The Cuban (left) and U.S. delegations on the last day of the first round of talks for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, Jan. 23, in Havana’s convention centre. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg and Ivet González
HAVANA, Jan 26 2015 (IPS)

The biggest discrepancies in the first meeting to normalise relations between Cuba and the United States, after more than half a century, were over the issue of human rights. But what stood out in the talks was a keen interest in forging ahead, in a process led by two women.

After a meeting with representatives of Cuba’s dissident groups, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson reiterated on Jan. 23 that the questions of democracy and human rights are crucial for her country in the bilateral talks, while stressing that there are “deep” differences with Havana on these points.

But the head of the Washington delegation said these discrepancies would not be an obstacle in the negotiations for restoring diplomatic ties – a goal that was announced simultaneously by Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro on Dec. 17.

In her statement to the media after her two-day official visit to Havana, Jacobson added that her country’s new policy towards Cuba is aimed at greater openness with more rights and freedoms.

Nor does independent journalist Miriam Leiva, founder of the opposition group Ladies in White, believe the U.S. focus on defending human rights and supporting dissidents will be a hurdle. “The Cuban government knew that, and they sat down to talk regardless,” she remarked to IPS.

In her view, the important thing is for the normalisation of ties to open up a direct channel of communication between the two governments. “This is a new phase marked by challenges, but also full of hope and opportunities for the people. Of course it’s not going to be easy, and the road ahead is long,” she added.

The Cuban authorities have consistently referred to opposition groups as “mercenaries” in the pay of the aggressive U.S. policy towards Cuba.

Nor are they happy when U.S. visitors to Cuba meet with opponents of the government. And they are intolerant of the relationship between dissidents and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which is to be turned into the new embassy as part of the process that got underway with the first round of talks in the convention centre in the Cuban capital.

Jacobson and her Cuban counterpart, Josefina Vidal, the Foreign Ministry’s chief diplomat for U.S. affairs, addressed the issue of human rights during the talks on Thursday Jan. 22.

The high-level U.S. diplomat described the process of reestablishing bilateral ties as “long” and “complex.”

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson, the head of the Washington delegation in the first round of bilateral talks, between the two countries’ flags. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In a written statement distributed to reporters in a no-questions-allowed media briefing, Jacobson said: “As a central element of our policy, we pressed the Cuban government for improved human rights conditions, including freedom of expression.”

Vidal, meanwhile, said “in our exchange, each party laid out their positions, visions and conceptions on the issue of the exercise of human rights.”

She said the word “pressure” – “pressed” was translated into Spanish as “pressured” – did not come up in the discussion, and that “Cuba has shown throughout its history that it does not and will not respond to pressure.”

In the 1990s and early this century, the question of human rights triggered harsh verbal confrontations between Havana and Washington in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and since 2006 in the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Havana complained that the U.S. used the issue as part of its “anti-Cuba” policy.

Vidal said she suggested to Jacobson that they hold a specific expert-level dialogue at a date to be agreed, to discuss their views of democracy and human rights.

Josefina Vidal, the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s chief diplomat for U.S. affairs, arriving at the convention centre in Havana, where the first round of talks for reestablishing diplomatic relations with Washington was held. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Jurist Roberto Veiga, who leads the civil society project Cuba Posible, told IPS that “the circumstances that have influenced the issue of human rights should be considered in any bilateral talks on the issue, to avoid mistaken judgments that could stand in the way of possible solutions.”

In his view, during the process that led to the 1959 triumph of the revolution, which was later declared “socialist,” there was a “struggle between a vision that put a priority on so-called individual rights to the unnecessary detriment of social rights and inequality,” and one that put the priority on social and collective rights.

As a result, in this Caribbean island nation what has prevailed up to now is “a conception [of human rights] that favours equality and social rights at the expense of certain freedoms, and of this country’s relations with important countries,” he said.

Veiga said Cubans must complete the effort to find a balance between individual rights and social equality. It is important to discuss this issue “for the development of Cuba’s political system and the consolidation of our civil society,” he argued.

The two delegations also addressed possibilities of cooperation in the areas of telecommunications, national security, international relations, people smuggling, care for the environment, responding to oil spills, the fight against drugs and terrorism, water resources, global health, and a joint response to the ebola epidemic in West Africa, among others.

In the first part of the meeting, the two sides analysed the practical steps to be taken for the opening up of embassies, which will basically follow the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in effect since 1964.

Reporting the results of the first meeting, aimed above all at laying the foundations for the process, Vidal stressed that following the Convention “implies reciprocal respect for the political, economic and social system of both states and avoiding any form of meddling in internal affairs.”

The date for the next round of talks was not announced.

The meeting was preceded, on Wednesday Jan. 21, by a round of follow-up talks on the migration accords reached by the two countries in 1994 and 1995.

Most Cubans are sceptical and even incredulous about the surprising decision to “make friends” with the United States.

“I think both sides are demanding a lot of each other,” 37-year-old Ángel Calvo, a self-employed driver, told IPS. “Both countries have completely different politics, which it is best to respect in order to start reaching agreements.”

Manuel Sánchez, 33, who described himself as a worker in the informal economy, said both countries “will make more progress towards improving relations than in the past, but they’ll never have the excellent ties that many people are hoping for.”

What is clear is that the talks led by the two high-level officials in Havana have raised expectations.

As renowned Cuban writer Leonardo Padura wrote in a column for IPS earlier this month, after the historic Dec. 17 announcement, “with our eyes wide open, we can catch a glimpse of the future, trying to see shapes more clearly through the haze.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Saturday night at El Madrigal, a private bar in the upscale Havana neighbourhood of Vedado, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Dec 30 2013 (IPS)

The landscape is changing in Cuba’s cities and towns, with political slogans giving way to lighted signs  advertising the best of local and international cuisine and air-conditioned lodgings – signs of an emerging private sector that was inconceivable until recently.

As a result of the new migration rules that went into force in 2013, Cubans made 250,000 trips abroad between Jan. 14 and Nov. 30, according to official figures.

Since the migration policy reform scrapped the requirement for an exit visa and a letter of invitation from abroad, well-known dissidents have been able to travel overseas and return without any trouble, after decades of restrictions.

In 2011, Cubans had recovered the right to buy and sell their homes and cars, which only the state could do up to then. And on Dec. 19, the government announced that costly, difficult-to-obtain letters of approval from the Transport Ministry would no longer be required to buy a car.

Steep prices on the state market are still a hurdle, however. Many people who saved up to buy a car see no real possibility of doing so, because the new prices will be three times higher than what they could afford.

Mercedes, a retired 67-year-old office worker who draws a pension of 11 dollars a month and also cares for a disabled daughter, does not feel like the changes have improved things for her.

“I can’t survive on my income. My neighbours encourage me to rent out a room, but I would first have to fix up my apartment, and I don’t have the money to do so,” Mercedes told IPS, asking that her last name not be used.

“The problem isn’t the slow pace of the reforms, but how they are perceived and how they reach the people,” says Bélkis González, a professional who works in communications. Despite the government’s stated aim that no one will be left high and dry and that there will be no “shock therapy,” gaps and inequalities remain.

During the discussions that preceded the reforms approved in 2011 by Cuba’s governing Communist Party, experts warned that the core document should include much more explicit and far-reaching social measures than the ones outlined there.

“The text has a totally justified economic focus because otherwise social changes are not possible,” sociologist Mayra Espina admitted at the time to IPS. But she added that it was “somewhat simplistic” to believe that a preferential focus on economic measures would generate positive influences on social questions.

According to studies cited by Espina and other experts, the proportion of the urban population who are income-poor and have unmet basic needs climbed from 6.3 percent in 1988 to 20 percent in 2000.

That increase in social vulnerability was due to the impact of the economic recession that has had Cuba in its grip since the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc, on which this country was fully dependent.

According to the 2012 census, 76.8 percent of the Cuban population is urban. The total number of inhabitants reached 11,167,325 – 10,418 fewer than in 2002. And two million people are over the age of 60.

In 2012, the government of Raúl Castro created a subsidy for low-income segments of the population who need to repair or build homes. The measure was seen as the start of a process to subsidise people rather than products.

Meanwhile, the government has postponed the elimination of the ration book of subsidised basic food items, a system that cost the state 2.43 billion dollars this year.

The poor are also less able to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the reforms because they have less education and training, do not have the capital or other resources to set up their own businesses, and do not receive remittances from family members abroad – a lifeline that has made it possible for many families to weather the storm. (There is no official estimate of the remittances.)

“It would be decisive to implement policies not only of assistance for the vulnerable,” under the planned reforms, but also “affirmative action” policies to reduce inequality, Espina said.

One of the most comprehensive transformations began in agriculture, in 2008. But it has not yet brought results, and food prices remain high, because the productive apparatus is still hampered by the lack of measures to facilitate its development and independence in decision-making, say experts like economist Armando Nova.

Now 70 percent of the land is in the hands of non-state producers, who account for over 75 percent of total food production.

Among them are cooperatives and private farmers, who hold 24 percent of the country’s farmland and produce over 57 percent of all food of vegetable and animal origin. “In other words, their efficiency has been demonstrated,” Nova said in an interview that circulated over the Internet.

More than 440,000 people are now self-employed ‘cuentapropistas’ in nearly 200 different economic activities in which private enterprise is permitted.

But the lack of a wholesale market for purchasing the inputs they need, the scant buying power of the great majority of potential consumers, and the heavy taxes conspire against their success.

The government apparently wants to develop non-agricultural cooperatives. A total of 270 are already operating or have permits, and 228 are awaiting authorisation.

Vice President Marino Murillo explained to parliament that the priority put on cooperatives was due to the distribution of the resources they generate and the social impact of their production.

The authorities would like 40 percent of jobs to be generated outside of the government and state enterprises by 2016, compared to just 20 percent of the workforce prior to the advent of the reforms.

Another pending issue is the convergence of Cuba’s two currencies, the peso and the Cuban convertible peso (CUC), which is pegged to the dollar.

“In no case will people’s purchasing power be affected. The financial capacity of the CUC will be respected,” said Murillo in a message that helped ease the fears of the estimated 60 percent of the population that receives dollars or other hard currency in remittances.

But the changes have not been felt in homes like Mercedes’, although like the rest of the population she and her daughter still receive free healthcare, which they could not do without.

“I know that [former president] Fidel [Castro] and Raúl [Castro] think about people like us, but they’re already over 80,” said Mercedes. “What will happen with those who follow them [in the government]? If they eliminate the ration book, what will we eat?”

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Dec 11 2013 (Columnist Service)

After three decades of supposedly planned socialism (1960-1990), when government plans were often only halfway fulfilled, lost in oblivion due to lack of oversight or of realism, or in the best of cases carried out any which way just to live up to the goals, Cubans got used to waiting (with or without hope) for the political leadership, financed with heavy Soviet subsidies, to come up with the next “plan”.

This reorganisation or new project came into our lives like a whirlwind, although it could later disappear with the speed and consistency of smoke.

The idealistic planning had, however, one result: people got used to receiving orders and orientations in which their individual decisions had little to no weight. If you had a telephone it was because the state let you have one; if you travelled, it was because the state allowed you to….ad nauseum.

The toughest years of the crisis and scarcities that followed the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its subsidies showed how unprepared the country was to make it on its own, because all that socialist planning had barely managed to provide the national economy with a structure capable of sustaining itself without foreign support.

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

In the last six or seven years, the state-government-single party, led by General Raúl Castro after Fidel Castro withdrew from power, has tried to introduce order into the economic and social structure with more realistic planning, and endorsed it with the drafting of economic and social policy guidelines, approved as a pragmatic instrument at the 2011 Communist Party Congress.

Under cover of these guidelines, the leaders have introduced numerous and important changes in the economic and social life of the nation. But between the programme and the real, day-to-day individual lives of the people of this Caribbean island nation, there is a stressful distance caused by the uncertainty about how, when and in what order the planned “updates” will occur…

I will explain myself briefly: Cubans continue to see it as impossible, despite the planning, to create their own life projects because each time they must modify them, reformulate them, or forget about them depending on what comes down to them from the heights of political decision-making, and on the form and intensity with which the planners of the updates decide, with their lofty macroeconomic or macrosocial scrutiny, on these plans or variations that often arrive without Cubans having the chance to make their own updates and new plans.

Right now Cubans who one way or another have managed to save up some capital have very little certainty about the monetary future of the country, because the dual currencies will be unified, but there is no clear idea of how or when this will take place, how much the money will be worth, etc.

Those even more fortunate who, for example, hoped to buy a new or used car sold by the state now don’t know if they will ever see that dream come true, or how it might happen.

For some reasons that have been kept quiet, car sales are still controlled, restricted or denied by the state, even though the sale of a car in Cuba is one of the most lucrative business opportunities that any salesperson in the universe could dream of (new cars are, or were, taxed at a 100 percent rate – in other words, they cost double their market price).

But these lucky few are, as it is easy to deduct in an impoverished country, a tiny portion of the population.

Most Cubans live hand to mouth by juggling subsistence household economies that are constantly altered by inflation that has grown since the 1990s to the point that the wages earned by public employees, who account for around 80 percent of those working in Cuba, fall far short.

The cost of basic articles (food, hygiene products) and of electricity, transport and other services rises steadily, according to central planning, and ruins the plans with which hundreds of thousands of families, millions of people, barely managed to get by.

As another year is coming to a close, most Cubans know that not even the cryptic and poetic predictions that the Ifá priests (of santería, a popular religion of African roots) make every January will truly shed light on their immediate future, which each person has to plan in order to live their personal life – the only one that biology (or perhaps some god) has given them.

What will the next year be like for Cuba’s 11 million people? I don’t think even the oracle of Ifá knows for sure.
(END/COPYRIGHT/IPS)

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By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Nov 6 2013 (Columnist Service)

For the Cuban economy, the year 2014 is set to start with the opening of the first installations in the Special Economic Development Zone in the upgraded Mariel port, 70 km west of Havana.

The new trade and industrial hub will include a container port, enormous warehouses, a free trade zone, industrial endeavours with foreign capital, and modern infrastructure. It will be the country’s leading industrial centre, and is already considered Cuba’s main window to the world of imports and exports.

As soon as the Mariel container terminal begins to operate, Havana’s ageing port will start to be overhauled and renovated, to turn it into a marina for yachts and cruise ships, especially once the half-century U.S. embargo is lifted to allow tourists to come and boats from the United States to dock on Cuban shores.

The upgrade of the Mariel port installations has been mainly financed – 640 million of the 900 million dollars invested – by a loan obtained through an intergovernmental agreement signed by Brazil and Cuba.

Leonardo Padura

The involvement of Brazil and its companies in the construction and investment gives some indication of that country’s interest in gaining a commercial and productive foothold in this privileged geographic location in the Caribbean, at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico and across from the U.S. coast, just before the expansion of the nearby Panama Canal, which will be able to serve bigger ships as of 2015.

The big question with respect to the future of Mariel is who will invest, and under what conditions, in the development zone, which will have not only port installations and warehouses but also industries.

There has been a great deal of talk about the need for the Cuban government to finally declare whether it will modify its legal relations with foreign capital.

Back in July 2012, an official announcement was made that a new investment law was to go into effect by the end of that year, to replace Law 77 passed in 1995.

But there has not yet been a clear response to the expectations created. Meanwhile, what has actually happened is that 190 joint enterprises between the Cuban government and private foreign capital were operating in mid-2013 – only half the number in operation in 2000.

According to a recently read report, from which I took the previous figures, a Cuban deputy minister of foreign trade stated that “a general and sectoral policy to accompany the fomenting of foreign investment is currently being evaluated, and although a modification of the law is not being considered, certain regulations could be updated.”

In other words, no new law can be expected for the time being, and the Mariel Special Economic Development Zone will move towards its future under regulations that in the last few years have scared off more investors than they have attracted, according to the most simple of mathematical operations.

However, due to its special characteristics, Mariel could be governed by different legal mechanisms, which will perhaps be among the regulations to be updated.

The economic transformations undertaken by the government of Raúl Castro, outlined in the economic and social policy guidelines approved at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2011, have gradually modified certain structures and fundamentals of the Cuban economy.

Self-employment has been revitalised, numerous agricultural and services cooperatives have been created and small private businesses have been opened, which has improved services, gastronomy, passenger transport, and food production to a certain extent….

But because of their reduced level of influence on macroeconomics, the changes have failed, and will fail, to become a motor to accelerate development in a country in urgent need of efficiency, productivity, modernisation of all infrastructure, liquidity and access to finance – that is, the elements capable of generating palpable wealth, and with that, an improvement in the living standards of a populace that for nearly a quarter of a century have been getting by on depressed wages that make it impossible to satisfy all of their basic needs, including food.

On several occasions, high-level government officials have said that the most significant economic modifications are yet to come. But the content of what has been promised is unknown and the timeframe for implementation uncertain.

If the announced new law on foreign investment is not approved in the end in a form that manages to draw foreign capital, it is hard to imagine who will be interested in investing in Cuba, even in the Mariel development zone.

Besides Brazilian, Chinese and Russian companies that are predictably close to that investment, the geographic factor and hopes for future changes alone no longer seem sufficient attractions for businesspersons who, upon arriving in Cuba, would even have a problem buying a vehicle for driving around executives and employees.

And a pending question would be where Cubans – that is, Cubans living in Cuba – fit in these new structures, because according to what I read, the Mariel Special Economic Development Zone could be a source of employment for them…but not investment.

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