in the memories and actions of the women who were its members,” Hernández, author of the 2011 book “Mujeres en crisis. Aproximaciones a lo femenino en las narradoras cubanas de los noventa” (Women in Crisis: Women’s Issues in the Work of Cuban Women Writers of the 1990s), told IPS after attending the first public revival of an experience that changed the lives and work of those involved.

After the MAGIN experience, writer Daysi Rubiera published a book on sexual violence in Cuba; researcher Gisela Arandia promoted the project “Color cubano”, focusing on race issues; psychologist Norma Guillard began working with sexual diversity groups; and film-maker Belkys Vega made important documentary and fictionalised films about AIDS in Cuba.

Historian Julio César González Pagés, one of the few men involved in the initiative, devoted himself to rescuing the history of women and feminism in Cuba. He also founded the Ibero-American Masculinity Network, an academic space that is considered one of the most important in today’s debate on gender issues in Cuba.

“It was like a little bug that is born, generates a discussion and then begins to spread all over,” anthropologist and former MAGIN member Leticia Artiles commented to IPS about the group’s impact, which spanned radio and television, literature, research in diverse areas and especially women’s studies.

In what more than a few people saw as “an act of justice,” this revival of MAGIN took place during the international colloquium “Women, Channels of Collaboration and Associations in Latin American and Caribbean culture and history”, which ended on Friday the 24th at the cultural institution Casa de las Américas.

Covered with a veil of silence since its “deactivation,” as it was referred to in 1996, to avoid more definitive words like “shutdown,” the Association of Women Communicators was created in March 1993 after the First Ibero-American Women and Communication Conference was held in Havana.

During one of the most difficult moments of the economic crisis that Cuba endured after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its main aid and partners in the European socialist bloc, a group of women communication workers who attended the conference identified the need to work for gender awareness in the media.

Responding to the initial invitation of journalist Mirta Rodríguez Calderón, who subsequently continued her work from her new home in the Dominican Republic, more than 100 women joined, including journalists, artists, scientists and local and national government officials. As a name for the group, they chose the name “magin,” which means intelligence.

However, by 1996, the association had not yet received approval of its application for registration, and its members were informed that it could no longer operate.

“The more or less formal statement that was made the day they summoned us, after talking about the intentions of the United States to infiltrate the Revolution using its intellectuals, was that we were not going to be given legal status because it was not opportune,” Rodríguez Calderón told IPS via email.

The main argument brandished by those who made that decision was related to the so-called Track II of the 1992 U.S. Torricelli Act, which promoted people-to-people contact and academic, cultural and civil society exchange as a way of encouraging changes to Cuba’s political system.

But the real reason, according to various former MAGIN members, may have been “jealousy” on the part of entities accustomed to having a “national monopoly” over certain issues, or the transgression implied by a project such as this in a society organised in a top-down, heterosexist way, with a deeply-rooted patriarchal culture.

“How could a group of prominent women journalists get involved like that in a transgressive, innovative process? Crises tend to generate development, and MAGIN was the fruit of that innovative development. But the social structure was not ‘ready’ for that leap,” Artiles said.

Psychiatrist Ada Alfonso has a similar opinion. “The fact that in the early 1990s a group of women were conducting self-esteem workshops to talk about our orgasms, among other things, was very transgressive. Even today, in 2012, we don’t speak completely freely about our bodies,” she said.

In just three years, MAGIN organised 50 workshops on different issues and worked on projects that included a publishing collection, a quarterly magazine, a press bureau to produce informational materials with a gender-based approach, and training workshops, along with other ideas recalled by editor Pilar Sa Leal, the group’s recognised executor.

After the association formally shut down, Rodríguez Calderón moved to the Dominican Republic, where she organised exchange activities and founded the publication A primera plana (APP), with contributions from Cuba.

Meanwhile, back in Cuba a group of former MAGIN members prepared and circulated by email La Hoja de APP bulletin.

According to one of the founders, Irene Esther Ruíz, beyond the energy that was deployed, there was “a magic” that helped “illuminate the obscure areas of knowledge,” and to understand “that other women were not your rivals, but your counterparts.” In fact, “that magic was responsible for a sense of belonging that still remains,” she said.

As Cuban writer Sonnia Moro said, “MAGIN was deactivated, but the ‘women of MAGIN’ live on.” (END)

By - - and Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Dec 30 2011 (IPS)

Promoting the first Men for Non-Violence platform is one of the challenges undertaken by a group of social actors who devoted November and December 2011 to the most intensive Cuban campaign ever against gender-based violence.

“This is a living, horizontal platform that fulfils the longstanding dream of uniting activism and academia – the organisations that work in the community and those of us who carry out the studies that make it possible to promote public policy,” Julio César González Pagés, coordinator of the Ibero-American Masculinity Network, told IPS.

With specialists from 30 Ibero-American countries (Latin America, Spain and Portugal) and plans to expand to 10 African countries, this academic network joined forces with the Oscar Arnulfo Romero Reflection and Solidarity Group (OAR), a Christian-based organisation named after the Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in 1980 that works with the issue of gender-based violence at the community level.

The Dec. 9 founding workshop of the Men for Non-Violence platform was attended by about 40 men from at-risk neighbourhoods, African-based religions and societies, the Fraternity of Baptist Churches, the Christian Student Movement, the Catholic Church, along with representatives of cultural, environmental and rural projects. At the same time, 16 women from the Havana municipality of Cerro joined the Non-Violence Reflection Group, and state television broadcast the second part of the soap opera “Bajo el mismo sol” (Under the Same Sun), the first of its kind to focus on domestic violence.

“Each one of us, in our own space, must confront any act of violence, exclusion or discrimination. If we can save a single woman from violence, that is important,” said Gabriel Coderch, general coordinator of the OAR, who added that “the conspiratorial silence must be broken.”

The need to raise awareness about violence against women in order to make progress in coordinating actions in all social spheres was a recurrent theme of the debates organised for Nov. 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The fifth National Non-Violence Campaign, coordinated by the OAR, was joined by other independent activities organised as part of the worldwide campaign launched by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “Say NO – UNiTE to End Violence against Women”.

This campaign is especially important in a country where, for years, the government and the media ignored or downplayed the phenomenon of domestic violence by comparing it to the much worse situation in many other countries, thus limiting actions to acknowledge, prevent and fight the problem, as well as adequate services for victims and survivors.

While some say the approach is still “timid,” the explicit mention of gender-based violence in the central document of the upcoming national conference of the ruling Communist Party, set for Jan. 28, could create the conditions for more in-depth, systematic multisectoral work.

“One of the challenges is to learn about the true scope of violence in Cuba, beyond crimes that are reported. There are other kinds of violence, with varying levels of seriousness, and there is little understanding of how widespread they are,” Mareelén Díaz, of the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research, told IPS.

“The statistics help to raise awareness, treat and prevent. And the challenge is also how to confront the problem to change it. If violence is learned, it must be unlearned,” said Díaz, who is part of a group of specialists who created a methodology for addressing this issue in the Cuban context.

In the absence of statistics, a systematisation of different studies conducted by Cuban sociologist Clotilde Proveyer found that for each man killed by his spouse in Cuba, almost three women meet the same fate, and generally die in their own homes, or in the homes of their mothers or other close relatives.

Furthermore, all Cuban women who murder their partners do so as a last resort in the face of repeated violence against them, said Proveyer, a researcher with the National Group for Attention to and Prevention of Domestic Violence, created by the government in 1997.

According to the 2010 Annual Health Statistics Yearbook published by the Public Health Ministry, acts of physical aggression in 2010 resulted in the deaths of 128 women and 376 men. As is the case in other countries, men are most in danger of violence outside the home, while for women, the opposite is true.

“Changes among men need to begin within them, not based on women’s or society’s demands, because otherwise it is fictitious,” psychologist María Teresa Díaz, coordinator of the OAR project “Well-being for Men in Development,” told IPS.

In addition to the need to work with men, debates on the issue in Cuba have identified a number of challenges, including the need for continued awareness-raising efforts, a specific law on gender-based violence, and support services for victims, such as a help line.

The media, which legitimise the patriarchal system, were also a focus of discussions on gender-based violence. And a call was issued to avoid limiting prevention work to campaigns surrounding Nov. 25 every year. “The real challenge for the non-violence campaign begins in January, when nobody is talking about it,” González Pagés said.

In response to this challenge, the Ibero-American Masculinity Network and the Todas Contracorriente sociocultural project, promoted by Cuban singer Rochy Ameneiro, announced that in January a national concert tour, which will include workshops, will kick off to push for changes in the way that these issues are approached among art school students.

Excerpt:

Whether or not they live in Cuba, whatever their political affiliation, most people consulted by IPS want changes to Cuban migration policy that include three key elements: freedom, rights and normalisation.

Cubans hope migration reforms will be announced soon. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“The first thing would be to treat the issue of migration as a basic human right,” poet Alex Fleites said in response to a question by Café 108, an IPS Cuba initiative to foster citizen participation in investigative journalism.

Most people consulted by IPS listed, as essential elements for ensuring the human right of freedom of movement, the elimination of the exit permit required for any trip outside of Cuba and the elimination of the category known as “salida definitiva” or “final departure.” They also said Cuba should recognise the right to return.

Marked by the Cuba-U.S. conflict, emigration by Cubans was viewed for decades as a political phenomenon. Émigrés were considered to have left the country forever, without the possibility of returning to live or to visit.

The situation began to change with the authorisation of visits by members of the Cuban community abroad, following the 1978 talks between former President Fidel Castro and a group of émigrés. A greater opening occurred in the 1990s with the authorisation of temporary residence in other countries.

However, rules that were considered a step forward at the time are now viewed as unnecessary, and have triggered a whole series of regulations and actions that continue to place the Cuban people in a situation that is unique in Latin America.

“Cuba needs to respect its citizens and to recognise their right to enter and leave the country without obstacles or fees. The fatherland is home, and one returns home when one pleases, without obstructions of any kind,” playwright Esther Suárez Durán said on Café 108.

One aspect that is generally omitted was mentioned by Raúl Regueiro. “Recently, I had the misfortune of having my exit permit delayed for a second time because I have HIV,” Regueiro said, describing the process as “discriminatory, humiliating and degrading.”

One of the most frequent comments was the need to eliminate the letter of invitation, which is required not only by foreign embassies for visa applications, but also by Cuban immigration authorities for permission to leave the country.

Participants in the Café 108 discussion also said that other requirements that should be eliminated are the costly procedures involved in authorisation to live abroad, such as the renewal of permits, and the loss of rights or property for people who are placed in the “final departure” category.

In addition, “fees for passports and other official paperwork should be in Cuban pesos on a sliding scale based on people’s wages,” rather than charging high prices in hard currency, which has been the case since the legalisation of the dollar in 1993, according to a proposal from feminist Yasmín Silvia Portales, creator of the blog “En 2310 y 8225”.

The issue of children is also controversial. After 14,048 unaccompanied minors went to the United States between 1960 and 1962 as part of the so-called Operation Peter Pan, protective regulations have been in place for children, but over time, they have caused unnecessary family divisions.

Likewise, several participants in the IPS consultation advocated the right of parents to travel outside the country, for whatever the reason, accompanied by their children who are minors.

For her part, Sandra Álvarez, author of the blog “Negra cubana tenía que ser”, said that “the children of Cuban émigrés should not be considered foreigners.”

Also controversial are the regulations in place to curb the exodus of professionals. Any policy on that question “should be based on motivational mechanisms that respect the rights of individuals and that, above all, are not discriminatory,” said Josué Portal, a participant in the Café 108 debate.

On that same issue, economist and political scientist Esteban Morales noted that Cuba is “a poor country with many internal difficulties in guaranteeing people’s life aspirations,” which is why “solutions to that problem should be more flexible and intelligent.”

“Believing that the human capital that we have created is protected by preventing or restricting people from travelling abroad is truly dysfunctional. All Cubans should be able to live and work wherever they want, and they should be able to return to their country whenever they want,” he said.

Another issue closely related to migration is the contradictory question of “nationality,” said historian and ethnologist Jesús Guanche. According to the current laws, people born on the island are always Cuban; they never lose their nationality, and no second or third nationality is recognised.

The right to several nationalities “does not eliminate patriotism or a sense of belonging, which is a cultural tradition, a conviction, and not a piece of paper,” Guanche said. He commented that the idea of the “urgent integration” of Latin America and the Caribbean means that “we must also think about a ‘grand national’ legal status.”

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta and - -
HAVANA, Nov 15 2011 (IPS)

Farmers and experts on agriculture from Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique are touring fields in Cuba this week, along with local colleagues, to exchange experiences to foment ecological fruit growing on Caribbean islands.

Jorge Medina practices integrated, diversified farming on land near Havana. Credit: Ivet González/IPS

“From now on I’m going to use vermiculture (composting using earthworms), which does not require a major investment, and I know that many people will see what I’m doing and want to replicate it,” she said.

“The experts and farmers have shared their know-how, and we have tried to take advantage of this great opportunity, to take the new knowledge back home to our fellow agricultural producers,” said Djuié Abdul, a farmer from Martinique who was one of the 22 participants in the experience.

To highlight Cuba’s experience in these techniques and transfer technology to the other three participating Caribbean islands – these are two of the central aims of the Caribbean Network for the Development of Agroecological Horticultural Systems (DEVAG), a four-year project launched in late 2009 with the support of the French embassies in Cuba and Haiti.

The course that began in Havana on Nov. 7 is the most important activity to date by the project, which is fomenting environmentally-friendly agriculture in islands of the Caribbean, where intensive use of agrochemicals pollutes the soil and leaves residue on fruit and vegetables.

The course in Cuba has included learning about the experiences of successful fruit-growing cooperatives, studies on the application of agroecological techniques in a state-run company in eastern Cuba, and visits to fruit orchards where animals have been integrated for weed control as part of a sustainable agricultural production project in the central Cuban province of Ciego de Ávila.

“All of these farmers grow their own specific crops, but what they have in common is the weather and pests, which are a constant challenge on our islands,” the coordinator of the project in Cuba, Lilian Otero, told IPS.

“Cuba can show how, despite economic limitations, progress has been made in bioproducts and the application of agroecological practices,” she said.

Besides drawing attention to Cuba’s experience in the area, the initiative is promoting joint research by institutes in the region, the training of professionals and farmers, and the creation of an exchange network among farmers, researchers and technicians from the four islands involved in the project.

Ecological agriculture is based on the principles of self-sufficiency and closed-loop farming systems where soil fertility is restored by means of compost and mulch and the use of crops suitable to specific local conditions.

According to Otero, an expert with the Cuban Research Institute on Tropical Fruit Growing (IIFT) orchard management group, these essentially “rustic” or “do-it-by-hand” alternative farming methods can easily be adopted by farmers, because they don’t involve complicated techniques and can be adapted to the conditions of each area.

“Compost, vermiculture, intercropping or growing different crops on the same field, and making use of the natural enemies of pests are some of the viable practices that be used as part of the concept of agroecological fruit-growing,” the researcher explained.

DEVAG is based on the idea that agroecological or biological farming is not practiced widely enough in the Caribbean, even though the benefits of these practices are recognised, in terms of a healthy diet and food self-sufficiency, and as a source of income.

The project aims to fuel the adoption of innovative, adaptable farming systems to help meet the growing levels of demand for fresh, organic produce in local markets, while reducing the negative impact of agriculture on already fragile, limited island ecosystems.

The economic benefits of agroecological farming are also significant, and the techniques can open the door to markets with increasingly strict requirements, the participants in the course learned.

Official statistics indicate that Cuba exported more than 1,000 tons of organic grapefruit, orange, coconut and mango juice to Europe in 2009 and 2010.

“We want to benefit from Cuba’s experiences and to take home with us these practices, which do not involve the use of pesticides, and are profitable,” said Christian Lavigne, with the Centre for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD) in the French overseas department of Martinique.

Otero, for her part, said “the idea is to create a network and for the farmers themselves to become promoters of these techniques, so that they spread on the islands, and continue to be practiced even when the project is over.”

Ricot Scutt, an agricultural producer, researcher and professor from Haiti, said Cuba’s experiences could be widely applied in his country, because the two countries have similar climates, crops and soils, and because application of the techniques does not require a large output of money.

“Food security is a very important issue, and these technologies can be easily taught to people with little knowledge and resources, and with a great need to boost their production levels,” he said.

With respect to the course, Otero said “the theoretical instruction that the participants have received in the classroom lays the scientific-technical foundation. Afterwards, in the visits to the field, they see this isn’t a fantasy. With their hands, they touch what they have learned.”

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta and - -
HAVANA, Nov 11 2011 (IPS)

Communist Party militant, gay rights activist, journalist and blogger Francisco Rodríguez has triggered an online debate in Cuba by calling for sexual diversity to be identified in the next census, due in September 2012.

Las Isabelas, the first group of lesbian and bisexual women founded in Cuba, display their work in a central square in Santiago. Credit: Cuba Archive/IPS

“Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people must demand that our families are counted in the census – the largest piece of social research conducted by any given country – notwithstanding the fact that our laws still do not recognise any form of legal union for same-sex couples,” he posted on his blog Monday Nov. 7.

If this happens, Cuba would join countries like Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Italy, the United States and Venezuela which, in their separate ways, have incorporated questions related to sexual diversity in their national censuses.

“Those who wish to be recognised as the real families they are, including the possibility that these couples may be raising the biological children of one or both partners, should be given the opportunity to do so,” Rodríguez told IPS in an e-mail. The journalist acknowledged that the point of such a decision would not be to assess the number of same-sex couples, which would be under-reported because of the invisibility that “surrounds these couples as a result of cultural homophobia,” as well as other problems facing people living together, such as the housing shortage. However, he said, “there are many family models that are not socially recognised, that the census could help to count and describe,” to raise awareness about sexual diversity and to contribute key information when political and legislative decisions are made that affect these population groups.

“Paquito’s” latest post began to circulate immediately through social networks like Facebook, and was forwarded to e-mail contact lists and through personal communications on the island by people defending sexual rights as human rights.

It also provoked reactions from people whose outlook remains influenced by the “machista” culture, and who regard heterosexuality as the only acceptable option. In his blog post, Rodríguez said he had access to a letter from Mariela Castro, head of the state National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX), asking ONEI to consider including questions in the census to help identify the different kinds of families.

Earlier, Malú Cano of CENESEX’s Red Trans, a network of transvestite and transgender people, had raised the need to include gender identity in the country’s statistics. “What is nameless does not exist. And we do exist,” said Cano at the Second National Meeting of Transgender Promoters of Sexual Health in mid 2011.

One argument against the proposal is that the pilot trial for the next census was already held last September, to test the methodology that will be used by some 69,000 census takers, mostly volunteer students and teachers in technical and university education.

Rather than delay implementation of the proposal until the next census a decade away, a national survey to gain a broader specific view of sexual minorities could be carried out, but this would require additional resources and political will.

In any case, the proposal by CENESEX and activists like Rodríguez rests on the draft document for discussion at the January 2012 national conference of the governing Cuban Communist Party, which affirms the need to overcome prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation.

“It makes sense to me that if a country wants to know about the social and demographic features of its population, it should take measures to collect reliable statistics. In this case, same-sex couples are a feature just like any other, for instance the number of heterosexual couples living together,” Rogelio Manuel Díaz told IPS.

Díaz, a nuclear physicist and the author of the blog Bubusopia, holds the view that this course of action would allow the 2012 census to “reflect reality, rather than an imaginary picture that would inevitably ignore, exclude and certainly discriminate against part of the population.”

According to Rodríguez, who writes for the trade union weekly Trabajadores, if same-sex couples and families were included in the census, it would be an important tool to persuade parliament to approve a bill recognising equal rights for heterosexual and homosexual couples.

It would also be a key step towards enacting a Gender Identity Law with the aim of guaranteeing full social inclusion for transgender persons.

Yasmín Silvia Portales, a feminist and supporter of the rights of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities, told IPS that “one of the excuses used to justify denying GLBT groups their full rights, and failing to admit that they are victims of discrimination, is that there are so few of us.

“The census is a good opportunity to explode this myth. GLBT people are out there, looking after children and elderly people, living together, getting divorced, studying or working or being supported by our partners,” said Portales, who writes the blog En 2310 y 8225.

Excerpt:

Young people have a decisive role to play in Cuban society, U.N. experts say. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Nov 4 2011 (IPS)

At 19, Liz Sandra Falcón had never imagined that every decision she made could have an impact beyond her own life: not only on people close to her, but on Cuban society itself, and even – although it might seem like an exaggeration – on global tendencies.

The expression “each person counts” went from being a slogan to being part of her daily life. “It was like a door opening,” Falcón, a second-year student at the Cuban Higher Art Institute’s Faculty of Audiovisual Media (FAMCA), told IPS. Falcón, along with her classmate Celia Suárez, designed a short video called “Child’s Play”, which won first prize in a contest organised by FAMCA, the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) and the Cuban Foreign Trade and Investment Ministry.

Another 46 ideas were presented in the contest for TV spots in Cuba as part of the 7 Billion Actions campaign carried out by UNPFA worldwide to mark the birth of the seven billionth human being on the planet, on Monday Oct. 31.

“Participating helped me to be more aware of all the problems, including some I had never thought about – the world population, youth, aging, and environmental health – and to see those problems in our everyday lives,” said Falcón, who said she was sure she would draw on this newfound awareness “in any future work I do.”

The awards ceremony for three of the public service announcements, which are now being shown on state television, was one of a number of activities on the island, including the presentation of the UNPFA State of the World Population 2011 report and lectures on specific aspects of the situation in Cuba. “Cuba is proof that the limitations on developing economies are not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to progress in the areas of health, demographic change and well-being,” Jesús Robles, international coordinator for UNPFA programmes, told IPS.

Robles said that in a world marked by disparities, this island nation is proof that “inequality can be combated if the political will exists to do so.” He also recalled the position Cuba took at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.

Having worked for sexual and reproductive health since the 1960s, the Cuban government defended then – as it does today – people’s right to decide on the number and spacing of pregnancies.

As the result of policies implemented for decades, Cuba has “a socio-demographic development level similar to that of the industrialised countries,” Juan Carlos Alfonso, director of the Centre for the Study of Population and Development of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), told IPS. “The key demographic indicators for measuring a country’s evolution are the rates of population growth, fertility and mortality. In those three indicators, Cuba is similar to the developed countries and surpasses those of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said.

Citing the 2011 State of the World Population report, Alfonso highlighted certain indicators that have a bearing on the fact that the island nation ranks 53rd on the Human Development Index drawn up by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

He noted, for example, that Cuba has a fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman, life expectancy of 79 years, and infant mortality among children five and under of 5.8 per 1,000 live births, similar to the rates seen in many industrialised countries and far below the average for Latin America and the Caribbean, of 22.4 per 1,000 live births.

After having the opportunity to participate and get her voice heard, Falcón has a new awareness about questions like sexual relations, protecting against sexually transmitted diseases, preventing pregnancy and deciding when is the best time to have a baby.

To hear young people, foster their knowledge and provide them with options to participate are, according to experts, a pressing need for Cuba, which is facing an accelerated process of aging as a result of several decades of low fertility and mortality rates and high emigration.

The National Fertility Survey conducted by the ONEI in 2009 found that the average age for first sexual intercourse in Cuba was 17 for women and 16 for men. Although people are universally aware of contraception methods, they tend to have their first relations without protection, and abortions are routine.

In addition, the survey found that couples are often formed at early ages, that sexually transmitted diseases spread due to cultural patterns that inhibit the use of condoms by stable couples, that teen pregnancy is common, and that pregnancy is often postponed by women or even ruled out as an option.

“The roles of young people are decisive in a society with social guarantees and strong community and family networks. They play an important role not only as receptive individuals who are full of energy but also, and above all, as participants,” said Rolando García, assistant representative of the UNPFA office in Cuba.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Oct 12 2011 (IPS)

Continuing its mission to promote gender studies and use academia to demonstrate the inequalities between women and men in Cuba, the Women’s Studies Department is celebrating 20 years of work with new challenges in terms of researching and drawing attention to the disadvantages faced by the female population.

“We have to take a critical approach to reality to see the inequalities that persist and those that are emerging in today’s new scenarios. The patriarchy reproduces itself and is difficult to change,” Norma Vasallo, president of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Havana, told IPS. She said she still sees a long road ahead.

“The current ‘updating’ of the economic model in the country could have repercussions on the development that women have achieved,” Vasallo, a psychologist, said, commenting on one of the principal challenges faced by women’s studies in the context of the economic changes ushered in by the Raúl Castro government.

Cuban women hold 42.7 percent of public sector jobs, according to the National Office of Statistics.

But since the government announced massive lay-offs of public employees last year, which were to potentially affect one million people by the end of 2011, an expansion of self-employment and areas like agriculture and construction that are not traditionally seen as the domain of women has been expected to absorb the hundreds of thousands of employees slashed from the public workforce.

Women make up about 69,000 of the more than 300,000 people with small private businesses, the labour and social security deputy minister, José Barreiro, told the Cuban parliament in late July. However, women tend to be concentrated in low-income activities or as the employees of these businesses, and rarely as the owners.

The agriculture sector shows similar figures. In the interest of increasing the presence of women, and not just as subordinates, the nongovernmental National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) are aiming to reach a total of 100,000 women in diverse jobs in the cooperative sector by the end of 2011.

Another pending issue for academia is the area of women and health, a concern that has not caught on among the medical personnel of this Caribbean island nation, Vasallo said. Moreover, progress is needed in the areas of law and communication, and in legitimising “problems that are not yet recognised by society, such as gender-based violence,” she added.

Since it was created in September 1991, the department has brought together researchers, above all, from the University of Havana’s 17 departments, including psychology, sociology, philosophy and philology. Their efforts have been joined by the activities of other entities, such as the FMC and the Oscar Arnulfo Romero Reflection and Solidarity Group.

“Since the late 1980s, a marked interest has resurfaced among women academics in having an association,” noted writer Luisa Campusano during a gathering of the department’s founders in September. “When the economic crisis was forecast, the need to research women’s issues became stronger,” she explained.

Sociologist Marta Núñez said this interest was related to “the ideological position, in this case of women researchers, that women suffer disadvantages such as the double workday, at work and at home.” Cuban women devote an average of 34 hours a week to domestic work, while men only spend about 12 hours on supportive tasks, studies show.

Before the department was founded, demographer Sonia Catasús, sociologists Niurka Pérez and Elena Díaz, psychologist Irene Smith, Núñez and Campusano, among others, individually conducted research in what is now known as “gender studies,” in their different institutions and nongovernmental organisations.

In the early 1980s, the first articles appeared on women construction workers, women farmers and women brick-makers, in addition to subjects like literature, fertility and feminism. Some of the outstanding work focused on Cuban women in two textile factories, the Ariguanabo (1986-1988) and the Celia Sánchez (1986-1987).

Women’s studies began appearing in Cuba at least 15 years after their peak in Latin America, Vasallo says regretfully. In 1989, since the emergence of the Women’s and Family Studies Department at the Villa Clara Teachers’ Institute, located about 360 kilometres east of Havana, these academic spaces for women’s studies became official and are now expanding.

In 1988, a group of teachers presented a request to create the women’s studies department to the vice-chancellor’s office of the University of Havana, but it did not happen until 1991, Elena Díaz recalled. It was proposed then to encourage these studies in the country and to reflect on the needs and obstacles faced by the female population.

“We were able to promote human resource training through continuing education courses and local, national and international conferences,” Vasallo said about the work of the group led until 1997 by psychologist Albertina Mitjans.

That is how the biannual international workshop Women in the 21st Century arose in 1995, and as of its 2011 edition, participation continued to grow, including the number of papers presented, from all 15 Cuban provinces, and it was expanded to include other issues within women’s studies, such as violence, masculinity and race.

In 2005, a master’s programme in Gender Studies was created. It is the only one of its kind in the country, and the third of five editions was offered at the University of Holguín, 689 kilometres east of Havana, with financial support from Oxfam International.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Oct 10 2011 (IPS)

Excluded from the 2010 Human Development Index, Cuba will issue a report of its own, which will reflect the impact of an economic crisis that has lasted for 20-plus years, and will show social and health indicators typical of the developed world.

This decision, which has the support of the Human Development Report (HDR) Office of the United Nations Development Programme, is one of the results of a process of dialogue and consultation that followed the exclusion of Cuba from the U.N. agency’s global report in 2010.

After a Sep. 30 visit to Cuba, Khalid Malik, the new director of the HDR Office, said they were ready to work together with the UNDP office in Cuba.

This is not the first time that the UNDP has supported efforts by Cuba to measure human development in this Caribbean island nation. Three studies were conducted by the government-run Centre for the Study of the World Economy in 1996, 1999 and 2003, in the latter two cases devoted specifically to equity and science and technology.

Malik said that, in parallel with this effort, his office hoped Cuba would participate in a global human development forum to be held in January or February of 2012.

He said that at the conference the HDR Office would analyse the HDI and how to best gauge progress in human development among countries. And he added that the more all the countries work together with the UNDP, the more everyone will benefit. His trip to the island was one of his first missions as director of the HDR office.

One of the main aims of the visit was the official presentation to Cuban authorities of the results of the process that followed the publication of the report “The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development” and the methodological changes that made it possible to retroactively include Cuba.

According to the UNDP, Cuba was omitted from the 2010 Human Development Index (HDI) due to the absence of current internationally reported data for one of the three required indicators: health, education and income (which are used to calculate the composite HDI value, which in turn determines a country’s HDI ranking.)

The missing indicator for Cuba was for income, because there is no internationally reported figure for Cuba’s Gross National Income adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (GNI-PPP): the figure used for all countries for the income component of the HDI, and which is normally provided by the World Bank and/or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Doubts were also raised about the reliability of Cuba’s ranking in the HDI reports from previous years, due to the difficulty of comparing data from a country where the economy operates with a dual currency system (the Cuban peso and the Cuban convertible peso).

“They provided very unusual numbers and that happens because there were two types of exchange,” Malik told IPS. “When you have to compare country by country, you compare the local currency with the international and then all of the countries. And that gave rise to figures that did not seem real and that could give an erroneous impression.”

“This is a technical problem and perhaps it was not the right decision,” he said, referring to the decision not to include Cuba.

“What we did after that was to invest a lot of time trying to find a reliable method to see how we could come up with a formula that does not need conversion, in order to arrive at a figure that seems to be accurate. And then we updated all of the results from all the years about Cuba, as well as the formula,” he explained.

In addition to Cuba, the 2010 report excluded Palau and the Occupied Palestinian Territories due to problems with data. The situation, which sparked debate and joint work by statistics specialists at various institutions, eventually led to the return of all three countries to the HDI, and to the expansion of its coverage from 169 to more than 180 nations

The methodology developed made it possible to make a retroactive estimate, according to which Cuba would have ranked 53rd in the HDI 2010, among the group of countries with high human development. In the Latin American and Caribbean region, it would have been in sixth place.

In the case of Cuba, the new method for calculating GNI takes into account per capita GDP with relation to international trade, per capita energy consumption, proportion of the population with Internet access, and a set of regional variables.

The result, according to sources from the HDR Office, reflects national achievements such as an average of 10 years of schooling among the adult population, almost 18 expected years of schooling among the younger generations, a life expectancy of 79 years, and 5,747 dollars in income per capita in PPP terms.

“Cuba is the only Latin American country in the top ten non-income-HDI movers over the past decade, with life expectancy increasing by two years and expected years of schooling increasing by five years. These are remarkable improvements for a country that already had very high health and education indicators at the outset of the decade,” says an article by Francisco Rodríguez and Clara García, head of research and statistics and research analyst, respectively, in the HDR Office.

The global reports, however, are not able to take into account highly specific aspects from each nation, such as the possible impact on human development of the nearly five-decade United States embargo against Cuba, Malik admitted during his remarks to reporters in Havana.

“The more we see each other and work together, the more we can all benefit,” the U.N. official said, after meeting with Cuban authorities and experts, accompanied by Barbara Pesce-Monteiro, U.N. resident coordinator and UNDP resident representative in Cuba.

Excerpt:

Artificial single-species forests are expanding fast in countries of the developing South, fuelled by low production costs and incentives from governments, and causing severe social and environmental impacts, warned experts from around the world who met this week in the Uruguayan capital.

The so-called “green deserts” are encroaching on the fertile soil of South America and other regions, with the proliferation of plantations of fast-growing and high water-demanding trees to be used to produce pulp and paper, and for other industrial uses, displacing local communities and threatening native ecosystems.

Many governments in the global South support this model of investment, production and consumption, which is replicated from the North, said the participants in the International Symposium on Forestation, held Wednesday Sep. 21, the International Day of Struggle against Tree Plantations.

“Some 350 kg of paper per person a year are consumed in Europe, half of which is packaging, while in Brazil and Uruguay the average is 50 kgs per person annually,” Brazilian activist Winfridus Overbeek, international coordinator of the Uruguay-based World Rainforest Movement (WRM), told IPS.

Overbeek said that in Europe as well as North America, there is no longer enough space to plant the trees required for that high level of consumption, so companies are shifting production to countries of the developing South.

He also pointed to the different opportunities found by transnational corporations in the developing world, where fertile land abounds and production costs and wages are lower than in the industrialised North.

In several countries of Latin America, as well as in southern Africa and in Asia, monoculture eucalyptus and pine plantations are advancing, to supply paper pulp factories. Plantations of oil palm, first established in Indonesia, are also expanding in those areas.

Meanwhile, “to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, false solutions to protect the planet have been created,” said Overbeek. “The production of biofuels, produced with palm oil, for example, is promoted, even though the processing and transportation releases into the atmosphere the same amount of carbon that it is supposed to reduce.”

Moreover, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), one of the “flexibility” mechanisms defined in the Kyoto Protocol, allows developed countries to continue emitting greenhouse gases while investing in projects that supposedly boost local development and cut emissions in the developing world as offsets for their own polluting.

“One of those activities is, precisely, planting trees on a large scale,” Overbeek complained.

Guadalupe Rodríguez, a member of the Germany-based Rainforest Rescue, told IPS that “monoculture forests tend to be seen as a good thing, because they are green and pretty. But if you approach them, you won’t hear a single bird, because there is nothing there, just silence.

“A monoculture forest is almost like a stone quarry,” she added. “In tropical rainforests, by contrast, you hear animals, water flowing, because they are full of life.”

Brazil is a prime example of how the expansion of plantation forests affects local communities.

There are currently around seven million forested hectares in Brazil, mainly eucalyptus, in plantations “concentrated in the country’s most fertile and populous regions,” Overbeek said.

“We estimate that 50,000 families who used to make a living from farming have been displaced from the countryside for that reason in the southeastern state of Espírito Santo,” where the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) already has 10 settlements.

“They went into the eucalyptus growing areas, cut down trees, and built themselves houses, to say: ‘we need this land to survive’,” the WRM coordinator said. “And on Mar. 8, the MST brought 1,500 women together to cut down eucalyptus trees and grow food, and today, six months later, there are beans and corn growing in an area that was a monoculture forest.”

Overbeek added that, because Brazil has been governed by left-wing presidents since 2003, unlike in the past “they no longer send in the police to combat the occupations of land; fortunately that kind of violence isn’t happening now.”

But communities that resist the thirsty plantation forests do face repression in other developing countries. “There have been murders of people who were involved in resistance struggles,” Rodríguez said.

She cited, for example, the case of a Guatemalan peasant woman who was killed for opposing the expansion of sugar cane and oil palm plantations in the northern province of Alta Verapaz. The impact of forest plantations on grasslands and prairies and on water is another serious problem.

Philip Owen, founder of Geasphere, a South Africa-based environmental pressure group, described to IPS the negative experience in Mpumalanga region in the northeast of that country, where eucalyptus and pine plantations have dried up groundwater, streams and rivers.

The other major impact is on biodiversity. Monoculture plantations spell out death for grasslands, because light, which is essential for the prairie to grow, is blocked out, he said.

He also explained that native grasslands act like a sponge, absorbing rain and moisture so that it infiltrates into the ground, and their disappearance can lead to flooding and soil erosion.

The companies planting the artificial forests in Mpumalanga, Owen said, are also killing off animals like baboons, which damage the trees in the plantations in their search for food. He said some 3,000 baboons have been slaughtered in the last 10 years in South Africa.

The case of Uruguay is similar to that of South Africa. The environmental experts who came to Uruguay for the symposium visited two areas with different and opposite models of production.

“On one hand, we saw the work carried out by local residents in Cerro Alegre, in the southwestern department (province) of Soriano, which over the last 10 years has suffered from a shortage of water due to industrial forestation in the area that is affecting 100 families,” Elizabeth Díaz, with the Uruguayan environmental organisation Guayubira, told IPS.

“We also visited the city of Tarariras, in the neighbouring department of Colonia, where a number of families make a living from agriculture thanks to a diversified production model. It’s an example of how to live and work in the countryside, when there are no monoculture forests,” she said.

Díaz said the environmentalists who met in Montevideo reached the conclusion that “the production model based on large-scale monoculture is the same throughout the developing world, with very similar impacts on communities and the environment.”

Although pets are banned in some areas, many owners take them along to the beach. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Sep 5 2011 (IPS)

People are packed like sardines on the sand and in the water. Like every summer in Cuba, tens of thousands of Havana residents seek to escape the heat and worries of city life every day along a 12-km stretch of popular beaches to the east of the capital, known as Playas del Este.

“When I was a teenager, I used to come with my friends every day in July and August as soon as school was out and until we had to go back. Now transportation is more difficult and the beach is not as nice, but even so, I can’t stop coming,” Liana Méndez, a 36-year-old professional, told IPS.

Méndez, like many Cubans, schedules her summer vacation to coincide with the school holidays. “We rent a private house for the whole family for a week, or we come whenever we can on the bus, by taxi or on the train to Guanabo,” she added.

Up to 200,000 people a day crowd the beaches to the east of Havana, a veritable invasion that overburdens the public transport system and affects the lives of the area’s 25,000 year-round residents.

For over 30 years, the Havana provincial transport authorities have added additional buses to the beach routes. But for more than a decade, those efforts have been concentrated on Guanabo, a community with few state offerings for foreign tourists and a high concentration of Cuban beach-goers.

Every August, departures are scheduled from the Havana central railway station for a five-carriage Guanabo-bound train with a 300-seat capacity. “Sometimes it’s scary to see how many people get off that train in the morning,” said María Díaz, who lives in Guanabo’s La Conchita neighbourhood.

Like her neighbours, Díaz places a sign on her door to keep visitors away: “No water, no bathroom, beware of dog.” There are families, however, who for years have made a living from providing summertime services, from doing brisk business renting rooms or houses to selling drinking water.

“One family here built their home by selling tamales on the beach. It took them about 15 years, but they did it,” Díaz commented.

On the Guanabo train, groups of young people chat boisterously as a mother nurses her baby, who will bathe in the sea before his first birthday. There is no lack of the traditional peanut and candy sellers, or police, who try to keep order during a time when social problems are mounting due to alcohol consumption.

At the end of the day, signs of the “human flood” are everywhere: the remains of food, beer cans, plastic bottles and bags, condoms, rum bottles and other rubbish are strewn across the sand, despite the rustic garbage cans distributed along the beach.

At night, the waves drag some of the waste from the beaches into the sea.

When the sun is high in the sky at noon, university professor Tania González, 46, and her husband, Ricardo Herrera, 48, look for shade. They decided to take the bus to leave early in the morning from the Havana district of 10 de Octubre with their two children, Liz and Adrián, on a journey that can take hours because of the transport crisis.

“Some parts of the beach are in quite bad shape,” said González, who remembers the “green-blue” colour of the water when her parents would bring her as a child. Palm trees and other coastal vegetation are scant after years of construction of homes and service facilities along the shore. And the coastline retreats almost one metre a year due to erosion.

For almost two decades, the dunes were covered with stands of casuarinas, or Australian pines, which are not native to the area. They were cut down between 1981 and 1985.

Both of those mistakes have contributed to coastal erosion and the shrinking or outright disappearance of the dunes, according to a study by the government-run Cuban Oceanology Institute.

Published as part of a 2010 oceanology series, the article by a group of authors led by geologist Magalys Sosa found that “in the last 27 years, the Playas del Este have evolved toward the restoration of the original morphology of dunes.” But more must be done to restore the area’s ecosystem, she said.

“We came early and we’re leaving early. It is not recommendable to be under the sun at noon and during the afternoon. There are hardly any palm trees, and the few we saw were far way,” Adanet Rodríguez, a 15-year-old student, told IPS. Unlike previous generations of young people, she is beginning to be aware of the dangers of excessive tanning.

Studies by the Cuban Centre for Engineering and Environmental Management of Bays and Coasts warn that the main source of pollution is faeces, which is poured into the ocean through sewage discharge and rivers like the Guanabo and Itabo. Likewise, toxic substances from oil spills have been found in coastal waters.

The local population loves the beach. Several environmental projects have emerged in these areas, such as the now-defunct 2006 Sibarimar Committee of the Cuban Society for the Protection of the Environment/Pronaturaleza.

From 1994, this group had promoted participatory and community management of the area, along with environmental education.

Since the project came to an end, however, “only brief environmental actions have been carried out” in the area, Ángel Valdés, president of Pronaturaleza, told IPS.

In 2012, a new environmental initiative should benefit the town of Guanabo and 30 other coastal communities nationwide, the activist announced.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Aug 31 2011 (IPS)

They get ready for the jump, a spectacular airborne pirouette follows and then a stream of saltwater spray rounds off the plunge. Dozens of youngsters, mainly boys, cool off from the summer heat with daring dives from the sea wall lining the Malecón, the Cuban capital’s famous seaside avenue.

Most of those diving off the Malecón seawall are young men and boys. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The Malecón features a broad sidewalk ending in a thick wall of concrete that runs along eight kilometres of coastline, from Havana Bay to the city’s largest river, the Almendares.

The waves crash hard and unskilled swimmers can be slammed against the reef, banged up, scraped or even killed. “They say that this is where the sewers empty out. But swimming off the Malecón is something normal now,” Deinar, a 29-year-old kitchen assistant who has brought her young son along to swim, comments to IPS.

The largest number of bathers gathers at the intersection of Paseo del Prado, where the reef has natural swimming holes, a favourite spot for children who splash around and older women who dip their toes. The teenagers and young men, meanwhile, continue their dives, with the most daring jumping off the top of the wall.

The ruins of early 20th century resorts can still be seen. They were created when these coastal waters were still crystal clear, and demolished to build the seawall. It was not until after 1990 that the custom of swimming off the Malecón returned as a result of the economic crisis and a lack of transportation for visiting the beaches 20 kilometres east of the city.

Before diving in, 19-year-old accounting student Yulian Lara chats with IPS. Every summer he comes to the area to swim because “it’s closer to home. A lot of people go to the eastern beaches in the summer and problems come up (violence and fighting). Here, I have no problem with transportation,” he says.

A symbol of Havana, the Malecón encompasses three municipalities: Habana Vieja (Old Havana), Centro Habana and Plaza de la Revolución. It is guarded on each end by colonial-era fortresses: the Castillo de La Punta and La Chorrera, which used to protect the city from pirate attacks.

The most popular swimming spot is right at the entry to Havana Bay, where the lack of oxygen in the water made survival of marine fauna impossible.

In 1998, a working group, the GTE-BH, was established to clean up the bay. It charges taxes for port services in order to reinvest in the Havana Bay ecosystem and monitors compliance with regulations aimed at preventing the dumping of industrial waste.

The Luyanó River, which empties into the bay, accounts for almost 90 percent of the contamination that comes from its tributaries. An additional 98 sources contribute industrial waste, but that volume was reduced by 56 percent over the last decade as a result of actions by the GTE-BH.

Since 2008, the bay’s waters have had the minimum level of oxygen needed for life, and pollution has been reduced by more than 74 percent, Yosvany Simón, one of the group’s directors, told reporters in July. Every year, however, at least one environmental accident occurs, such as an oil spill from a ship or from the Ñico López refinery.

Environmentalists Irina Echarry and Erasmo Calzadilla warn that “oil, sewage and industrial waste, all of which are harmful to health, empty into the bay every day.”

Health authorities warn swimmers about the risk of contracting digestive, respiratory and skin diseases.

Echarry and Calzadilla participated last year in two citizen clean-up efforts, to collect the garbage left by visitors on the reefs of the Malecón, mostly cans, glass and plastic bags.

“Plastic bags and soda and beer cans (which are not biodegradable) are the main contribution by swimmers to costal pollution. We have seen families picnicking on the shore, and because there are no garbage cans on the reefs, waste ends up in the ocean,” the activists said.

Garbage cans do line the sidewalk that runs along the seawall, though, where thousands of people go every day to chat, fall in love, sing and look at the waves.

Along the Malecón, Havana’s most-frequented area, only one sign exists prohibiting swimming and fishing. In the centrally-located Vedado neighbourhood, a group of people dive off the wall across from the Riviera and Melía Cohiba hotels, and further ahead, at the end of the wall, is the second most-popular area, next to La Chorrera, a colonial-era fort.

The Malecón runs to the mouth of the Almendares River, one of the most polluted in the country. According to a 2010 report from the National Office of Statistics, there were 2,017 tons of biochemical oxygen demand – a yardstick of the amount of faecal and other organic material – in the river’s waters that year, up from the 2007 to 2009 totals.

When the sun sets behind La Chorrera fortress, the swimmers start to leave the Malecón, giving way to families, couples in love and groups of people seeking a sea breeze in the hot summer air. They are joined by the fishermen who come every night hoping for a catch.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Aug 16 2011 (IPS)

Nearly four years after realising her dream of changing her body into a woman’s to match her transgender identity, Wendy Iriepa rode through the Cuban capital in a vintage convertible, wearing a stunning full-length white bridal gown and unfurling a rainbow flag, the symbol of the sexual diversity movement, for all to see.

Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada are now wife and husband. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Loyalty to her love caused Iriepa to leave the state National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX) in July, bidding farewell to its director Mariela Castro and psychologist Mayra Rodríguez, in charge of care for transsexual persons at the centre, who for many years she had regarded as a second mother.

According to contrasting reports, she was either expelled from CENESEX or she resigned. Whatever the case may be, the 37-year-old transsexual underwent a radical change: from holding an active and distinguished post in the institution, to joining demonstrations by the dissident Women in White, a group of relatives of political prisoners.

She also invited internationally renowned dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez and her husband, journalist Reynaldo Escobar, to stand up in her wedding.

The marriage ceremony went off without a hitch on the afternoon of Saturday Aug. 13, and was attended by many representatives of dissident movements. Earlier, Estrada called the marriage a “birthday present to (former Cuban president) Fidel Castro to remind him of the atrocities he committed against the Cuban gay community, above all in the 1960s.”

Fidel Castro turned 85 on Aug. 13. In the 1960s, many gay and transsexual people were fired from government jobs, jailed, sent to work camps or fled into exile.

“I don’t know why it’s been politicised, because Ignacio and I did not want to make it political,” said Iriepa. However, she said apologies for past mistakes by Fidel Castro himself were not enough to redress the persistence of police harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in public places.

A further nuance was added Friday Aug. 12 by Mariela Castro – the daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro and Fidel’s niece – who wished Iriepa every happiness in her marriage, but went on to claim that U.S. government funds are being used to promote LGBT groups on the island “that oppose the position of CENESEX.”

“This (U.S.) policy is a media campaign against Cuba, with a lot of money behind it, and some people are being seduced by these things,” Mariela Castro said. Her allegation was immediately denied by Leannes Imbert, the head of the Cuban Observatory on LGBT Rights, in which bridegroom Estrada is a prominent member.

The head of CENESEX said she was delighted that Iriepa was able to marry, “although not exactly with a heterosexual man as she wanted, but it seems she has found the love of her life and is celebrating it.” CENESEX’s work “has been for this, the well-being and happiness of our sisters,” she said.

Iriepa was one of the first people on the island to benefit from free sex reassignment operations in late 2007, when a team of foreign specialists began training Cuban doctors in the surgical procedures, in a pilot programme largely arranged by CENESEX.

At an international market cost of around 15,000 dollars each, the operations were legally approved by a Health Ministry resolution in 2008 as part of a comprehensive health care programme for transsexuals, which CENESEX complements with a much broader strategy of social integration.

Since that time, 16 people have had sex reassignment surgery and another 15 are on the waiting list, out of 35 transsexuals accepted by the programme, Dr. Alberto Roque, coordinator of the National Commission for Comprehensive Care of Transsexual People, told IPS.

Roque, who is himself a gay activist, said three people who have been surgically reassigned to the female gender have succeeded in changing the legal designation on their identity documents, and 12 more are in the process of doing so.

“Wendy Iriepa’s sex reassignment process is complete, according to the programme protocol, including the change on her identity document. However, she has every right and we are very willing for her to approach the Commission for medical care any time she wishes,” said the internal medicine specialist.

Iriepa was one of the first transsexuals to obtain legal identity as a woman, giving her access to a civil marriage, which the constitution defines as the formalisation of a union between a man and a woman. But the wedding was not the first of its kind in Cuba.

In 1991, Mavi Susel, the first person to receive surgical sex reassignment within the public health system, in 1988, was married at a civil registry office in Cuba. Unlike Iriepa’s, though, her wedding was a very private affair, far removed from the media spotlight, political tensions and controversies over human rights.

Sex reassignment surgery and changes of legal identity, which bring with them a string of benefits for the transsexual community, are among the chief accomplishments of CENESEX, that for years has promoted respect for freely chosen sexual orientation and gender identity as part of its vision that includes legal unions between same-sex couples.

“From this day forth, in our view, Cuba is entering a new era, for which all of civil society is united in struggle,” Estrada said as he arrived at the registry office.

“I dedicate my wedding to all those who want to have their own,” said Iriepa after the brief civil ceremony, adding that she had “fought hard for this.”

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jul 6 2011 (IPS)

“I want to meet @salvatore300 and @elainediaz2003” was a comment overheard at #TwittHab, the first meeting in Cuba of social network users. After years of being connected only via the web, the internet is now being used to facilitate real-world contact between citizens of this socialist island nation.

“Social encounters and meetings can be organised spontaneously, without the tutelage of the Cuban institutions. They just take place, and nothing bad happens: there is no need to fear,” Rogelio M. Díaz, the author of the blog Bubusopia and one of the participants at an unusual “Twitterfest” in Cuba that kicked off Jul. 1, told IPS.

Political tensions between the Cuban government and its historic enemy, the United States, and continuing frictions with groups of political dissidents, who also use blogs and social networks to express their views, create a complex climate for initiatives of this kind.

However, on the afternoon of Jul. 1, on the corner of 23rd and 12th Streets in downtown Havana, some 35 faces, mostly young but some not so young, came out “from behind the @,” as one of the slogans for the meeting invited Cuban Twitterers to do.

Convened by Leunam Rodríguez, the administrator of the Radio Cubana portal, the meeting was one of three that took place the same afternoon in the Cuban capital. It inspired reactions in the eastern province of Holguín, and gave rise to several more meetings in cultural centres and nightspots in Havana, “to carry on talking and getting to know each other,” over the whole weekend, as one participant told IPS.

The original idea for #TwitterHab arose in mid-June and spread swiftly through blogs and social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The goal of the “real life, friendly” get-together was to have an opportunity to get to know the faces, people and thoughts behind on-line identities such as @alondraM (“larkM”) and @cuba1erplano (“Cuba Foreground”).

Without a specific agenda and just for the sake of sharing, the creativity of university students, journalists, bloggers and professionals in the computing world gave rise to posters and name tags combining Twitter visualisations with Cuban symbols such as the trogon (tocororo), the national bird.

“Come out from behind the @ now!” and “I want to get to know you” were the invitations that circulated in cyberspace. But some people unconnected with the organisation, as well as some mass media outside Cuba, put a political interpretation on the friendly social meeting’s aims, according to observers.

“It was actually only a group of young people who wanted to meet and get to know each other. It was not even close to being political,” blogger and psychologist Sandra Álvarez, whose Twitter name is @negracubana” (“Afro-Cuban woman”) and who attended the meeting at 23rd and 12th Streets, told IPS.

According to Elaine Díaz, author of the blog La Polémica Digital (Digital Controversy), needless politicisation “distorts the original goals of the initiative.” The day before #TwittHab, Leunam Rodríguez announced a change of venue, to the Cuba Pavilion in the central Havana neighbourhood of Vedado.

The Asociación Hermanos Saíz, a non-governmental cultural organisation for young artists, which has its headquarters in the pavilion, offered computers with internet access for the event. The main organiser, Rodríguez, with members of the blog La Joven Cuba (Young Cuba) and representatives of the self-styled alternative Cuban blogosphere, showed up there.

Hours later, some of the people who had been at either of the two locations went to a Havana park by the Amadeo Roldán theatre, and together addressed the issue of communication and the aspirations for better connectivity on a mass scale in the country, which could be possible thanks to a fibre optic cable that has been laid with Venezuelan support.

A 2010 nationwide survey of 38,000 households by the National Statistics Office (ONE) found that only 2.9 percent of respondents said they had surfed the internet in 2009. Of those, 59.9 percent used the internet from their educational centre, 7.4 percent from their workplace, and 5.9 percent at home.

At the park, nearly 100 people who had earlier gone either to the Cuba Pavilion or to the corner of 23rd and 12th streets fulfilled their common dream of “getting to know one another and sharing experiences.” A homemade video, to be posted on YouTube, was made of everyone introducing themselves, along with their online name tags.

This spontaneously agreed third venue was a place where dialogue and debate flowed freely about several concerns, including how to achieve inclusion for people in Cuba, whatever their political convictions, who want to offer their personal views through social networks and blogs.

“I don’t need an introduction: I am the father of Twitter in Cuba,” said Roger Trabas, @roger213tm, when it was his turn to face the camera.

Trabas was the second Cuban, in early 2008, to open a Twitter account, a social network that contains a mixture of “people who live in the world, and other people who want to change it,” the group of participants agreed.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jul 4 2011 (IPS)

Despite the many limitations on access to digital-age technology in Cuba, a taste for computer games is spreading in this country, giving rise to a youthful movement that is beginning to conquer new public spaces.

Starting in the 1990s, a small group of mainly young people in this socialist island nation began to enter the world of video games. Over time, the number of people involved grew, and they became keen on face-to-face competitions and meetings, instead of just virtual interaction.

This gave rise to the nongovernmental Cuban Electronic Sports Group (ADEC), created in November 2007, which works to “spread the culture and wholesome entertainment” of these types of games, Ian Pedro Carbonell, the group’s president, told IPS.

StarCraft, a strategy game created in 1998 by the U.S. company Blizzard, is the best promoted and most popular among the young people who belong to ADEC. Since its launch on the market, it has gained followers worldwide, and in some countries, such as South Korea, it is considered a “sport”.

It can be played on computers with minimal technical requirements, although they need to be able to connect to a network for playing in groups, a more engaging option than a single person playing against the computer.

“In Cuba, not everybody has access to this technology,” Jessica Sori, one of the few women who have participated in the StarCraft tournaments, told IPS. “As a serious sport, it can only be played by those who don’t have heavy work or study commitments, because it requires a lot of time,” explained the young University of Havana sociology major.

Very few young women compete in the tournaments, more popular among men, which are organised by ADEC at least five times a year for both individuals and teams. Sori said young women are not attracted to this type of game because of a sexist upbringing from an early age.

The Blizzard game, which has spread to all parts of the world in either paid or pirated form, recreates an imaginary universe inhabited by the Terran, Protoss and Zerg civilisations. Each has its own weaknesses and strengths, allowing players to chart their strategies.

To win, players must be familiar with the potential of each civilisation, develop mental agility and know the keyboard commands to execute each action as fast as possible. In addition to StarCraft, the Cuban group of about 300 members sponsors games that it considers electronic sports, such as Warcraft.

With no profit motive, young people, especially university students, organise get-togethers to play in cities like Holguín, Sancti Spíritus, Camagüey and Matanzas. “In other provinces, the electronic sports movement is practically null,” Osmani Grau, a computer programmer in the central province of Sancti Spíritus, told IPS.

The scant access to communications via telephone or cell-phone hinders the enjoyment of this hobby in teams, Grau commented. According to a National Office of Statistics survey of about 38,000 homes conducted in early 2010, only 2.9 percent of Cubans had direct access to the Internet in 2009.

Nevertheless, the tournaments began a few years ago in private homes. In fact, the first Havana StarCraft League existed before ADEC was established. Later, the Havana Teams League formed, and the idea of going public gradually gained force.

In Havana, the first gathering in an institutional space took place in 2009, in the University Student Centre, run by the federation to which all university students belong. For the past year, the Maxim Rock auditorium in the capital, home to the Cuban Rock Agency, has accommodated ADEC events.

At the Maxim, as this Cuban temple to rock music is popularly known, the group adds other expressions of electronic culture to its programme. Cuban DJs and VJs (music video jockeys) provide the music for the tournaments, which have become more and more frequent.

The main aim of this youthful initiative, however, is to be recognised as an organisation by the National Institute of Sport and Recreation (INDER), the state entity that regulates this area in Cuba. But “INDER has a complicated financing situation; it is impossible for it to take us on right now,” Padrón said.

Talks with INDER led only to an agreement of possible support for locales and infrastructure, said Padrón, a cybernetics student at the University of Havana. “We asked them to at least recognise this new form of wholesome recreation, and in the future, to validate it as a sport.”

If these games are classified as a sport, ADEC could aspire to its own venue, better technology for other games, and even sending talented Cubans to international tournaments, Padrón commented. For now, they finance their activities with the support of companies and producers like singer-songwriter Pablo Milanes’s PM Records.

Informal networks using thick cables running from window to window, or wireless connections with telecommunications devices such as AP (wireless access points), liven up the underground, almost clandestine, world of electronic games in Cuba.

This form of entertainment, which tends to become an addiction, explodes when played over the web. Cubans have devised creative alternatives, according to a 29-year-old Havana man who asked for anonymity. He told IPS he knows of five wireless networks near his neighbourhood, each of them comprising about 20 people, set up for that purpose.

The technology for these connections is not sold in authorised stores. On the underground market, however, accessible on websites like Revolico, buyers can find everything from video cards to APs for connecting some 30 computers within the radius covered by the antenna’s signal.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jun 20 2011 (IPS)

The idea emerged spontaneously, and then snowballed. In just a few months, more than 100 people in Cuba became part of a young people’s social network for diversity, in a society where machismo and homophobia are seen as natural.

Cuban psychologist Yasmany Díaz told IPS he uses gender neutral terms, “so nobody complains or feels left out.” Díaz works with the government-run National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), which took over coordination of the Young People for Diversity social network this year.

But he said that more than coordination, it involves “accompanying” the process. “Accompaniment cannot be from up ahead, it must be shoulder to shoulder,” he said. In other words, “no rigid plans or bosses.

“Young people today are avid to participate, but in a real way, without leaders, horizontally, with a focus on being able to do things and on constant dialogue,” he added.

“It doesn’t matter what you are” has become the slogan of the group, which does not distinguish among its members based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“You just have to be young, feel young, and want to do things, to be part of our group,” added the 26-year-old psychologist, who uses the methodology of grassroots education in his work.

Young People for Diversity is just one of the networks that have sprung up in recent years around CENESEX, whose work is aimed at raising awareness about sexual rights as human rights. The process includes three women’s groups, a trans group and Men for Diversity.

The new group’s history goes back to 2009, when CENESEX began working at the main centre of the Federation of University Students (FEU), one of the principal youth organisations in Cuba. The first meetings were followed by conferences, video-debates and workshops for training sex education and rights promoters.

Since late 2010, work with university students has gained strength and has even exceeded expectations, thanks to improved organisation and to financial support for a CENESEX project from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

Within just a few months, the group has been joined by students from various fields, including journalism, psychology, law, sociology, geography, arts and letters, education, industrial design, medicine, and various technical and computer science careers. Young people from the provinces of Pinar del Rio and Matanzas in western Cuba have also joined in.

“Homophobia affects everyone, including heterosexuals, because it conditions whom they can or cannot hang out with,” Ana Lucía Gómez, a 22-year-old sociology student, told IPS. “This is a struggle for changing mentalities, against all forms of machismo that predominate in society.”

Like her, Antonio Alejo, at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Havana, found in CENESEX an opportunity to “learn more and work for a new openness in society” regarding an issue about which he had always had questions, and which he described as “being against a socially-imposed culture.”

Some of the network’s most active members took part in the May activities for the Cuba Anti-Homophobia Campaign, a high point in a much broader programme for free sexual orientation and gender identity that lasts throughout the year, with activities in different provinces.

As part of these experiences, Wilfredo Mederos, a young professor at the Enrique José Varona University of Pedagogical Sciences (UCP), decided on his own to take one of his classes to a debate on sexual diversity at the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

“Raising awareness among teachers is a real challenge,” Mederos, who is a member of Men for Diversity, told IPS. “School, along with the family and the community, are the key factors in the socialisation of children. That is where the child learns to love or hate, to accept or reject, to be homophobic or not.”

The professor, who also forms part of the Department of Gender, Sexology and Sex Education at the UCP, said heterosexual people need to join the fight against homophobia, because this type of hatred is not exclusive to any one population group, and extends even to the youngest generations.

As a result of their experience in the “conga” or parade against homophobia on a central avenue in Havana on May 14, a group of young people spontaneously joined together to create the Heterosexual Cubans against Homophobia community on the Facebook social networking site.

According to Díaz, today’s younger generations in Cuba may have a greater potential for change, but that does not mean they are free of the dominant culture of machismo and, therefore, of prejudice toward homosexual, bisexual and trans people and deep-rooted homophobia.

“While young people may be a little more open, there is still a great deal of resistance,” the psychologist said. “We cannot ignore the fact that we are the product of a culture, nor can we ignore the socialisation process. Moreover, an individual may change, but the family has to change with us.”

Nevertheless, “our work sees the younger generations as a force for social change,” he said.

“If we look at the history of this country, young people have been the driving force behind social changes that have led to economic and political change, and to one extent or another, a change in awareness,” he noted.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jun 16 2011 (IPS)

Women in Cuba are gaining ground in public life and earn the same wages as men. But the gender gap in the workplace is still a challenge for women, who are finding the odds more heavily stacked against them as the government of Raúl Castro adopts economic reforms aimed at “updating” the country’s socialist system.

“I don’t know what to do,” a 53-year-old Havana woman told IPS, after finding herself for the first time ever without the security of a state job.

Another woman, 39 and highly qualified, remembers the times when she sought an executive position in the tourism industry: “Nobody said as much to me, but I heard that I didn’t get the job because I have a young daughter.”

As is the case with women around the world, despite the fact that generations of Cuban women are well-educated, they continue to lag behind in the most stable, best-remunerated sectors of the economy, says sociologist Mayra Espina Prieto in her findings on poverty for the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS).

According to official sources, women earn wages that are equivalent to 80 to 85 percent of what men earn, for reasons such as fewer days worked because of having to care for a family member, above all children and the elderly.

Men hold the majority of executive positions in joint ventures with foreign capital and the tourism industry, and a good part of the jobs that have possibilities of access to hard currency bonuses. The women may be better-qualified, but they tend to hold intermediate management positions.

Paid work for women is concentrated essentially in the state and civil sector, where they total 42.7 percent of employees. And in 2009, women held 59 percent of administrative jobs, according to the National Office of Statistics (ONE).

But this is starting to change, under the decentralisation policies aimed at overhauling the country’s economic system, approved in April at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. Some of the policies began to be implemented prior to the party Congress, such as a major reduction in inflated state-sector payrolls, which began in 2010.

The ultimate goal is to reduce public sector employment by more than one million jobs, in this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people. The number of private activities in which self-employment is allowed was expanded to 178, and rules easing the tax burden were created, to encourage more people to strike out on their own.

While President Castro called for avoiding “any manifestation of favouritism, or discrimination based on gender or any other type” during this process, the disadvantaged situation of women set off a red alert among women’s rights activists and experts.

“I don’t see self-employment offering many assurances for the security of that whole mass of people without work, the majority of whom are going to be women,” Zulema Hidalgo, of the nongovernmental Oscar Arnulfo Romero Reflection and Solidarity Group (OAR), told IPS.

Women represent about 30 percent of those who opt for self-employment in Cuba, and work in occupations that are traditionally identified with women and have limited income potential, such as salespersons or hired workers. And they almost never figure as the owners of family businesses.

Based on her experience in working with local communities since 1994, Hidalgo says that women “need to start from scratch and overcome obstacles” if they want to make progress in non-state initiatives. In her opinion, greater business freedom is needed, and more knowledge about marketing and selling products or making headway in a given market.

The heavy burden of domestic work that women bear and their responsibility in taking care of their families limits their economic participation. Hidalgo says more awareness is needed about the growing number of women who have to leave their jobs to take care of sick relatives or small children, or to work as homemakers.

Cuban women devote more than 34 hours a week on average to housework and child-raising, while men devote about 12 hours, especially in support tasks, according to studies.

Around the world, women tend to have more unstable and lower-paid jobs, said María Ángeles Sallé, a Spanish expert on gender equality policies.

“Women do two-thirds of the work worldwide, earn 10 percent of the income, and own one percent of the property,” Sallé told IPS on a visit to Havana early this year, citing United Nations statistics.

“It is not a question of incorporating more women into work: they work all the time,” she said. The sociologist believes what is most urgently needed is to conquer key sectors of the economy, which currently are being transferred to the private sector – a phenomenon that is taking a toll on employment – as well as to redistribute the burden of domestic chores.

In Cuba possibilities for state employment are now concentrated in agriculture, where women have had minimal participation. According to the ONE, only 3.2 percent of people hired in agriculture, livestock, forestry and fishing are women.

More than 11,000 women have benefited so far from the process of distributing idle land to farmers, launched in 2008 as part of a reform to strengthen agriculture and boost food production.

Dilcia García, of the Cuban Association for Animal Production (ACPA), advocated in a conversation with IPS “carrying out actions to solve or narrow the gender gaps that still exist, and to overcome subjective obstacles” to achieve greater participation by women in rural economic life.

“In all sectors of the country we have a patriarchal culture, and in ours (farming) it may be a little stronger,” García commented. In ACPA, only 30 percent of about 36,000 members are women.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jun 4 2011 (IPS)

The family history of writer Manuel Martínez rises up in large, black letters on the walls and ceilings of his house in a low-income neighbourhood of the Cuban capital. Photos and objects from times past complete this different kind of a book, which you can start reading from any point.

Manuel Martínez wrote the book, and he and his family opened up the house and yard to the community. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Its paragraphs even invade the bathroom of the family, made up of Martínez, his wife Yamilka Velásquez, and their seven-year-old daughter Sarah Jane, and tell the story of how Juan Pérez, an upright Mambí (the name of the rebels who fought Spanish colonialism in the 19th century) settled down on the land of what is now their home.

The book that covers every free inch of the house because “Who would have published a story like that?” narrates how this area of Havana was populated: “They arrived one morning at Concepción Street, which was not yet a street, just a beaten track along an embankment. They found some shade to sit down in and imagine what kind of yard they would have and to weep with joy at their good fortune.”

Pérez was the great-grandfather of Martínez, a playwright and coordinator of the Coco Solo Social Club sociocultural project. Pérez, his wife Evangelina Prieto-Solís, and several of their friends’ families settled down in the early years of the Cuban Republic on the land surrounding the yard that now houses this citizens’ initiative.

Located in Coco Solo, a neighbourhood that has been categorised as “marginalised” in the Havana municipality of Marianao, the spacious area that harbours the family’s two houses opened up to the whole neighbourhood in 2009 for parties that were completely free of charge, and little by little, almost without meaning to, became the most important place in the community.

The idea emerged “without intentions or methodology” Martínez explained to IPS, as he gazed at an improvised, open-air theatre with recycled lights and curtains. It was right there that the name appeared in an almost ironical reference to the Buena Vista Social Club project, which in 1996 rescued a group of Cuban master musicians from oblivion.

The yard, once full of crops to put food on the family table and the exotic plants of the writer’s late grandfather, turned into a community space after neighbours spontaneously joined in the first party organised by a group of friends, and it became a regular event.

“We all got together – actors who no longer belonged to any theatre group, musicians who weren’t composing music, and magicians who weren’t doing magic,” Martínez commentsed. “We put together a show and everybody came.” They organise their activities on holidays so as not to disturb anyone’s rest, with their noise.

With a homemade caldosa (popular Cuban stew based on tubers and meat), the celebration begins, including activities for children and young people, adults and seniors. This alternative is especially appreciated in a city where recreational spaces tend to be scarce in places that are not centrally located.

The first party they organised as a project was a concert with the rock band Magical Beat, led by Luis Manuel Molina. Since then, the scope of the Coco Solo Social Club has broadened, and it now has support from the local government.

“When officials from the Marianao Municipal Culture Department found out, they were surprised and came for a visit to see how we had managed it. When they saw that we didn’t charge anything and that it was a wholesome environment, they joined the party,” Martínez recounts.

“People don’t understand why it’s free,” commented Caridad Pérez, Manuel’s mother, in a conversation with IPS. She talked about how the self-organised family initiative has gradually gained the support and respect of the community, which joins in, participates, takes care of, and defends the project as its own.

This initiative is especially important at a time when the process of economic reform set in motion by the government of Raúl Castro requires more profitability from the country’s cultural institutions, which for decades had run programmes that were free or subsidised.

The Coco Solo Social Club was, moreover, an alternative for the creative fulfilment of its members in the face of the difficulties involved in finding work as artistes.Those who are part of the project include the experimental group Los Mataflores and the theatre company La Marea, whose venue, the Cero theatre in Marianao, is in danger of collapse.

Martínez plays a character “who is not a man or a woman: it has long hair and a beard and covers itself with a sheet.” Velásquez, in turn, gives classes on music theory, as well as piano classes to children. And all together, they make independent amateur videos with the distinct intention of making people think.

The material is distributed hand to hand on flash drives and CDs, in a system dubbed “the USB market.”

With the spread of digital technology, the Cuban population created these informal, mostly free networks, to socialise local or pirated foreign videos.

For a number of months, the Coco Solo Social Club has been exchanging ideas with the citizens’ group Red Protagónica Observatorio Crítico, which is involved in similar initiatives such as El Trencito, a visual arts workshop for children directed by a Havana family. In March, the Coco Solo yard was the venue for the Critical Observatory’s 5th Forum, an annual event.

“The project is innovative, in that it makes day-to-day life, which can sometimes be difficult, into something beautiful based on each member’s commitment to the community, and by considering as art everything that comes from people’s hearts,” blogger Sandra Alvarez, a participant in this year’s forum, told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, May 19 2011 (IPS)

Known as the cradle of the revolution and of the conga, but also as one of the most machista places in Cuba, the city of Santiago in the east of the island was the scene of two days of activities demanding respect and freedom for different sexual orientations and gender identities.

Mariela Castro (centre) and sexual diversity activists lead a conga in Santiago de Cuba. Credit: Archivo Cuba/IPS

“We want a new society. The struggle against homophobia is part of the struggle against every kind of discrimination in our society,” including racial discrimination and discrimination against women, Mariela Castro, head of the state National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), told IPS.

The view of this city as “the most machista” on the island could be an unjustified stigma, said Castro, who happens to be the daughter of President Raúl Castro. But lesbians and gays interviewed by IPS agreed that other parts of the country were “more open” compared to the almost daily attacks they experience on these streets.

“Two people of the same sex who love each other are often rejected and publicly attacked, verbally or even physically,” said Isbrailda Ruiz, a member of Las Isabelas, the first group of lesbian and bisexual women to be founded in Cuba, in 2002.

Intolerance is also found in the universities. Jorge Hadad, a social communication student, told IPS he thought the university environment would be “more permissive,” but instead encountered “professors who do not accept you as you are, and this has caused some clashes.”

Perhaps another symptom of reality in Santiago is the fact that people from this city hardly ever post their photos on the CENESEX friendship club website. “Anonymity is very much the norm here,” said Camilo García, a CENESEX worker.

Four years after the first Cuban celebration of International Day Against Homophobia, and less than a decade after systematic work to promote respect for sexual diversity began, the celebration this year emphasised the view that sexual rights are human rights, for everyone.

Prejudice can lead to discrimination against those with same-sex partners, or who were born male but feel themselves to be female, or who simply are women – more so if they are lesbian – or dark-skinned, or of mixed race, or because they live outside the capital, or are poor.

“If we unite overall against discrimination in general, I think we will make faster progress than if we tackle each type of discrimination separately,” said writer Daysi Rubiera, a member of the civil society Afro-Cuban association Cofradía de la Negritud who participated in the Cuban Day against Homophobia with her book “Aires de la Memoria”.

On the specific topic of homosexuality, debates in Santiago de Cuba ranged from the right to choose how, where and with whom to have sex, so long as no one else is harmed, to public displays of affection for a person of the same sex.

“Until yesterday, our thoughts on the subject were very different from what we are seeing today,” Major Luis Mariano Mustelier of the Cuban police acknowledged, in response to a question on police actions against same sex-couples kissing in public, or against transvestites or transsexuals.

Although such displays of affection do not constitute a crime, they are still considered offences under decree-law 141 of the Council of Ministers, which imposes a fine of 40 pesos (less than two dollars) on persons whose “indecent exhibitions” offend the public.

“A police officer who sees two homosexuals kissing, or dressed as women, and puts them in jail is breaking the law, because those are not crimes,” said lawyer Alexis Batista, an expert with the provincial justice authority, in response to participants’ questions. He acknowledged the decree-law “should be changed.”

Dr. Alberto Roque, an activist with the group Men for Diversity (HxD), talked about where the limits are and who sets them. “Who deserves our respect? The overwhelming majority that decides what the rules are, based on existing homophobia?” he said.

“This is no place for that,” said a passerby seeing an awareness-raising panel in Dolores square, right across from the Cuban Communist Party’s municipal headquarters. Meanwhile a young Rastafarian ponders why he should defend homosexuality when the Rasta movement, “which harms no one,” is itself discriminated against.

Over 400 students attended a debate at the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba, which among other things discussed the homophobic prejudices of future lawyers, and the need for more heterosexual men to take part in awareness campaigns.

The CENESEX sexual diversity programme operates year-round, but made its biggest splash Saturday May 14 with conferences and debates in different sectors of society, film and video screenings, performance galas including drag artists and a conga against homophobia in Havana.

“In Cuba, we wanted to focus not on the victims of homophobia, but rather on the problem itself,” Mariela Castro told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, May 16 2011 (IPS)

While homosexuality is punishable by law in nine Caribbean island nations, gay activism is increasingly taking root in countries like Cuba.

“The situation in the Caribbean today is one of contrasts,” Gloria Careaga, co-secretary general of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), founded in 1978 and with close to 700 member groups in over 110 countries, told IPS.

Differences are greatest between the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean, Careaga, a Mexican psychologist who is also in charge of the Latin American and Caribbean region (ILGA-LAC), said by email on the occasion of International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, Tuesday May 17.

Careaga said “clear” signs of progress were the work of Cuban institutions in favour of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people and of strengthening their groups, the growing presence of studies on sexual diversity in Puerto Rican universities, and the emergence of lesbian organisations in the Dominican Republic.

However, “the English-speaking Caribbean seems to be unable to shake off the influence of Victorian morality, and not only maintains laws that criminalise gays and lesbians, but also argues the case for homophobia, for instance in Jamaica,” she said.

A national survey carried out in Jamaica by the University of the West Indies in 2010 found that 89 percent of respondents were homophobic. The study polled 1,007 adults from 231 communities in the island nation.

Jamaican courts often sentence men who have sex with men (MSM) to prison terms with hard labour.

Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago ban relations between same-sex couples, especially men. Penalties for this crime vary between 10 and 50 years, depending on the laws of each country.

Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica and Saint Lucia only punish male homosexuality while allowing, or simply making no pronouncement on, lesbianism. Since 1976, Trinidad and Tobago has even forbidden homosexual persons from entering its territory.

Institutionalised homophobia is also a health problem. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) indicates that penalisation of homosexuality in the Caribbean is one of the main obstacles to controlling the epidemic that affects some 240,000 people in the Greater and Lesser Antilles.

Against that backdrop, the few groups and individuals fighting for social acceptance of sexual diversity come up against a high degree of homophobia and the risk of hate crimes. They can even be accused of illegality, even though the constitution defends the universal right to free association.

Wilfred Labiosa, a Puerto Rican activist who lives in the United States and is visiting Cuba to take part in the Fourth Cuban Day Against Homophobia, told IPS that the region’s major challenge is to consolidate unity among people struggling for respect for freely chosen sexual orientation and gender identity.

In socialist Cuba, which lived through several decades of institutionalised homophobia, outstanding efforts have been made by institutions and civil society sectors to raise public awareness in favour of the rights of all persons, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“We want a new society,” said Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro and head of the state National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), during a May 10 conference on “Why a Cuban campaign against homophobia?” Fighting this problem is part of the struggle against all kinds of discrimination, she emphasised.

The experiences of Cuba and Puerto Rico, which hold around four Gay Pride parades, including educational activities, every year, should be disseminated throughout the Caribbean LGBTI community, Labiosa, a leader of Unid@s, the National Latino/a LGBT Human Rights Organisation in the United States, suggested.

But factors like the criminalisation of homosexuality in nine English-speaking Caribbean island nations, and Belize and Guyana, and the lack of historical links between the region’s peoples mean that sexual rights activists remain dispersed in the region, he said.

Labiosa, a psychologist, said that so far, exchanges between civil society organisations in the island nations of the Caribbean and other countries have been “informal and personal.” In his view, this form of contact is more effective than institutional links in terms of building concrete action in favour of the LGBT community.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) bloc hosts the Regional Meeting of LGBT activists from member countries, a space where proposals for sexual rights and HIV prevention can be made.

The United Gays and Lesbians Against AIDS Barbados (UGLAAB), the Jamaican Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) and the Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation (CAISO) of Trinidad and Tobago all converge there with other activist groups.

In 2010, ILGA-LAC was able to bring together eight activists from eight different countries where homosexuality is still a crime, at its biennial conference held in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba.

“We have established increasingly close ties with LGBT organisations in the Caribbean,” said Careaga, praising the work of activists who, “with our support and recognition, maintain an active and courageous presence, organising themselves and carrying out public demonstrations, in spite of the risks.”

The achievements of the activist community, according to Careaga, include blocking performances by musical groups who foment homophobia through their song lyrics.

“In spite of the blinkered attitudes, we are closely monitoring the actions of governments and we seek dialogue with their representatives at intergovernment forums. We hope one day these efforts will lead to the repeal of those laws that penalise LGBT persons,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, May 3 2011 (IPS)

LGBT social networks and experts with Cuba’s National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX) announced Tuesday that events surrounding the Day Against Homophobia will last a month this year in this Caribbean island nation.

“There are places where gay pride day is celebrated; we are going to dedicate the entire month of May to the fight against homophobia,” said sexologist Mariela Castro, director of CENESEX, a government agency.

“Although our activities take place year-round, this is the time of greatest visibility,” she said.

In a press conference held to present the planned events, Castro – who happens to be the daughter of President Raúl Castro – stressed the central role to be played by social networks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people that have emerged with ties to CENESEX since 2003.

The members of the networks “are sexual rights activists who have been participating in organising the activities,” Castro explained, after pointing to the increase in the number of blogs and other individual communication initiatives in Cuba promoting respect for freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Representatives of the social networks accompanied Castro and other CENESEX experts in the International Workers’ Day march on May 1 in Havana, holding up the Cuban flag and the rainbow flag – the international symbol of the LGBT movement – side by side.

The activities prepared for this month, under the slogan “Diversity Is Humanity”, include conferences, debates, films, concerts, exhibitions, street processions of conga bands, and a gala performance by leading artistes and crossdressers in the Karl Marx theatre, which seats 5,000.

The central events on the International Day Against Homophobia, celebrated on May 17 because homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases on May 17, 1990, will take place this year in Santiago de Cuba, 861 km east of Havana.

“Students from the University of Santiago asked us to hold the events there,” Castro said.

Local groups from Santiago and Las Isabelas, the first of the three associations of lesbians that exist in Cuba, set forth a proposed programme in line with the general objectives promoted by CENESEX and have worked intensely to organise the May 16-17 activities.

Castro also underlined the specific commitment by the leadership of the governing Communist Party to open up spaces for discussion of these issues in the national press, which is controlled by the state and has only timidly and sporadically addressed the question of sexual diversity, generally from a health point of view.

The terms gay, lesbian and transsexual were totally absent from the media in Cuba for decades and, to a large extent, from academic research and social programmes. Isolated cases of public assistance policies, such as support for trans people, were kept silent for 30 years or more.

The congress of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) held in the second half of the 1980s called for eliminating the taboo surrounding certain subjects in Cuban journalism. But in areas like sexual diversity, the new openness never went beyond good intentions.

The situation began to change, however, with the impact of the AIDS epidemic among men who have sex with men, which gradually brought visibility to this population group, while the fight against homophobia began to be seen as a priority in HIV/AIDS prevention policies.

To that was added CENESEX’s decision, prompted by complaints from trans people in the capital, to carry out awareness-raising work which, more than five years after it began, has grown into an integrated programme that includes aspects ranging from media strategies to legislative proposals.

With respect to the debate in the public health sector on free sex-change operations for transsexuals, at a time of severe economic troubles, Castro clarified that the basic costs of the procedure are covered by international aid funds raised by the institution.

Meanwhile, a reform of the family code, which would include recognition of the rights of same-sex couples and the family’s responsibility and duty to accept and care for all of its members, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation, is to be introduced in parliament.

Castro said things are “finally moving,” now that the Communist Party has specifically expressed the intention to involve the media in the effort against homophobia, and because of the possible inclusion of the issue in the party’s next national conference, to be held Jan. 28, 2012.

While waiting for the legal reform to go through, CENESEX has been working with the police, the Supreme Court and the Education Ministry in order to move towards the design and implementation of policies and strategies that would help create an inclusive society marked by respect for diversity.

“We insist that it is necessary to work closely with teacher training schools and universities. If teachers are not clear on these issues, we can’t do anything. If teachers are homophobic, they will pass on their homophobia; if they are misogynistic, they will transmit their discriminatory attitude towards women,” Castro said in response to a question from IPS.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 22 2011 (IPS)

Although it failed to bring about the hoped-for generational renewal at the highest level of Cuba’s governing Communist Party, the recent party congress may have marked the start of a new stage of socialist development, if the resistance to change among the most conservative sectors is overcome.

Not a few observers lamented that the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) sixth congress ended Apr. 19 with the presentation of a 15-member political bureau mainly made up of the old guard, with an average age of 67. Others stress that any real change in the country will depend on new ways of thinking.

“Years of reductionist thinking and simplifications, of wilfulness, weigh down on those who must push the changes through,” psychologist and professor of communications José Ramón Vidal told IPS. “Awareness of these limitations and barriers is the first condition for preventing them from distorting or frustrating the proposed changes.”

Vidal said it is clear that the “desired scenario” would require strengthened institutions, a break with the state monopoly over all economic activities, greater autonomy for public enterprises, and administrative decentralisation to make management of municipal governments more independent.

However, “popular participation is still limited to consultation processes, to listening to public demands, and no new ideas have been set forth for how to boost the role of citizens in political decision-making or how to increase citizen oversight over the country’s institutions and leaders,” he said.

The new first secretary of the PCC, President Raúl Castro, acknowledged the need for a change in mentality.

At the four-day party congress, he said Cubans would have to overcome a “mentality of inertia,” and the only thing that could threaten the revolution was “our inability to rectify errors.”

However, the resistance to change is not only identified with a specific generation, but with sectors that could see the proposed transformations as a threat to privileges they have gained in their careers as politicians or civil servants.

Since Raúl Castro first became acting president when his brother Fidel fell ill in 2006, he has insisted on the need to be wary of a false sense of unanimity and to respect diversity of opinion.

But in Castro’s case, that respect may end where dissident groups start.

In the party congress, Castro called for doing away with prejudice against private enterprise or “self-employment,” insisted on delinking the party and the government, and reiterated the need to move forward without “haste or improvisation.”

The party congress’s “approval of the Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy gave us the main tool, the ‘what’; now we need the ‘how’: the legal framework, regulations and even changes to the constitution,” economist Armando Nova, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy (CEEC), told IPS.

In the analyst’s view, the country is facing “a realignment, more than an updating,” of the social economic model. “There is the development of different forms of property, spaces are opening up to a non-state sector in the economy, and more rational labour and wage policies” are being introduced, he said.

The touchiest changes, he said, are the restructuring of the labour market – which involves the dismissal of half a million public sector workers this year alone – and the elimination of the ration card, which guarantees heavily subsidised food and other basic products to the entire population.

These changes are necessary for economic reasons, “but it is good that it has been clarified that conditions will be created for these things to happen, that the process will be gradual, and that in the case of cuts to state payrolls, the modifications will be linked to the workers’ employment possibilities and options,” added Nova, one of the leading scholars on agriculture in Cuba.

Gender and racial inequalities acknowledged

One of the questions that drew the most attention from civil society was the recognition of the persistence of gender and racial inequalities – issues that tend to be ignored and denied by government authorities, who prefer to highlight the achievements and downplay the shortcomings of the socialist system.

“We have to remain alert, to avoid falling into the traps of the past, when the idea was that by declaring the abolition of a society divided into antagonistic classes, all social, political and cultural problems would disappear,” writer Tomás Fernández, a member of the Cofradía de la Negritud – an association of black people aimed at raising awareness of the problem of racial discrimination – told IPS.

“Social problems have always been shouldered aside by economic and political problems; let’s not fall into this same mistake again,” said Fernández, who warned against “closing our eyes to the social problems” that plague the segments of the population in greatest need of assistance, like blacks.

Blogger Sandra Álvarez recognised that the number of women and blacks on the 115-member PCC Central Committee had grown. But she called for close monitoring of “racial inequalities that could be generated or exacerbated” in the process of the implementation of the new economic and social policy guidelines.

“I hope the debate on race-based inequality in Cuban society will also be taken up by the PCC National Conference,” added the writer of the blog “Negra cubana tenía que ser”.

The conference, which will focus on internal party questions, is slated for Jan. 28, 2012.

Professor Vidal commended Castro’s criticism of the party’s policy of hastily promoting “inexperienced and immature cadres” based on the mistaken “idea that an unspoken premise to occupy a leading position was to be a member of the Party or the Young Communist League.”

Castro linked the errors of this policy to the impossibility of “rejuvenating” the political bureau.

The professor also mentioned the president’s call for the eradication of prejudice against religion and people of faith.

With respect to the national press, Vidal said it would live up to its “social responsibility” when it overcame its current role, which is heavily focused on “propaganda,” and once it strengthened its informative and educational functions and became a vehicle for the exchange of ideas for “the construction of inclusive consensuses.”

Analysing the significance of the congress, historian and anthropologist Jesús Guanche said “it is still necessary to struggle with those who have not yet understood that the means and the end of development are human beings, in all their diversity of cultural expression and personal choice, and that the economy, no matter how successful it is, is only a means.

“All of the necessary changes, especially the loosening up of the knot of productive forces, must head in the direction of dealing a devastating blow to corruption, at both the low and, especially, the high levels, which also contributes to blocking everything that can be blocked,” he told IPS in an email interview.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 21 2011 (IPS)

YES to sexual diversity! NO to transgenics! LONG LIVE @! In stark contrast to the political apathy of many of their contemporaries, some sectors of Cuban youth are radically re-writing the standard slogans, opting for active participation and fomenting “new revolutions within the Revolution.”

Young people dance a 'conga' at a protest against homophobia in Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The founder and editor of El Guardabosques (The Forest Ranger), an electronic bulletin advocating tree conservation, Díaz sees in the young people around him “deep cravings for freedom in the widest sense of the word: freedom of expression, sexual and ideological freedom, freedom of movement, of action and of consumption

“The feeling of suffocation that arises from having attained high cultural and educational levels in a permanently circumscribed environment is something we all want to do away with,” said Díaz, who at 35 is living proof that youth is not a matter of age but “an attitude, a state of mind.”

However, people like Díaz are a minority. Studies carried out by the state Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS) found that social and political aspirations have great weight among certain segments of young people, but not for the majority.

In the 1980s, many young people ranked social and political goals in third place among their priorities, after self-development and their family, but this changed with the economic crisis in the 1990s. Society and politics dropped into fifth place, and the aims expressed in these categories were wide-ranging, such as “achieving the stability of the Revolution.”

Over the last decade, young people’s interests changed again. Social and political affairs became further diversified and continued to decline in importance on the scale of priorities, and this was true even for people committed to and systematically involved in political action, through membership in student organisations or the Young Communist League (UJC).

“People concentrate on their day-to-day troubles and forget about the future,” Ivet Ávila, a producer who runs a children’s workshop for making animated cartoons, told IPS. “My sense is that many young people are not concerned about their country. Even so, there are quite a lot of people who are involved in community projects.”

The trend is not confined solely to Cuba. “In the 1960s, young people all over the world were imbued with the spirit of protest and were involved in transforming society; but later generations wanted less and less to do with these concerns,” María Isabel Domínguez, the head of CIPS, told IPS.

In her view, these changes in outlook are due not only to the priority young people accord to their individual interests, and to cultural and social activities centred on ways of interacting facilitated by the new technologies, but also to their disappointment with traditional politics, which have become discredited among young people worldwide.

“The fact that Cuban youth have maintained their levels of political affiliation and commitment to traditional political practices attests to the credibility of these institutions and organisations, notwithstanding that young people wish to change, modify and adjust them in accordance with modern times,” Domínguez said.

In any case, she added, Cuban society is in need of “continual adjustments” to free it from the “ways of doing things learned in the past” that have become entrenched to the point of being “permanent and immutable formulas” that tend to give blanket treatment to “social groups that are increasingly diverse.”

In the face of the government’s aim to “update” Cuba’s socialist model, civil society experts and activists agree on the need to transform the ways in which participation has been understood for decades, and to create mechanisms to ensure ordinary citizens can express themselves and take the initiative, without having to wait for the prompting of “instructions from above,” she said.

Ana Isabel Peñate, a researcher at the Centre for Youth Studies (CESJ), said “We must seek a more autonomous kind of participation by the young in a large number of areas. The idea is not for adults and institutions to create these projects for them, but for young people to contribute their own opinions, needs and expectations.”

The head of CESJ, Natividad Guerrero, argued that the older generations should share their experience and work with the younger generations, not simply “make way for them.”

“If adults do not change their attitude of wanting to control everything in an authoritarian manner, young people who want to shake things up and do things differently will only be able to do so within the areas they already occupy. We have raised our youth to be combative about things that are badly organised at present, but not to take on a protest role from an individualistic point of view,” Guerrero told IPS.

While in many spheres in Cuba the same patterns of participation that have prevailed for the last five decades are still in place, young people like the editor of El Guardabosques have chosen to build their own spaces of citizen expression and participation “that are really authentic and functional,” Díaz said.

Díaz grew up with guaranteed access to free health care and education. The conquests of his parents’ generation, that spearheaded the transformations that followed the triumph of the 1959 revolution, were for him “inherited rights.” His teenage years were marked by the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe.

In his view, events like the Living the Revolution Workshop Cycle, organised in 2009 by the Antonio Gramsci Chair at the state Juan Marinello Institute for Cultural Research, and many other self-managed projects springing up spontaneously all over the country, are examples of thinking about and building Cuba in participative ways.

Díaz is convinced that for Cuban youth, the watchword is “fusion”, and therefore “pure”, single focus approaches no longer work for them. He proposes that intellectual workers should be in constant dialogue with real social actors, because “I believe that when both these functional groups come into contact, they have the greatest transformational capacity.”

As for young people who are working for socialism in Cuba, he said “We have understood that the main thing now is not defending the Revolution so much as developing it, broadening it and radicalising it.”

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 19 2011 (IPS)

Accompanied unexpectedly by Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl brought the sixth congress of Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) to a close Tuesday with a call to “change everything that should be changed,” but without abandoning the socialist path taken on Apr. 16, 1961.

Fidel and Raúl Castro greet the sixth PCC congress. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“I assume my last task with the firm conviction and commitment … to defend, preserve and continue perfecting socialism, and never allow the return of the capitalist regime,” he said in his speech.

Castro, who is also chairman of the Council of State, thus made it clear that he would lead what he called a necessary and ongoing process of renewal of leadership, in both the party and the government.

In what he described as an example of “true democracy,” the sixth congress approved the Draft Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy after a months-long process in which a reported 8.9 million Cubans, of a total population of 11.2 million, discussed the document in their places of work and study, leading to modifications and additions.

After the more than three million grassroots meetings held to debate the document, only 94 of the original 291 policy guidelines remained unmodified. The final draft included 313 guidelines.

With respect to the new composition of the PCC Political Bureau and Central Committee, whose members were elected at the congress, there are significant differences between the two.

Changes can be seen in the Central Committee, considered a “first step” towards what Castro described as the gradual process of renewal and generational change in political and government posts.

The election of the 115 members of the Central Committee made progress towards greater representativity in terms of gender and race. The proportion of women on the Committee went from 13 percent to nearly 42 percent, and the percentage of blacks and people of mixed-race heritage grew from 10 to 31 percent.

But the renewal barely affected the Political Bureau. The majority of its 15 new members come from the ranks of long-time leaders of the revolution, including the new second secretary, Vice President José Ramón Machado. And there is only one woman member.

Although Castro did not give the average age, he said a large number of the new members of the Central Committee are young university graduates or skilled workers who have been active in politics and grassroots organising for years.

In addition, 10-year term limits were proposed for senior government positions, to be sent for approval at the next PCC National Conference, scheduled for Jan. 28, 2012.

The phrase “change everything that should be changed,” a revolutionary slogan in Cuba, should also be “the spirit” of the National Conference, which should objectively and critically evaluate the work of the party and determine the transformations necessary for maintaining its leadership in society, Castro said.

“Fidel is Fidel and he does not need any formal post to occupy, forever, an outstanding position in history,” said Raúl, who praised the “first example” given by Fidel when he asked not to be included on the list of candidates for the Central Committee.

The televised images of the closing ceremony of the PCC congress showed the delegates’ surprise at Fidel’s appearance. And equally unexpectedly, he did not take the microphone during Tuesday’s two-hour session.

But his opinions were present, as expressed in several of the columns he has regularly written since he retired from public life due to illness in 2006. “The smaller a country is and the more difficult its circumstances, the greater its obligation to avoid mistakes,” he wrote on Monday.

In Fidel Castro’s last public appearance, in February, he met with intellectuals attending the Havana International Book Fair.

His previous appearance before that was on Nov. 17, when he met with several dozen students, university officials and leaders of the youth movement, and referred to a 2005 speech he had given at the University of Havana in which he warned that the revolution could destroy itself as a result of its own errors.

Along the same lines, Raúl Castro said the main enemy on the route to the modernisation of Cuba’s economic and social policies, a process officially launched by the congress, would be “our own shortcomings.”

“It’s a question of being alert, with our feet and ears to the ground” to overcome obstacles and errors, and of never forgetting that in a task of such importance for the future of the nation, there is no room for “hasty actions and improvisations,” he added.

Convinced that Cuba is among the small number of countries that have the conditions for transforming its economic model and pulling out of crisis without social traumas, the president also warned that the “updating” of the system would not happen overnight and would involve a great deal of work.

To achieve success, he said, the first thing will be to “overcome a mentality of inertia” in the PCC. He also urged the party to “abandon an inflexibility founded in dogma and empty slogans.”

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 18 2011 (IPS)

While for their parents, leaving Cuba was a traumatic event because of the impossibility of returning, for younger generations, “moving abroad” is becoming more and more of a normal decision, just another alternative for the future.

Most illegal emigrants from Cuba are unemployed young men, many of whom have criminal records. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Perhaps the reason is that in the early 1980s, the Cuban government began to allow Cuban exiles to visit their home country, and in the 1990s it began to grant permits for temporary residence abroad. Until then, leaving the country had been a permanent move, since the 1959 revolution.

Other aspects are the networks of families and friends who are waiting to welcome loved ones in other countries; the greater access to information of all kind that young people today enjoy; and above all, values and aspirations that put increasing weight on personal fulfilment and higher living standards.

According to a University of Havana study that includes email testimony from young Cubans living abroad, the severe economic crisis that hit the country in the 1990s led to emigration being seen as just another alternative or possible solution.

For Antonio Aja, an expert on migration issues, the fact that Cubans are leaving the country at younger and younger ages is a reflection of conflicts provoked by the crisis and the circumstances among certain segments of today’s youth, including “lack of motivation, disinterest and scepticism” that they can realise their aspirations in Cuba today.

Although to a lesser extent, Cuba has become, like Mexico, El Salvador and Nicaragua, a major source of emigrants in Latin America and the Caribbean. And in line with trends in those and other countries, most of the migrants are young people, and the proportion of women heading abroad is growing.

The United Nations regional agency ECLAC reported that in the early 2000s, over 10 percent of the roughly 200 million migrants in the world were from Latin America and the Caribbean. And more than one million of the people from this region living outside of their country of origin in 2000 were professionals or skilled workers.

The exodus of skilled workers and university graduates from Cuba grew, until they represented 12 percent of emigrants between 1995 and 2003, according to specialised sources. And the average age of emigrants in 2008 was 30.5 years among those who went to live in the United States, 29.1 years (emigrants to Spain) and 26.2 years (emigrants to Italy).

“For me it’s a door that has opened, after a number of other doors were slammed shut,” said Estévez, who along with his wife has spent nearly two years doing the paperwork to move to Canada legally, through a programme designed to promote immigration of skilled workers to that country.

“First I applied for a job at a place where I would have had good economic prospects, and they told me I didn’t have enough experience. Then I was invited to give a conference, and my boss didn’t let me travel because I was too young. It’s really frustrating because they teach you to think and then they don’t let you think,” he said.

“I’m not leaving Cuba because of economic troubles but because I just don’t see a solution to them in any reasonable lapse of time. I’m 29, how long do I have to wait?” said Estévez, a graduate in humanities from the University of Havana, who shares an apartment with his wife, brother, parents and maternal grandparents.

More “earthly” needs are combined, in his case, with the dream of seeing other parts of the world – a possibility that is limited in Cuba. “Having a house and travelling, which seem to be such simple things, translate into individual independence, the possibility of building a family, and spiritual and professional development,” he said.

The elimination of the exit visa that Cubans need to be able to travel abroad is one of the demands of Cuban citizens that the government of Raúl Castro may be in a position to meet; in the current process of reforms aimed at “updating the socialist model.”

“There are young people who would like to emigrate, but what young people really want is to travel, go to other places, experience them and be able to come back,” sociologist María Isabel Domínguez, the author of several studies on youth in Cuba, told IPS. “We see that tendency even among young people from rural areas, where other aspirations have not yet been met.”

Some young people have set their sights on Canada, others have sought to prove that their grandparents came from Spain, in order to obtain Spanish citizenship and a European Union passport, some marry someone from another country to obtain an exit permit, and then there are those who seek to leave illegally, sometimes by paying people traffickers.

Many of those who obtain exit permits are women between the ages of 21 and 40, while most of those who defected in 2005 were young men and men between the ages of 15 and 35, with an incomplete or complete high school education. A large proportion of them were unemployed, and 20 percent had criminal records.

Among the young people who stay in Cuba – who make up a majority of the total – there are those who have an elderly parent to take care of or other family obligations, those who lack opportunities to leave, and those who stay simply because they love their country as it is, with its flaws and its virtues.

“They always talk about those who leave, and never about those of us who stay,” Niuris Cabrera, a 27-year-old computer expert who fights an everyday battle in the attempt to get ahead, told IPS. “The ones who leave long for what they left behind, and we long for what left with each friend.

“It is my choice to live in Cuba,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 13 2011 (IPS)

Mariana García is a child of the 1990s, when Cuba was in the grip of the severe crisis that hit the island after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc. She grew up bombarded by the first video games and surrounded by people who talked more about how to get by than about their dreams and ideals.

"Urban tribes" on Calle G in Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), to be held Apr. 15-17 in Havana, places its hopes for continuity of the country’s socialist system and for fresh blood to replace the long-time leaders of the revolution on people like García, who are sometimes impetuous and hypercritical.

The 22-year-old university student complains of the tendency to criticise Cuba’s younger generations. “My father says young people today are lost, but he forgets that my grandmother said the same thing about him,” García says, citing an old proverb: “People resemble their times more than they resemble their parents.”

And they are not only different from their parents. Studies show that, in keeping with international trends, young Cubans are increasingly diverse.

While one segment of today’s youth – in which women outnumber men – attends the university, others have decided instead to join the job market. Cuba also has a fast-growing counterculture movement, with hundreds or even thousands of youngsters gathering in their different “urban tribes” on weekend nights along Calle G, one of Havana’s main avenues.

The tribes are largely differentiated by their musical tastes: the rockers (rockeros), who are divided among metalheads (metaleros), new metalheads, punks, hippies and freaks (frikis); the “emos,” devotees of a subgenre of dark, broody rock music; the “mikis,” who listen to electroacoustic, disco and Cuba’s native-grown trova music; and the “reparteros,” who follow reggaeton, hip hop, rap and timba (often referred to as Cuban salsa).

The youngsters, in Havana and other cities, form part of the generation of the MP3, the flash drive and the condom tucked in the pocket.

Although young people have not turned their backs on the common features of their national identity, there are different elements that reflect “the evident diversity among today’s youth,” sociologist María Isabel Domínguez told IPS.

Domínguez, the director of the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS), said the major differences arise from gender, place of residence, race, social background, educational level and access to opportunities.

The crisis generation

Four or five generations coexist in Cuba today in constantly shifting relations. Some, like the generations of the 1970s and the 1980s, are starting to merge, while others have not developed a specific identity. Then there are the generations marked by periods of transition.

Those who were young during “the 1960s transition are the generation of the revolution, while the people of the 1990s are the crisis generation,” Domínguez said.

The former group, made up of those who were older children or young teenagers in 1959, intensely experienced the changes ushered in by the revolution as well as a radical break with earlier generations, in both the private and public spheres.

The latter is the generation of the economic crisis of the 1990s, the most difficult period in the second half of the 20th century in Cuba. The revolution may have equalled “opportunity” for their parents, but circumstances were markedly different for those who were young during the so-called “special period” – the euphemistic name given to the crisis.

It was not just about the economic impact of the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, Cuba’s main aid and trade partners, or of the stiffening of the U.S. embargo, but about a widening of social inequalities and a deterioration of living conditions.

The generation gap is reflected by the evolution of the different groups’ biggest aspirations and hopes, according to studies carried out by CIPS.

Among those who were between the ages of 14 and 30 in the 1980s, the chief aspiration was a good education, and material living standards were ranked in fourth place. But among people who were young in the 1990s, the top priorities were family, living conditions, improving one’s life by means of higher incomes, and spiritual satisfaction.

“When I was a teenager I had just one pair of jeans, only two different shirts, and a pair of Russian boots,” says Rafael Sánchez, a 46-year-old cultural promoter. “I would have wanted more, but it wasn’t a big deal, because that’s how most people lived. We were also constantly dreaming of a better future. The young people of today don’t live in the future, but in the present.”

New approaches

A look at the half century since the Cuban revolution shows “a common context, values and practices” shared by the few generations that have lived in that period, but also “variations and a need for readjustments and reconstructions of the ways of thinking and doing, new approaches,” Domínguez says.

The author of several publications on young people says Cuban society “is in need of these constant adjustments,” because the country’s institutions are often tied to “learned ways of doing things, formulas that worked at one time” but have been enshrined as “permanent and immutable.”

“The process of generational succession is didactic, made up of continuities and ruptures,” she says. “Each new generation inherits things, while at the same time it builds and creates new approaches to whatever stage of life they are in. That is the story of humanity.”

Young people, defined by the United Nations as those between the ages of 15 and 24, make up 18 percent of the world population. Around 87 percent of youths live in developing countries.

In the case of Cuba, where the experts include people up to the age of 30 in that category, 2.2 million of the 11.2 million people who lived in the country in 2009 were between the ages of 15 and 29, according to the National Statistics Office.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 31 2011 (IPS)

The annual Critical Observatory Social Forum discussed the need for new spaces of dialogue, debate and participation in Cuba, including the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and decentralisation to empower local communities.

“If we are going to make a revolution that is consistent, many Cuban bloggers are committed to the idea of improving the situation, not going backwards,” said feminist blogger Yasmín Portales, who attended the forum held in Havana last weekend. “And the way to improve things is to be critical in a systematic way,” she said.

“Blogs are for talking about whatever we want; we have to exercise that right because this is our country and we have the right to talk about it however we want,” added Portales, in whose view creative uses of ICT and social and political activism should not be seen as incompatible.

The sharp polarisation between government opponents and defenders in the Cuban blogosphere, and the extension into cyberspace of the five-decade political conflict between Cuba and the United States, occupied one of the sessions at the Observatory Forum, which declared itself in favour of expanding ordinary people’s access to the internet.

In the view of participants, the so-called “cyberwar” denounced by the government of President Raúl Castro in a documentary serial titled “Las razones de Cuba” (Cuba’s Reasons) should not be used as an excuse to avoid opening up internet access to the population, once the island has better connections to the global network.

Under the trees in the courtyard of playwright Manuel González’s house in the Havana neighbourhood of Coco Solo, Observatory Forum participants shared opinions and experiences on subjects as diverse as communication between genders, sexual diversity, the current debate on racial issues in Cuba and real opportunities for citizen participation.

“The Forum is above all a place where meetings, encounters and groups can be planned, and social activism can be constructed freely and independently,” Mario Castillo, the coordinator of the fifth edition of the Observatory Forum, which attracted 60 people under the slogan “Create, Show Solidarity, Revolutionise”, told IPS.

Castillo said the Critical Observatory, founded in 2006 as a convergence and coordination mechanism for the Haydeé Santamaría Critical Thought and Emerging Cultures Collective, has managed to “remain a living organisation, without owners or fixed schedules, through the determination of a group of people.”

This sense of freedom is one of its characteristics to this day, and “is what makes it interesting to young people,” he said.

The Haydée Santamaría Collective is a social and cultural project, attached since 2005 to the Criticism and Research Section of the Saíz Brothers Association (AHS), an organisation of young creative artists. Under AHS sponsorship, it held its first Social Forum in 2006, and over time has opened the event to projects and people from all over the country.

In 2009 the Critical Observatory Activist Network emerged as a natural development. In addition to promoting different activities and projects all year round, it sends out a regular e-mail information summary about a wide variety of controversial topics in today’s Cuba.

For the first time, this year’s Forum was truly self-managed, and transcended the narrow confines of an academic meeting on social and cultural research and criticism to become “a real social forum,” according to its organisers.

Among the projects that come together in the Network are the Cofradía de la Negritud, a citizens’ association that promotes debate about racial discrimination in Cuba, El Guardabosques, an environmentalist electronic newsletter, and NotiG, an independent news service on sexual diversity issues.

As well as the democratisation of internet use and the media on the island, there were debates on the changes in Cuba’s economic model and institutional responsibilities and procedures to encourage self-organisation and popular freedoms, self-management and cooperatives.

Decentralisation as an effective means of citizen participation was the first topic of discussion at the Fifth Critical Observatory Social Forum, held ahead of the Sixth Congress of the governing Cuban Communist Party announced for mid-April.

Researcher Jorge Luis Alemán, a member of the Haydée Santamaría Collective, said decentralisation in Cuban society today implies the transfer of power to small local bodies capable of self-management, and the creation of effective opportunities for participation at neighbourhood level.

A larger role for people like elected delegates to the local government so that they can sign contracts with other local actors, like self-employed workers, and wide opportunities for citizen participation, will be essential for achieving decentralisation, said Alemán.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 14 2011 (IPS)

The 15-year jail sentence handed down over the weekend to U.S. citizen Alan Gross, who was found guilty in Cuba of “acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the state,” is part of a new chapter in the conflict between Havana and Washington, which is now playing out in cyberspace.

Cuban authorities say Gross was providing sophisticated communication technology to internal opposition groups, including independent journalists and other activists whose anti-government activities have mainly been carried out over the Internet, vía blogs and social networking sites.

According to a U.S. State Department communiqué, Gross “is a dedicated international development worker who has devoted his life to helping people in more than 50 countries. He was in Cuba to help the Cuban people connect with the rest of the world.”

When he was arrested in Cuba on Dec. 3, 2009, Gross was working for a Maryland-based firm, Development Alternatives, as a subcontractor on a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programme to promote democracy in Cuba.

The U.S. government says his work mainly involved distributing laptops and satellite phone equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba, to give them remote access to the Internet.

In a statement broadcast after the sentence was issued Saturday, the Cuban government said that during the trial Gross “recognised having been used and manipulated” by USAID and the U.S. State Department.

Gross, 61, has the right to appeal the sentence to Cuba’s Supreme Court. The prosecutor had sought the maximum sentence, 20 years.

According to the official statement, the evidence presented in the trial demonstrated Gross’s participation “in a subversive project of the U.S. government” aimed at destabilising the Cuban government “through the use of communications systems outside of the control of authorities.”

The Gross family was “devastated by the verdict and harsh sentence announced today,” said Gross’s attorney Peter Kahn. “Alan and his family have paid an enormous personal price in the long-standing political feud between Cuba and the United States,” he added.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said “Today’s sentencing adds another injustice to Alan Gross’s ordeal,” and called for his immediate release.

The news of his sentence coincided in Cuba with the announcement of a new episode of the documentary series “Las razones de Cuba” (Cuba’s Reasons) aired by state-run television. The episode, “Mentiras bien pagadas” (Well-Paid Lies), will focus Monday night on “the financing for the U.S. cyberwar against the island,” according to official sources.

The Cubadebate web site says Monday’s episode will focus on how Washington allegedly finances activists and independent reporters who mainly express their views over the Internet, and who purportedly receive instructions to focus on issues “from a counter-revolutionary perspective.”

“The documentary will offer, besides information declassified by the Cuban government, details on the budget funds received by USAID for subversive purposes towards Cuba,” added Cubadebate, which describes itself as a web site “against terrorism in the media.”

After Gross’s trial was finished but the sentence was still pending, another episode of “Las razones de Cuba” was broadcast, dedicated to showing how the U.S. government has introduced communication technologies into this Caribbean island nation to promote “subversive actions.”

In the programme, a young telecommunications expert told how he was recruited in 2007 by a U.S. organisation that gave him four satellite antennas disguised as surf boards, to set up illegal communication networks in Cuba.

The focus of the U.S. government’s Cuba policy shifted more sharply towards cyberspace last year after the whistleblower web site Wikileaks published a confidential diplomatic cable sent by the head of the U.S. Interests Section (USINT) in Havana which, besides describing the traditional dissident groups in Cuba as largely ineffectual, stressed the social impact that others, like bloggers, can have.

“We also must continue to open up Cuba to the information age…to facilitate and encourage the younger generations of Cubans seeking greater freedom and opportunity,” USINT head Jonathan Farrar said in the cable dated Apr. 15, 2009.

Gross’s sentence also seems to slam the door shut on further moves to ease U.S. restrictions against Cuba, a possibility that was widely discussed after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, but which since last year has been discarded by senior officials in the government of Raúl Castro.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta and Ivet González
HAVANA, Mar 10 2011 (IPS)

The absence of more open social policies and real citizen participation are some of the concerns being debated in the run-up to the Sixth Congress of the ruling Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in April.

Cuban President Raúl Castro, whose country is involved in a process of change. Credit: Cuban government

At the same time, in alternative debates that have become increasingly common on the island, various representatives of Cuban civil society have circulated their opinions through parallel channels, such as web sites, blogs, social networks, and especially e-mails lists, which read a wide audience.

“The only guarantee of democracy in a society is people’s participation,” Mariela Castro, head of the National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), told IPS. “The fact that this is being given the importance it deserves fills me with the hope that we will follow the path to a kind of socialism that is closer to the one I imagine.”

The daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro and his late wife, women’s rights advocate Vilma Espín, Mariela Castro said it was “a very complex task to redesign the economy in a crisis situation, while continuing to maintain subsidies that cannot be abolished immediately because that would leave the population unprotected.”

The Sixth PCC Congress, postponed since 2002, will be the first to be held since Raúl Castro became president in February 2008.

The historic leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, stepped aside as president in July 2006 due to serious illness, and transferred power to his brother. However, Fidel remains First Secretary of the PCC, defined by the constitution as “the highest leading force of society and of the state.”

The Congress in April, to be followed by a Party Conference before the end of the year, must chart the economic and structural reforms regarded as essential by authorities and experts if the socialist model, which has so far been characterised by a strongly centralised state, is to be preserved on the island.

Sources interviewed by IPS said that most of the proposals collected so far at official consultations have been limited to concerns about short-term, circumstantial issues.

Among them are the gradual disappearance of the ration book for subsidised food distribution, a system in effect since the 1960s, or the recently implemented labour reform which involves massive lay-offs.

According to the official newspaper Granma, the meetings prior to the Congress resulted in “619,387 proposals for deletions, additions and modifications, and expressions of doubts and concerns” regarding the 32-page Draft Guidelines. At the conclusion of the discussion process, “the people will be provided with detailed information about its results.”

“We are very unused to in-depth discussions, and very used to vertical decision-making,” writer Fernando Martínez Heredia told IPS, referring to what many people still regard as one of the major obstacles to any process of debate and change in Cuba.

However, Martínez Heredia described as encouraging a late 2010 speech by President Raúl Castro, in which “he set out in tough language the need to discuss very different criteria, as well as the need for people who have responsibilities to meet their obligations.”

The lack of real participation and scrutiny by citizens have been regarded as historic flaws of Cuba’s political system, and now, according to observers, they are seen in a changing scenario where the bureaucracy, entrenched in positions of power, represents the main element of resistance to the in-depth transformations the country needs.

For political scientist Rafael Hernández, “this democratic debate, which extends beyond the rank and file of the PCC, expresses the will to build a consensus about the emerging new model, and not to secure support before the discussion has taken place, nor to dictate the outcome from above, as if it were revealed truth, or an irrefutable directive from on high.”

In Hernández’s view, the main political issues addressed by the Draft Guidelines include “decentralisation, legitimising non-state sectors, the determination to enforce the rule of law and constitutional order, and the downsizing of the state apparatus.”

At the same time, he said he regards as “revealing” the frequency with which some concepts appear in the PCC proposal. “Decentralise” and “decentralised” are mentioned five times, “socialism” twice, and “participation” 16 times, but only twice “in the sense of social or citizen participation.”

Meanwhile, sociologist María Isabel Domínguez, head of the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS), told IPS that “although economic transformations have priority at the moment, social and political processes, which accompany them and from which they are derived, cannot be neglected.”

According to Domínguez, the consequences of economic guidelines must be analysed “in terms of legal changes, as well as their social and political impacts.”

The absence of a more comprehensive view might even hinder “putting some of the aims of the Guidelines into practice,” she said.

Civil society groups like Cofradía de la Negritud (CONEG), an association of black people involved in raising awareness of racial discrimination, and the Red Protagónica Observatorio Crítico, a network of social and cultural projects, have circulated email messages calling for any strategic nationwide plan to include the issues of racial discrimination, respect for diversity, gender differences, climate change challenges and free access to information.

An editorial in the Catholic Archdiocese of Havana’s online magazine Espacio Laical says that “Cuba has recently experienced an increasing diversification of social identities,” which has generated a variety of proposals, but with common issues that could “facilitate dialogue and consensus.”

Among the common elements, it cites “the desire for responsible freedom, the enjoyment of all rights — both individual and social — the defence of sovereignty, freedom of economic initiative and the design of a political model capable of systematically increasing citizen participation and involvement.”

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 4 2011 (IPS)

More than 50 years of conflict between Cuba and the United States, and in particular Washington’s consistent support for dissidents in this Caribbean island nation, will leave their mark on the trial of U.S. citizen Alan Gross that began this Friday.

Gross was arrested Dec. 3, 2009 when he was attempting to return to the U.S. after his fifth visit to Cuba in nine months. He is accused of acts against the independence and integrity of Cuba, punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment.

The 61-year-old U.S. citizen works for Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), based in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington DC, which carries out development work in other countries. At the time of his arrest he was a subcontractor for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

As well as alleged involvement in spying, Cuban sources have maintained for months that Gross illegally brought in satellite communications equipment to hand over to internal dissident groups, as part of a programme financed by USAID.

“He violated Cuban laws and national sovereignty and has committed crimes which in the United States carry heavy sentences,” Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban parliament, said Dec. 10.

Officials in the government of U.S. President Barack Obama and Gross’s defence attorney, however, insist that the contractor was on the island to help the small Cuban Jewish community connect to the Internet, which they say is a global right.

“We have made it very clear to the Cuban government that the continued detention of Alan Gross is a major impediment to advancing the dialogue between our two countries,” U.S. State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said Dec. 3.

A possible swap of Gross for one or more of the five Cuban agents convicted of espionage and serving sentences in the United States, but regarded as anti-terrorism fighters by Havana, was apparently also ruled out by both sides in mid-2010.

Leaders of the Jewish community and of the Cuban Council of Churches denied any contact with the U.S. contractor.

“Gross was not arrested because he is Jewish,” said Arturo López-Levy, a Cuban lecturer at the University of Denver, Colorado. Jewish delegations from the United States travel regularly to Cuba, and many of them “have donated computers and cellphones to Cuban Jews,” he said.

“But none of these groups has a declared strategy of imposing regime change in Cuba through laws approved by the U.S. Congress,” he added, calling for a review of programmes to promote a political transition in Cuba, inherited from the administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009).

The Cuban Democracy Act, approved by the U.S. Congress in 1992, authorised financial assistance to individuals and organisations working for “non-violent democratic change” in this socialist country.

According to Cuban-American lawyer José Pertierra, after Bush took office “the budget for fomenting an opposition in Cuban society allied to the interests of Miami (where most Cuban exiles live) and the White House increased astronomically, from 3.5 million dollars in 2000 to 45 million in 2008.”

Local observers speculate that the key issue now could be Cuba’s interest in demonstrating links between dissidents and Washington. In the view of government authorities, the opposition in Cuba exists only because of financial and logistical support from the United States.

Perhaps the same reason might underlie the Feb. 26 broadcast of the story of two Cuban state security agents who for years infiltrated opposition groups like the National Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, and the Ladies in White.

A documentary screened on national television went beyond the personal experiences of Moisés Rodríguez and Carlos Manuel Serpa to delve into the permanent links between dissident groups and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, and how U.S. funds and other material aid enter the country and are distributed among them.

The Cuban agents expressed the view that obtaining money and a refugee visa are the main motives for dissidents to become involved in what the Cuban government regards as mercenary activities.

In addition to direct cash transfers, the government views international prizes awarded to dissident groups as another form of financing, like those received by the Ladies in White, a group of women who since 2003 have organised protests on behalf of their imprisoned husbands, or Yoani Sánchez, author of the Generation Y blog.

Excerpt:

By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 2 2011 (IPS)

Important architectural works from the Modern movement in Cuba appear to be doomed as a result of the expansion of massive hotel complexes, which threaten to take over the landscape in Varadero, this country’s most famous beach resort.

The alert was first sounded in 2010 when rumours began to spread about the demolition of the Hotel Internacional and the Hotel Club Cabañas del Sol, two 1950s structures located in a prime area of Varadero, which is 140 km east of Havana, in the province of Matanzas.

Two statements issued by the ICOMOS National Committee, the Cuban branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, in May and November have received no response, architect Jorge Fornés told IPS.

Fornés is chair of the National Committee of ICOMOS, an independent international non-governmental organisation of professionals dedicated to the conservation of the world’s historic monuments and sites, which works closely with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

“Independently of any decisions, I have no doubt as an architect that it is not necessary to eliminate something valuable to build something new,” he said. “If there is interest in preserving a valuable piece of heritage, there is always a way to do so,” he added, citing cases like the conservation of the colonial fortifications in Old Havana.

Nor have demands from intellectuals and academics, mainly circulated by email, received an official public response from representatives of the Tourism Ministry or coverage by the media. An employee at the Hotel Internacional told IPS, “The decision has already been reached.”

“There are contradictory versions,” Roberto Fernández García, a poet who lives in Varadero, said in an email message that sums up the results of his inquiries and those of others interested in the case, posed to the Tourism Ministry’s provincial authorities.

Tourism Ministry officials in Matanzas said “The Hotel Internacional, which opened on Dec. 24, 1950, is very old, small and old-fashioned, with few rooms, and no longer meets the requirements of today’s tourism,” according to Fernández García’s message.

He said the 161-room hotel would be demolished to build, on the same site, a modern 800-room structure. Cabañas del Sol, other tourist installations from the first half of the 20th century — when architects of the Modern movement were seeking a fresh expression of the Cuban identity — and buildings in the old city in Varadero are also apparently facing the same fate.

But the Matanzas office of the historian offered a different explanation. According to a message circulated by the Cofradía de la Negritud, a non-governmental association of black people, in this case the response was that “The hotel’s plumbing system is in a state of collapse, so it is more economical to demolish it and build from scratch, than to repair it.”

But tourism authorities did not mention poor structural condition to the hotel’s employees. “They told us the hotel would be demolished because of environmental regulations, and that it was useless to turn to Eusebio Leal to save the hotel,” one worker told IPS.

Supposedly Leal, a national lawmaker and the head of the ICOMOS National Committee, would be unable to do anything to preserve a structure built on a sand dune, like more than 100 other buildings and thousands of metres of walls and fences that will have to be demolished, according to environmental studies.

Alfredo Cabrera, director of the office in charge of the management of Varadero’s beaches, had ensured IPS in 2007 that before a decision was reached about a demolition, his office took into account “the cultural heritage or historical value of the structure,” and whether it served “an important social function.”

An employee at the Varahicacos ecological reserve, meanwhile, who a few years ago experienced the “breakdown” of the management of that protected area due to the construction of a mega-hotel, told IPS that in the case of the Hotel Internacional, environmental and heritage interests should be reconciled.

Sources close to the Tourism Ministry confirmed that the Hotel Internacional has reached an agreement with another country to build a modern hotel, similar to so many others built in Varadero in recent years near the Internacional and Cabañas del Sol hotels.

Half of the over two million tourists who visit Cuba every year go to Varadero, which has more than 18,000 rooms in 49 hotels on 22 kilometres of beach.

The municipality of 26,600 people, which includes Varadero and two neighbouring towns, received a record of more than 31,000 visitors in one day in February, in the context of the expansion of resort tourism in Cuba.

“This is a preview of what could be about to hit us on a much, much larger scale, because the country needs money urgently,” Mario Coyula, winner of the National Architecture Prize in 2001, told IPS, without directly mentioning the complicated economic situation the country has been in since the early 1990s.

Above and beyond architectural questions, Coyula, an architect and urban designer, pointed out that “for many people these two hotels are distinctive features of the local landscape, which are fast disappearing in Varadero, as is coexistence (between the tourists) and the local population, which is increasingly marginalised and isolated.”

Architects, artists, writers and journalists who have called for saving what is left of the Varadero of the 1950s point to the enormous potential for the promotion of cultural tourism, with an offer that differs from “the standardised sun and sand tourism in all-inclusive resorts” that can be found on any Caribbean island.

“I see this as a natural result of excessive centralisation, which stands in the way of dealing with thousands of small and medium investors who could generate more stable and balanced wealth,” Coyula said. “And the most important thing: small-scale investors cannot impose their own conditions.”

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By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Feb 24 2011 (IPS)

The first anniversary of the death of Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata, after an 85-day hunger strike, was marked by the usual tensions between internal dissident sectors, supporters of the government of President Raúl Castro, and Cuban authorities.

“It was a tense day, which does not bode well for relations between (this sector of) civil society and the Cuban government,” Manuel Cuesta Morúa, one of the dissidents temporarily detained on Wednesday when he attempted to take part in a memorial ceremony in honour of Zapata, told IPS.

Zapata, a 42-year-old Afro-Cuban mason and plumber, died on Feb. 23, 2010 after refusing food for nearly three months in the prison where he began serving an initial sentence of three years in 2003, for contempt of authority, public disorder, and disobedience.

But his defiance of prison authorities and protests against the conditions in which he was held drew heavy additional sentences.

According to Cuesta Morúa, spokesman for the Arco Progresista Party (PARP), a dissident group, there must have been over 100 people detained at police stations or confined to their homes Wednesday, some of whom were still under arrest Thursday. The day “ended badly,” but demonstrated “unprecedented unity” among opposition groups, he said.

Elizardo Sánchez, the head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), another illegal but tolerated dissident organisation, estimated the number of those actually arrested by security forces at around 50.

Some 200 government supporters gathered in front of a house in central Havana, shouting pro-government slogans in an attempt to prevent any public tribute to Zapata by the Ladies in White.

These women are the wives, daughters and other relatives of 75 dissidents who were accused of conspiring with the United States against Cuba in 2003 and sentenced to long prison terms, most of whom have by now been released. They held a “prayer vigil” for several hours in memory of Zapata.

However, they were unable to carry out a march through the streets of Havana, as planned.

“They can do whatever they like in their own homes, but the streets here belong to the revolutionaries,” 54-year-old Carlos Valdés, told IPS. He admitted to taking part in previous confrontations of this kind, some of them marred by episodes of violence,

The Cuban government and its supporters regard opposition groups as “mercenaries” in the pay of the United States that serve its hostile policies against the island, and consider that they only exist because of Washington’s logistical and financial support.

Among those taken briefly into custody Wednesday was dissident Guillermo Fariñas, a 49-year-old psychologist and journalist who went on hunger strike the day after Zapata’s death, and fasted for 135 days.

His protest ended Jul. 8, 2010 with the announcement of the release of a group of political prisoners, as a result of dialogue at the highest level between the Catholic Church and the Cuban government.

Fariñas’ mother, Alicia Hernández, told the press by telephone that her son had been arrested Wednesday afternoon, after shouting anti-government slogans from his rooftop terrace in an outlying neighbourhood of the Cuban city of Santa Clara, 276 kilometres east of Havana.

Fariñas, the winner of the 2010 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded annually by the European Parliament, was taken to a police station after several hours of house arrest, Hernández said.

In contrast, Zapata’s mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, told the press she and her entire family had walked together to her son’s grave in the cemetery of Banes, a town 820 kilometres east of the Cuban capital. At the family ceremony, participants laid flowers and sang the national anthem.

Prior to the anniversary of Zapata’s death, the Catholic Church announced the government would release seven more prisoners, taking the total of those who have been freed to 71, of whom six have stayed in Cuba rather than be flown to Spain.

Out of the original group of 75 political prisoners, arrested in the spring of 2003 at a time of acute tension between Cuba and the United States, 52 were still in prison in mid-2010, when Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega announced that agreement on a gradual release process had been reached with President Castro.

“Six of this group are still in prison. Some of them want to go to the United States, and some wish to stay in Cuba,” Ortega said at the Feb. 21 opening of the Tenth International Seminar of the Dialogue with Cuba Programme, organised by the Archdiocese of Havana and the Catholic University of Eichstätt, Germany.

The Cardinal, who is Archbishop of Havana, stressed that “there is a clear and formal promise by the Cuban government that all of the prisoners will be released.”

Meanwhile, a communiqué from U.S. State Department spokesperson Philip J. Crowley Wednesday criticised harassment of human rights activists on the island, and urged the Castro government to free all political prisoners.

The CCDHRN reported that as of Jan. 26, 2011 they had documented 105 persons who have been sentenced or are being tried for political reasons. In January 2010 the organisation said there were 201 political prisoners, and in June 2010, 167.

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