The international Informática 2013 Fair, held in Havana Mar. 19-22, 2013. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 28 2013 (IPS)

Cuba will continue to prioritise public Internet access over connectivity in private homes, as indicated by a government announcement Tuesday that 118 new public cyber salons would open nationwide as of early June.

The new Internet outlets were reportedly made possible by the “full functioning” of a fibre optic cable laid between Cuba and Venezuela.

The government-controlled press reported on a communications ministry resolution Tuesday that said one hour online in the new outlets would cost the equivalent of 4.50 dollars, payable in 4.50 CUCs or convertible pesos, to which only a small part of the Cuban population of 11.2 million has access.

That amount is equivalent to 108 Cuban pesos, the currency earned by most Cubans. “I cannot possibly afford that on my pension of 270 pesos a month,” retired journalist and university professor Enrique López Oliva told IPS.

Readers of the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, which expanded on the information, had similar complaints. “It looks like whoever set these prices lives in another country or earns a salary wholly in CUCs,” commented one reader who identified himself as J. Pérez.

But the price for surfing the domestic Intranet will be 0.60 CUCs (14.40 pesos) an hour. And access to the international email service will cost 1.50 CUCs (36 pesos) an hour.

Internet, Intranet and email services in Cuba are provided by the state-owned telecoms company ETECSA, which has a monopoly over the informatics and communications sector.

The official resolution specifies that clients cannot use Internet services to carry out actions harmful to “public security, the economy, independence and national sovereignty” – a warning apparently aimed at dissident groups, which the government considers “mercenaries in the pay” of a hostile foreign power, the United States.

Juventud Rebelde wrote that the expansion of connectivity was in line with the Cuban strategy of facilitating growing access to new technologies, depending on the availability of funds and resources, and based on an approach that puts a priority on the social good.

It added that the new cyber salons were made possible by the underwater fibre optic cable running from Guaira in northern Venezuela to Siboney in eastern Cuba, which permits the high-quality, high-speed and stable transmission of a large amount of information.

Authorities in Cuba blame the five-decade U.S. economic and technological embargo for the high local cost of Internet connections, and for the serious problems in web services in this Caribbean island nation.

The newspaper added that “the fibre optic cable, while it improves international communications (up to now carried mainly by satellite) is not a free service, which explains the initial cost of the expansion of the service of navigation on the Internet.”

The cable reached Cuban shores in 2011, and Venezuela’s authorities declared it operational in May 2012, although Cuba’s official media maintained a discreet silence.

Cuba has a minimum bandwidth of 323 megabits per second via satellite, but various sources say the fibre optic cable will increase the current transmission speed by a factor of 3,000 and will cut operating costs by 25 percent, although the satellite services will continue to function.

Cuban authorities have repeatedly made it clear that the country will continue to put a priority on the “social use” of the new technologies – in other words, on connectivity in schools, research and work centres, professional associations or recreational and community centres.

A tiny minority of Cubans have access to the Internet, the Intranet or email service in their homes, basically by dial-up. Another small minority can afford the steep prices of cybercafés, mainly in hotels, which charge around eight dollars an hour.

In its report this year to the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Cuban delegation stated that the country had 783,000 personal computers as of the end of 2011. Of that total, an estimated 18 percent were in homes and more than 33 percent were in the health, education and culture sectors.

“In addition, 2,610,000 users employ Internet services, 622,000 with full navigation,” added the document, which did not differentiate between “social” and private access – the latter of which is limited, by means of payment in national currency, to intellectuals and professionals such as journalists, academics, artists or doctors.

Leonardo Padura. Credit: Courtesy of the author

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

The reform process launched in Cuba by the government of President Raúl Castro has made several changes to the country’s rigid social and economic structure, with the ultimate aim of bringing this island nation out of its economic lethargy and making production, which is sinking under the weight of restrictions, controls and contradictions, more efficient.

After the announcement of the government’s intention to introduce “structural and conceptual changes” to “update” the model, the 2011 Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba – the sole legal party, which governs the country – approved the Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy which set forth the transformations to be carried out.

The programme laid out in the document, which is precise on some issues but vaguer on others, sets out guidelines and commitments for the proposed changes, small and large.

In response to demands or criticism that the pace of change is too slow for a country plagued with social and economic problems that range from the highest structural and macroeconomic level to the complicated daily life of the average citizen, Raúl Castro has stated on several occasions that the transformations will keep pace with well-thought out plans, in order to avoid new errors. He calls this tempo “slow but sure.”

Recently the vice president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers, Miguel Díaz-Canel, confirmed to the press announcements already made by the president.

While economic and social changes have so far brought about slight (or not so slight) shifts in the relations of production, property and citizen rights, such as the revitalisation of private enterprise, creation of agricultural and worker cooperatives, distribution of land for farming, or the important migration reform that allows a majority of the population to travel, changes in the years to come will have a more radical effect on the basic structures of the system.

As Díaz-Canel said: “We have made progress on what was easiest, in the solutions that required less depth of decision and less work to implement, and now we are left with the more important aspects, which will be more decisive in the future development of the country, as well as more complex.”

What is intriguing is that neither leader has specified what the changes will consist of, or what their sphere or scope will be. They merely respond that everything is laid out in the Guidelines.

But an event of international importance has made a big difference to the balance of decision-making in Cuba.

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Cuba’s main political supporter and trading partner through bilateral and regional agreements, such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), is definitely a factor that Havana cannot take lightly.

If, as analysts expect, Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s political heir, wins the presidency in the upcoming elections in Venezuela, Cuba will be able to breathe more easily, given Maduro’s promises with respect to the island and the loyalty he has pledged to Chávez’s thought and commitments.

But what no one doubts is that, with the passing of Chávez, the internal situation in Venezuela could become complicated in many ways, and its close relations with this Caribbean island nation, at least in economic terms, could change because of those unpredictable complications in Venezuela’s domestic reality.

This new turn of events will doubtless have been studied by the Cuban government, independently of political declarations or even silence. And the development will probably have an effect on the pace of internal change.

The fragile state of this country’s economy calls for efficiency, investment (including, of course, foreign capital), the redefinition of production relations, and the updating of state and private sector use of new technologies.

Meanwhile, the complex social fabric, that is so different today than in the early 1990s (when a severe crisis was triggered by the break-up of Cuba’s main political and trading partner, the Soviet Union) requires more realism and dynamism in the process of change, given that a large percentage of the Cuban population is made up of young people with different ideas and points of view, and also that many people have spent more than 20 years struggling to survive on low wages and facing concrete problems of all kinds.

Has the time come to cut short the pauses and accelerate the pace? And is it time for citizens to begin to learn what future is in store for them with those deeper and more complex transformations, that could define the destiny of the country and, certainly, of their own lives? In all likelihood, yes.

Excerpt:

Jobs in the industry are hard to find for new computer engineering graduates in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

Thousands of young Cubans are graduating in computer engineering, a sector the government decided to strengthen over the past decade. But their professional future is uncertain because of failures of organisation and of internet connectivity.

“I haven’t been able to work as a computer engineer,” a 24-year-old woman who graduated in 2011 told IPS. She attended the University of Information Science (UCI), a centre for development and training that was planned as Cuba’s great stride forward in 2002 to boost the field of software programming.

While she was studying, the young woman imagined she would have a secure future in the field of computing. But instead she has been posted for training in a state institute of statistical analysis, where the work is suitable “neither for a computer engineer nor an information technologist.

“I am not learning anything in my specialty, and at the office I just work on statistics,” the engineer, who requested anonymity, complained. Only a few of her fellow students got jobs in software development, while many others are teaching in secondary schools or institutes.

A total of 1,600 computer engineers graduated in her year.

Juan Triana, at the state Centre for Studies on the Cuban Economy, said this Caribbean island nation needs to make better use of the human capital educated over decades at its universities.

The country has the potential to make progress in the knowledge economy, but it must be more innovative in science and technology, and organise regional and local innovation systems that make use of its human resources, Triana says in his 2012 article “Cuba: la economía del conocimiento y el desarrollo” (Cuba: the knowledge economy and development).

That way, he says, computer engineers and technicians from the Havana-based UCI could play an important role in the economic reforms set into motion by the government of President Raúl Castro in 2008.

Up to July 2012, 10,021 computer engineers had graduated from UCI in Havana, not counting graduates from the university’s campuses in three other cities.

Other universities also teach information science, but have fewer students.

Technical education also includes this specialisation. The National Office of Statistics and Information reported that in 2011, 1,466 students graduated in electronics, robotics and communications.

But there are more computer professionals than jobs generated by the industry, according to observers.

However, Luis Guillermo Fernández, the head of Softel, a company creating computing solutions for healthcare, disagreed with this analysis in conversation with IPS at the international Informática 2013 Fair, held in Havana Mar. 19-22.

The fair has been held for the past 15 years for the exchange of ideas and knowledge with companies and researchers from other countries, and to boost business deals and cooperation. This year it was attended by some 1,400 experts from 30 countries, with China in the lead.

Fernández maintained “there is no surplus of graduates; on the contrary, we will need more of them when we get organised.” He pointed out that “almost all undertakings nowadays use computer science.”

In his opinion, “it is essential to organise and update the computer industry. We have not properly organised what we need or defined what our goals are.” The industry veteran said it was urgent “to expand information science culture in order to use human resources more effectively and open up more opportunities.”

Among the problems, Fernández mentioned the need to set clear development goals and priorities, attract investment, bolster competitiveness, quality and efficiency in order to increase service exports and attract foreign companies to manufacture some components in Cuba.

The country only has a bandwidth of 323 megabits per second via satellite, which limits connectivity to internet by institutions, companies, and even more so by households. Since 2012 a fibre optic cable has been operational thanks to an agreement with Venezuela, which, it is hoped, will gradually improve matters.

Exporting goods and services was one of the aims in 2003 when the sector was expanded. Although centres like UCI sell some of their products and computer engineers are working on projects with countries like Venezuela, experts say there is still a long way to go.

Import substitution and export promotion were other goals, but not enough progress has been made, participants in the fair said.

At the end of 2003, the country had 44 software production firms, 24 of which belonged to the ministry of Informatics and Communications. The ministry has since reduced that number to 22.

Most of the companies are devoted to supplying demand from Cuban institutions and the local economy, which is still heavily centralised.

Young people are finding employment in firms like Desoft, which is dedicated to computerising business management and is present in the 15 provincial capitals and 139 municipalities, according to Anabel García, a spokeswoman for the state company. However, the average age of its employees is still around 40, she told IPS.

But it was the young who were actually more in evidence at the fair. Among them was 27-year-old Abel Fírvida, who works on Nova, the Cuban adaptation of the Linux operating system, a free and open source software system created in 1990 by Linus Torvalds of Finland.

Version 3.0 of Nova was presented at the fair. Owing to Fírvida’s excellent grades, he joined the project while he was still a student, and in his view, graduates with the best academic records do have good job opportunities.

Nova was developed by UCI and a company created by the armed forces. At present it is available free to anyone interested in installing it, Fírvida, who is also a teacher, told IPS. The 60-member Nova team is thus contributing to migration to open-source digital systems that guarantee greater security and sovereignty.

The social and economic model that is taking shape in Cuba based on changes gradually being implemented require reforms for strengthening and giving greater autonomy to local government bodies, which began to be renewed in October with the election of new municipal assembly members.

Now that state, cooperative and private forms of property have begun to coexist in the Cuban economy, “decentralised decision-making is going to be essential to the success of these transformations,” Ricardo Torres, a researcher with the University of Havana’s Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy, told IPS.

That principle is considered basic to the goal of local development, a process in which municipalities are becoming central players instead of recipients. The government wants projects such as small-scale industries and service centres, especially in the food sector, to be part of the strategy of municipal self-reliance in terms of supplies.

To ensure financial autonomy, the tax system that will go into effect in January will include taxes on businesses, trading companies and cooperatives, with the goal of financing projects in the areas where they are located. That income will increase municipal budgets for local productive and service activities.

Torres said that a mixed economy (in terms of ownership) and decentralisation are becoming characteristics of the model that could emerge from the reforms that were approved in April 2011, during the Sixth Congress of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba.

On that occasion, President Raúl Castro announced that the “excessively centralised economic model” had to open up. “Practical experience has shown us that excessive centralisation conspires against the development of society and the entire production chain,” Castro said.

“All of our lives, we have seen a Cuban model based on a central power, from which all decisions come. Now we have seen that that is not viable,” said Professor Marta Zaldívar of the University of Havana’s Faculty of Economics.

For Zaldívar, who has been working on the issue for several years, local development will continue to be a pending issue if there is no legal framework for management at the provincial level. “Some steps have been taken, but they are still incipient. The process is slow and time is running out,” she said.

In an interview with IPS, Torres said that “in a situation where there is greater heterogeneity among economic actors, it is essential for them to be able to make autonomous decisions about a multitude of variables and questions related to the life of these organisations.”

At the same time, he said, this is a new path, which requires a break with schemes and patterns of behaviour. “In fact, there will be cases where it will be necessary to de-concentrate ownership in enterprises that are too large for the size of the domestic market. It is an area in which state companies will have to be more autonomous,” he said.

In line with these changes in business management, the national government will have a number of powers, but it will have to share authority and functions with provincial and municipal authorities. “That is another long and difficult learning process that Cuba is setting out on now,” Torres commented.

Local and provincial governments “will have to play a leading role in setting the development agenda for their regions, which requires a number of things, including greater autonomy for them to make relevant decisions in certain areas, such as setting local policies that do not interfere with the national strategies,” he said.

In his view, the conditions are not yet fully in place in every province and municipality, which means the process will have to include the strengthening of local government capacities, so that the local and regional authorities are able to become more active agents in economic and social development at the municipal and provincial levels.

The municipal delegates who won the recent local elections — a process that lasted until November in some places due to Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the eastern provinces — are the government officials closest to the grassroots of society.

One frequent complaint voiced by Cubans is that a delegate may be very good, but does not have the resources to solve voters’ problems. However, delegates are not actually in charge of directly solving problems; their job is to represent and express the needs, concerns and difficulties of their constituents, and to inform them of measures passed by the municipal assembly.

Municipal elections are held every two and a half years. On this occasion, they will be followed by elections in February for representatives to provincial assemblies and the National Assembly – the single-chamber parliament. The official Communist Party media outlets have acknowledged that these government bodies need to boost their authority and participation in the process of changes.

By taking on a more central role in developing their regions, local officials will reinforce democratic participation and bring government closer to citizens on the local level, Torres said. He added that citizens, in turn, will be more interested in giving their votes to individuals shown to be the most competent in given situations.

In that sense, Torres did not rule out the future professionalisation of municipal and provincial delegates, and of the members of the National Assembly.

“As of now, in most cases, representatives at all levels fulfil their duties simultaneously with those of their previous occupation; however, if we really want these people to turn toward the development of their communities, the issue of professionalisation should be analysed and debated,” he commented.

* With reporting by Ivet González.

Granma announces the long-awaited travel reforms. Credit: Patricia Grogg/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Oct 16 2012 (IPS)

The easing of travel restrictions announced by the Cuban government Tuesday was one of the most eagerly awaited reforms. However, limitations remain in place for professionals and others deemed essential to the country’s development or national security.

A new law that goes into effect on Jan. 14 will eliminate the requirement for an exit visa and a letter of invitation from abroad – bureaucratic hurdles that also drove up the cost of travelling.

“My right to travel like any other citizen of this world has been restored,” a woman who was standing in line to buy a newspaper remarked to IPS. “I heard the news on the radio, but I want to see if Granma has more details.”

Along with a news article on the reform, Granma, the Communist Party daily, ran an editorial on the subject and a link to the official gazette, which published decree-law 302 that modifies the current law that dates back to 1976.

In an email message to IPS sent from the United States, Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, said “This reform responds to the Cuban population’s highest priority wish to be able to leave and return to the island freely.

“It not only gives Cubans greater autonomy but it also offers the promise of a more vibrant economy, with more remittances sent from abroad, and more Cubans engaged in both exit and return,” adds the statement from the Washington-based CDA, which is devoted to changing U.S. policy toward the countries of the Americas “by fostering dialogue with those governments and movements with which U.S. policy is at odds,” according to its web site.

In one way or another, the travel restrictions affect the great majority of Cuba’s population of 11.2 million people, especially due to what are considered discriminatory aspects of the requirement for a departure permit and a letter of invitation to travel abroad.

The letter of invitation is actually a condition set by destination countries, in order to grant entry visas. But in 2007, the Cuban authorities began to require that the letter be prepared at a Cuban consulate, before a notary.

When consulted by IPS, one Latin American diplomat who preferred to remain anonymous said the letter, signed before a notary, would continue to be necessary for applying for entry visas.

The travel reform has been expected since President Raúl Castro initially announced the plans in August 2011, after the legislative sessions. He said it would contribute to closer ties between this country and the community of Cubans living abroad, whose makeup he said was “radically different” from what it was in the first decades after the 1959 revolution.

As of January 2013, Cubans wishing to travel abroad on private affairs will only need a valid passport and an entry visa – when required by the destination country. In addition, the time they will be allowed to remain overseas will be expanded from 11 to 24 months, and they will be able to request an extension “for justified reasons.”

But the modifications include measures that continue to regulate the travel abroad of high performance athletes, government officials, administrative employees, university graduates, professionals and technicians “who are involved in activities vital to the country’s economic, social and scientific-technical development or hold positions with decision-making authority regarding financial and material resources.”

Granma stated in its editorial that in these cases, Cuba is forced to take measures to defend itself from U.S. policies that foment the “theft of talents,” which it said were aimed at depriving this country of human resources that are indispensable for economic, social and scientific development.

Immigration authorities told foreign correspondents that professionals considered necessary and essential to the country would continue to need authorisation to travel abroad for personal reasons. However, they did not specify how many people fell into that category.

At the same time, the government revoked a law that entitled the state to confiscate the assets of those who permanently leave the country – although this legislation had already been overruled in 2011 when the buying and selling of homes and cars was authorised.

According to Granma, “In due course, other measures related to the migratory issue will be adopted that will certainly help in the consolidation of the efforts being made by the Revolution towards the full normalisation of Cuba’s relations with its emigrants.”

Experts on migration affairs, like Antonio Aja, estimate that one out of three or four Cubans currently have family members living overseas. According to the 2010 U.S. census, there are 1.8 million Cubans in that country.

According to Aja, professionals represent 12 percent of all Cubans who have gone abroad to live in the last five years, “which makes Cuba part of the migration currents of theft and loss of important human capital.”

He said that while labour power is exported, the potential benefits of that process are not taken advantage of by Cuba.

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 8 2012 (IPS)

A year after the Raúl Castro government approved a programme of changes and measures aimed at making the Cuban economic model sustainable, the slow pace of implementation is a focus of debate and criticism even among its supporters, who believe it should move forward more rapidly.

In April 2011, the Sixth Congress of the ruling Communist Party (PCC) officially approved the “Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the Party and the Revolution,” with more than 300 short-, medium- and long-term policy goals. Some were already being implemented at the time, others were initiated in the months that followed and many are still waiting to be put into action.

“The changes should be sped up in some economic sectors,” economist Pável Vidal told IPS. “The best candidates for obtaining immediate significant results” through the new policies appear to be non-state forms of organising small-scale production, he said.

“Unlike large companies, small and medium-sized enterprises, together with cooperatives and agricultural producers, comprise a group that has a lot of flexibility and less inertia, no bureaucracy that is resisting changes, and a large capacity for adapting to a new framework of incentives,” Vidal said.

Among non-state forms of production, Cuban authorities are prioritising cooperatives, although new legislation announced for that sector is still being studied. “One of the aspects that apparently is being discussed is the scope or degree of autonomy that this type of association should have,” said a source who asked to remain anonymous.

University professor Reina Fleitas said that changes related to the workforce “should go slow,” to have as little of a negative impact as possible, especially in the case of women, “who, despite all of the progress, continue to be the most disadvantaged in terms of employment and wages.”

Given the complexity of the issue, the government relaxed a planned reorganisation of the labour force that was to involve the eventual elimination of up to one million state jobs. However, the number of people who have lost their jobs to date, their ages and their gender is unknown.

According to sources from the labour sector, some of the workers who were laid off accepted production-related jobs in the same state enterprise or opted to become self-employed, or private sector workers. This year, an anticipated 170,000 jobs that are considered superfluous or unproductive will be cut.

“It is essential to reduce payrolls, to be able to achieve efficiency and analyse deadweight and capacity to meet the plan and implement the budget, adjusting to what is available,” said Salvador Valdés, secretary general of Cuba’s labour federation, the CTC, in an interview prior to the May Day festivities.

Self-employed workers, who numbered more than 370,000 as of February, and about 80 percent of whom are union members, participated as part of that emerging sector for the first time this year in the parades held on May 1, International Workers Day. It is anticipated that their numbers will reach 600,000 this year.

That growth should be favoured by a gradual transition this year of state workers to private enterprise, in trades such as carpenters, photographers, and repairers of everything from jewellery, mattresses and other household items to electric and electronic equipment.

In addition, since late last year, private businesses have had access to loans from state banks, adding to channels for financing that include personal savings, remittances from abroad and informal financing sources.

In response to a question from Café 108, a website initiative of the IPS news office in Cuba designed to encourage citizen participation in investigative journalism, Prof. Fleitas said it was important to speed up the distribution of idle land, and to carry out the process with a gender-based approach.

In that sense, the sociologist and expert on gender, health and family said the proportion of women who own land was “too small.” She said it was necessary to raise awareness and create conditions in rural areas for women to become individual producers or members of cooperatives, but as owners or co-owners of their land.

According to official figures, in early 2011, women represented 23 percent of the total agricultural workforce of 1.3 million, including the state and cooperative sectors. At the same time, 11,249 women were reported as having received idle lands in usufruct, in line with Decree-law 259.

Under that legislation, in effect since 2008, the state has distributed 1.3 million hectares of land to private individuals and farming cooperatives, with the goal of increasing food production. According to official estimates, one million hectares are still available.

However, experts believe it is indispensable to introduce changes to that decree-law to eliminate factors that create uncertainty and discourage farmers. Possible changes that have been studied since last year include the eventual expansion of land that can be distributed, a longer period of usufruct rights, and the possibility of beneficiaries associating with different forms of production.

In late March, Marino Murillo, vice president of the Council of Ministers, said the goal was to extend cooperatives to non-agricultural sectors, which he did not identify. With respect to time-frames, he said only that the move was imminent.

In the government’s policy guidelines, which are like a roadmap, first-degree cooperatives (in which members are individuals or legal entities) are proposed as a socialist form of collective property in different sectors, for producing and providing services that are useful to society, and in which members are responsible for all expenses based on their income.

Second-degree cooperatives, which are made up of first-degree cooperatives, are also planned, with the goal of organising related complementary activities, those that add value to the products and services of their members, or to make joint purchases and sales, with the goal of increasing efficiency.

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 3 2012 (IPS)

Local communities can play a key role in adaptation to climate change if they are helped to properly understand the problem and take it on board. “Climate literacy is needed,” says Ángela Corvea, a long-time Cuban environmental activist.

“People do not always take these problems seriously, and do not see the risks involved in extreme natural events, which will become more frequent and increasingly severe,” Corvea adds, answering a question on Café 108, an initiative of the IPS Cuba office website to promote citizen participation in investigative journalism.

In her view, “small-scale actions by local communities can help deal with these changes, which are no longer merely imminent, but are already happening.” Rising temperatures and sea levels, recurrent droughts, and more intense floods and hurricanes are some of the consequences of climate change.

In 2003, Corvea created an environmental project named Acualina, to raise awareness about the environment, especially among children and teenagers. Every year for over a decade, she has organised coastal clean-up actions to contribute to the global campaign “Clean Up the World”, which started in Australia.

“We need to encourage savings of water and other resources, consume only what is necessary, avoid polluting, and try to keep our surroundings clean and pleasant; we need to recycle, and to be informed and teach others, especially children and young people; we need to act in solidarity, and to talk about these issues everywhere in order to draw attention and create awareness,” Corvea says.

Enrique Arango, an expert at the National Centre for Seismological Research (CENAIS), agrees with Corvea that the risks associated with climate change are only apparent in the long term, which makes it difficult to raise awareness at the community level. “It’s like smoking: no one sees the immediate effects, so people don’t give up the habit even though they know smoking is harmful,” he says.

In Cuba, it is difficult to separate the community from the centralised political and administrative bodies. “If an initiative does not come down from the authorities, it is not carried out or it remains unfinished,” one person wrote on the Café 108 comments site.

According to Arango, one way to teach people climate change literacy in their neighbourhoods is through interactive projects in which a high percentage of the population participates. A systematic approach, strong leadership, and above all political will are required at all levels; “otherwise, results will only be achieved while the programme is under way,” he said.

Social networks began to play a definite role in Cuba in creating ecological awareness in December 2011, when users of the microblogging network Twitter convened clean-up action and environmental education at the mouth of the Almendares river.

“Big things grow from small things. Everyone worked on their own little patch and helped each other. Ultimately, the issue was not just cleaning up the garbage, but provoking a reaction, raising the awareness of the population of the area itself to clean up and care for their own section of river,” twitterer Salvatore (@salvatore300) commented to IPS.

Osmel Francis, the leader of rap group Cubanos en la Red, promotes actions supporting social protection and care of the environment through his music. “Singers do not always realise how useful we can be to society,” he told IPS.

He has joined Corvea in clean-up actions on the Quibú river, one of the most polluted waterways in Havana.

Francis said there is a lack of environmental awareness, and the key to raising it is education. “The media must also get more involved, because we organise campaigns and clean-up actions but these are not always reported. I don’t see the environment as a priority issue (for the media),” he said.

“As for adaptation to climate change, even we (environmentalists) need education and training in order to learn more about what can be done, and how to reach people with our message,” Francis said.

Meanwhile, based on his experience as a photojournalist, Rolando Pujol is convinced that the population must have more knowledge of the risks it faces.

Often, coastal dwellers insist on remaining in at-risk areas because their life and livelihoods are closely linked to the sea. “They prefer to rebuild their homes time and again” after they have been destroyed by hurricanes, and they are also influenced by stories of places far inland that have had to be rebuilt, he said.

Ramón Pichs, an expert on climate change and development, said the role of the population in adaptation strategies was “essential” in Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands.

The success of any project will be greater “if the communities have an adequate level of awareness about the problems,” said Pichs.

In an interview with IPS, the Cuban academic described the active participation by his country’s citizens in health programmes and campaigns against disease vectors, and a project in Trinidad and Tobago for restoring the Nariva Swamp with the participation of several local civil society organisations.

The local level is key for climate adaptation, and the roles of the population and of the different organisations present in the community are essential for taking appropriate action, said Pichs, who also stressed the importance of links between these sectors and national institutions dealing with environmental issues.

As a result of climate change-related extreme weather events like a rise in the sea level and increasingly intense storms alternating with drought, Caribbean island nations are facing the challenge of adopting adaptation measures that could be too costly for their budgets.

Experts predict more and more intense storms in the Caribbean. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

One important message from the report is that costly investments are not needed to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events; there are other ways of dealing with the impacts that do not involve major spending on infrastructure, he told IPS.

That clarification is important because funds for climate change adaptation are scarce in this region, added the expert, who is co-chair of IPCC Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

The IPCC, which was established in 1988, has published four comprehensive assessment reports reviewing the latest climate science, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Field was in Havana to participate in a workshop held to divulge the results of the IPCC “Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”, produced as a tool for climate adaptation policy-making.

According to statistics provided in the Apr. 18-19 workshop, the rise in sea level could lead to a reduction in the size of the Caribbean islands and have a negative impact on infrastructure, including airports, roads and capital cities, which tend to be located near the coast.

More than half of the population in the region lives less than 1.5 km from the coast. Ian King, an expert from Barbados with the United Nations Development Programme Caribbean Disaster Risk Reduction Initiative (UNDP CRMI), said the first challenge is to assess the threats, in order to decide on the most suitable adaptation policies.

King told IPS that research on management of coastal areas and marine ecosystems has been carried out in Barbados, and that it is now a question of investing in these areas to protect not only the species but the population and infrastructure, facilitating access to information that helps evaluate the best way to manage disaster risks.

One of the ways is to model different scenarios of the risk of high-intensity storms and their impact on coastal areas, King said. Better adaptation policies can be established on this more scientific basis, he added, saying the decision of whether or not to pull out of at-risk areas largely depends on the communities themselves.

Although it is clear that adaptation to climate change is a pressing need, there is a problem of financing for programmes in countries with weak economies like the islands of the Caribbean.

“It is precisely the lowest-income sectors that are most vulnerable to these problems,” Beat Schmid, Oxfam director in Cuba, told IPS.

He said the financing of adaptation programmes in developing countries by those who caused global warming was a question of “climate justice.”

There is a broad scientific consensus that the rise in the average global temperatures is due to greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by human activities, mainly in the industrialised nations.

Schmid pointed out that in international negotiations, Oxfam and other organisations advocate the creation of a 100 billion dollar a year global fund to finance the adoption of concrete adaptation measures.

“There are also other mechanisms on the table, such as a financial transaction tax and an airline ticket tax,” he added.

The capacity of developing nations to undertake adaptation measures is limited, added the expert from Oxfam, an international confederation of 14 organisations working with over 3,000 partners in more than 100 countries to come up with lasting solutions to poverty.

In Schmid’s view, Cuba is a symbol of what can be achieved. But he clarified that this is a country with a strong state whose social policies reach the most remote areas, and which has invested steadily in human capital.

He also mentioned that this country has carried out large-scale, long-term programmes focusing on water sources and forests, for example, which started to be implemented years ago, not with the idea of adaptation, but to reduce risks like water scarcity and desertification – problems that are aggravated by climate change.

“But many countries do not have these strengths, or the level of poverty is so high that governments cannot even think about climate change adaptation programmes,” he said. “Even in the case of Cuba, the needs far surpass the possibilities of financing these programmes.”

He also lamented that there is still talk of each country paying for adaptation measures, and that only five industrialised nations are living up to the commitment to spend 0.7 percent of GDP on development aid, while several countries have actually cut their official development aid.

The IPCC special report on risk management warns that economic losses caused by global warming-related natural disasters are increasing, and this will have a great impact in the future on areas like tourism, agriculture and water supply.

“What matters at this summit is not what is on the official agenda,” said Uruguayan analyst Laura Gil, echoing the conventional wisdom in this Colombian port city, where the Sixth Summit of the Americas ended Sunday without a final declaration.

The Fifth People's Summit ended with a peaceful demonstration in Cartagena. Credit: People's Summit press office

The Fifth Summit, held in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, in 2009, had a similar outcome.

At the Sixth Summit, which opened Saturday Apr. 14, the foreign ministers failed to reach prior agreement on a consensus document.

Key points of discord were the continued U.S. embargo against Cuba and Argentina’s claim to sovereignty over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic.

Gil, an expert on international relations who lives in Colombia, told IPS that “a consensus on drugs seems to be forming among the countries of Latin America.”

“These three issues are precisely the ones that are dividing the hemisphere in two, or confronting the countries of Latin America with the United States and Canada,” she said.

“The Summit of the Americas process is in crisis. What the Sixth Summit clearly shows is that certain issues cannot be put off any longer, particularly that of Cuba,” excluded from the Americas summits due to pressure from the United States, she added.

In Gil’s opinion, “there will not be another summit without Cuba. Either Cuba is included, or there will not be a summit at all. The absence of (Ecuadorean President Rafael) Correa is a red alert,” she said, referring to the Ecuadorean president’s promise not to attend any further hemispheric meetings to which Cuba is not invited.

According to the expert, “Colombia positioned itself as a bridge, able to facilitate relations between contrary ideological blocs. But from this position, Colombia cannot work miracles.

“This summit reminds us that ideologies are still a force to be reckoned with. The limitations are plain to be seen,” she said.

The Venezuelan ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), Roy Chaderton – a former Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia and the U.S. – told the Colombian radio station RCN Radio: “This is a rebellion by Latin American democracies against U.S. and Canadian hegemony.”

Canada and the United States were left in isolation in a vote on a resolution to put an end to Cuba’s exclusion, which was split 32 against two, at a meeting of foreign ministers that was to approve documents to be signed by the presidents.

In addition to Correa, Haitian President Michel Martelly and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega were also absent, having sent last-minute cancellations. Ortega led a rally in Managua in solidarity with Cuba Saturday Apr. 14.

On Saturday morning it was announced that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez would not be attending the summit, due to the treatment for his cancer.

At the end of the first day’s meetings, the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) released a declaration in Cartagena stating that they would not attend any further summits without the participation of Cuba.

ALBA is made up of Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela.

The host’s speech

At the opening ceremony of the Sixth Summit, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos did not mince words. He exhorted delegates “not to be indifferent” to the changes occurring in Cuba, which he said were ever more widely recognised and should be encouraged.

“It is time to overcome the paralysis that results from ideological obstinacy and seek a basic consensus so that this process of change has a positive outcome, for the good of the Cuban people,” he said.

“The isolation, the embargo, the indifference, looking the other way, have been ineffective,” Santos said.

As for Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, Santos recommended supporting the agenda of the Haitian government, instead of pushing “our own agendas.”

He also said that “Central America is not alone.” Organised crime must be combated, but anti-drug policy should be focused on “the victims,” including “the millions” locked up in prisons, Santos said.

This summit will not find an answer to Latin America’s calls for facing up to the failure of the war on drugs, “of this I am completely certain,” he said.

Militarisation marches on

U.S. President Barack Obama let it be understood that his country would tolerate flexibilisation of Latin American anti-drug policies, saying “I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are ones that are doing more harm than good in certain places.”

But he flatly rejected legalisation.

“I know there are frustrations and that some call for legalisation. For the sake of the health and safety of our citizens – all our citizens – the United States will not be going in this direction,” Obama said on Saturday.

He also announced that the U.S. government would increase its aid to the war on drugs led by “our Central American friends” and pledged “more than 130 million dollars this year.”

Colombian expert Ricardo Vargas of Acción Andina, a local think tank, summed up the U.S. position: “‘You may decriminalise drugs, but that will not eliminate the mafias. And we will be there’,” with a military presence as soon as drug shipments cross the borders, he told IPS.

The People’s Summit

From another part of the city of Cartagena, Enrique Daza, the coordinator of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a movement of social organisations that organised the Fifth People’s Summit, held in parallel to the Summit of the Americas, announced their “satisfaction” at the same time as President Santos received a standing ovation in the auditorium where the heads of state were gathered.

“They were not able to keep our demands hidden,” Daza said at the close of the counter-summit.

The alternative summit rejected the United States’ “imposition of its agenda” at the Summits of the Americas, and demanded an end to militarisation based on the pretext of the war on drugs, which in fact ends up criminalising social protest, he said.

In its final declaration, the People’s Summit castigated the United States and Canada for insisting on the promotion of free trade treaties with other countries of the continent.

Canada came in for heavy criticism for fomenting a “predatory model” for the operations of its mining companies in Latin America. “The rights of investors cannot take precedence over the rights of people and of nature,” the final declaration says.

The gathering of social movements, left-wing groups and human rights, indigenous, environmental and women’s organisations also launched a veiled attack on socialist governments in Latin America.

While recognising the efforts of bodies such as ALBA and the fledgling Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the declaration expressed that “progressive and left-wing” governments in the Americas should take steps against the extraction of natural resources and the concentration of land ownership.

On the positive side, the People’s Summit proposed independent integration within the region, and knowledge and respect for the contributions of indigenous people and peasant farmers to the art of “good living” and a culture of peace.

A group of former political prisoners from Cuba and their family members gathered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square and in front of the foreign ministry Tuesday to protest the unexpected cut-off in aid from the government.

Former Cuban political prisoners gathered outside the governing party headquarters in Málaga to demand an extension of the aid they were receiving. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

“They have completely abandoned us,” Juan Antonio Bermúdez, the former vice president of the National Human Rights Federation of Cuba and a former political prisoner and prisoner of conscience, told IPS.

There are “children, elderly persons and pregnant women” among the people affected by the cut-off in economic assistance, he said.

Between July 2010 and April 2011, Spain took in 115 former political prisoners and 647 family members from Cuba, under an agreement between the Cuban government of Raúl Castro and the Spanish government of then socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

After granting them asylum, Zapatero established a one-year assistance plan providing them with housing, food, healthcare, transport, school materials and job training.

That programme was extended for six months, until January 2012. But the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who took office in December, did not approve a second extension.

“We have tried hard to find work, but haven’t found any. I don’t know where I’m going to go,” Yanelkys Ordóñez, the relative of a former political prisoner, told IPS as she bundled up her baby in a demonstration last week in the southern city of Málaga, outside the headquarters of the governing Popular Party (PP).

Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union – 23 percent – and is suffering a severe economic crisis that has forced the government to make drastic spending cuts in all areas.

The former political prisoners had been receiving an average of 1,000 euros (1,330 dollars) a month per family, depending on the number of dependents, and the payments were channelled through humanitarian groups like the Spanish Red Cross, the Spanish Catholic Commission of Migration Association (ACCEM), and the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR).

“We are going to make an effort to help them with insertion in Spanish society,” the secretary of state for international cooperation, Jesús Gracia, said Tuesday in the southern city of Cádiz.

Now that the programme for aid to the Cubans has ended, they are facing the same conditions experienced by the rest of the immigrants in Spain, and by many Spanish citizens, Gracia told the state TV station.

Their needs will be studied on an individual basis, he added.

On Apr. 4, exiled Cuban dissident Albert du Bouchet, the former director of the Habana Press news agency, committed suicide in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in Spain’s Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa.

The Spanish government lamented the news, but said du Bouchet’s death had nothing to do with the cut-off in assistance.

“We are very grateful to the Spanish government for taking us in, but we came here under an agreement that has not been fulfilled,” José Luis Rodríguez Chaves, a Cuban dissident who arrived in Spain on Apr. 8, 2011 with a group of 36 other former political prisoners, told IPS.

On Dec. 30, the Rajoy administration announced that it would extend the general assistance programme for refugees and for immigrants in a vulnerable situation. But the 17 million dollars in aid, to be handled by organisations that work with these population groups, were cancelled as part of the sweeping cutbacks made by the government.

Rodríguez Chaves, Julio César Gálvez and other Cubans met Tuesday in Madrid with PP legislator Teófilo de Luis, in search of a solution.

“The legislator told me he would meet with officials to find out the government’s response, and he warned us to stop protesting and to wait,” Bermúdez said.

“The situation is chaotic for more than 80 families, who have been totally abandoned,” he said.

“The wait is driving us to despair, when there are children and people who are ill, who are going to end up on the streets,” he added.

In a communiqué presented at PP headquarters in Málaga, the former political prisoners asked “all European Union member countries to intercede (on their behalf) with the Spanish authorities so that (we) are allowed to move to other countries.”

“If there is no possibility for us to find work here, they should send us to another country,” María Isabel García Reyes told IPS. She said she and her fellow Cubans will have to leave the apartments they are renting “and go and sleep under a bridge.”

In the last year of the Zapatero administration, the payments they were receiving to pay for clothes, medicine, transportation and school supplies were gradually reduced, until the aid was completely cut off in January “without providing time to prepare for this difficult situation,” the statement added.

Randol Roca, another Cuban who lives in Málaga, told IPS in March that since the assistance was cut off, he has had to panhandle on the streets to survive, since he cannot find work.

“There is no work for anyone,” said Rodríguez Chaves. He added that there are many Cuban dissidents who have been unable to get their professional qualifications and degrees validated in Spain.

He said he was forced to go into exile in Spain “under the threat of more years of prison, or the risk that at any moment I would appear in a ditch with my mouth full of ants.”

“They have left us in the streets. We won’t be able to send our kids to school because we have no money for transport,” said Bermúdez.

Relations between the United States and Latin America have “grown more distant” in importance part due to the latter’s persistent disagreement with U.S. policies on immigration, drugs, and Cuba, according to a new report released here Wednesday on the eve of this year’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia.

“The United States must regain credibility in the region by dealing seriously with an unfinished agenda of problems, including immigration, drugs, and Cuba – that stands in the way of a real partnership,” according to Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue (IAD).

The 20-page report, entitled “Remaking the Relationship”, described current inter-American relations as “generally cordial but lack(ing) in vigor and purpose”. It suggested that Washington, in particular, has failed to fully come to terms with Latin America’s strong economic and political progress over the past two decades.

It also concluded that the two sides “need to do more to exploit the enormous untapped opportunities of their relationship in economics, trade, and energy”, as well as to work more closely together on global and regional problems.

“They need to breathe new life and vigor into hemispheric relations,” it stressed.

“If the United States and Latin America do not make the effort now, the chance may slip away,” the report warned. “The most likely scenario then would be marked by a continued drift in their relationship, further deterioration of hemispheric-wide institutions, a reduced ability and willingness to deal with a range of common problems, and a spate of missed opportunities for more robust growth and greater social equity.”

Coming on the eve of the Cartagena Summit, where many of these same issues are expected to claim centre-stage, the report represents as much of a consensus of elite opinion in both Americas as can be found.

Washington’s 40-year-old drug war and its impacts on the region will be major agenda item as a result of an unprecedented push by Latin American leaders to use the forum to discuss alternative strategies that could reduce the level of violence associated with drug trafficking.

Most of IAD’s members endorsed the report; there was only one partial dissent – by a former Latin America aide in the George H.W. Bush administration who objected to the report’s suggestion that legalisation of some drugs or decriminalisation could offer viable alternative solutions to dealing with illicit drug trafficking and the violence associated with it in many Latin American countries.

Founded 30 years ago, IAD’s membership includes 100 prominent figures divided roughly evenly between U.S. nationals, including one former president (Jimmy Carter) and numerous former cabinet officials and lawmakers from both Democratic and Republican administrations, on the one hand, and leading personalities from Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin Americans, including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Lagos, and Ernesto Zedillo, and nine other former Latin American presidents, on the other.

IAD is co-chaired by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills.

In addition to leading politicians, members also include important business figures, heads of civil society organisations (CSOs), academics, and former top managers of multilateral or hemispheric organisations, including the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations, the Organisation of American States (OAS), and the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), among others.

Latin America’s recent advances in reducing poverty and inequality, consolidating democratic practices, and establishing promising new ties with countries like China and India contrasts favourably, according to the report, with Washington’s travails resulting from its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, growing inequality and political gridlock.

As a result, “(m)ost countries of the (Latin American) region view the United States as less and less relevant to their needs – and with declining capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with the issues that most concern them,” it said.

Moreover, Washington’s failure to deal effectively with three longstanding irritants to inter-American relations – immigration, drug policy, and Cuba – has hardly helped, the report noted.

The report noted that Washington’s failure to achieve meaningful immigration reform – the result, to a great extent, of its increasingly divisive politics – “is breeding resentment across the region, nowhere more so than in …Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.”

Recent signs that immigration from Mexico, in particular, has levelled off should, according to the report, offer an opportunity for U.S. policy makers to revise their views.

On drugs, the report called it “critical” that Washington respond to growing calls by Latin American leaders, most recently by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, and Guatemala’s new president, Otto Perez, to consider alternative strategies, such as regulated legalisation of marijuana and decriminalisation of mere possession of certain drugs.

The report endorsed similar conclusions reached by the 2009 Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, which was chaired by Cardoso, Zedillo, and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria.

It said these alternatives, as well as staunching “the flow of dangerous arms southward from the United States” by drug cartels and enhanced U.S. support for national efforts at rehabilitating and re- integrating criminals and other migrants repatriated by Washington to their home countries, should serve as a “starting point for an honest U.S.-Latin American dialogue on the drug question”.

On Cuba, the only country whose head of state, at Washington’s insistence, has not been invited to Cartegena, the report asserted that Washington’s 50-year-old embargo “has not worked and, in fact, may have been counter-productive, prolonging Cuba’s repressive rule rather than ending it.”

Washington, it said, “needs to do far more to dismantle its severe, outdated constraints on normalized relations with Cuba,” while its “authoritarian regime” should be urged by its Latin and Caribbean neighbours to institute democratic reform.

On the more positive side, the report said “expanded trade, investment and energy cooperation offer the greatest promise for robust U.S.-Latin American relations” and that “intensive economic engagement by the United States may be the best foundation for wider partnerships across many issues as well as the best way to energize currently listless U.S. relations with the region.”

While the U.S. share of the Latin American market has diminished in recent years, its exports – now greater in value than its exports to Europe – have been growing “at an impressive pace”.

The report noted that the ratification of long-pending free trade accords with Colombia and Panama offer a good start, but that Washington should also seek a “broader framework for U.S. economic relations with Latin America,” despite the failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to gain any traction.

The growing global influence of Latin America, particularly Brazil and Mexico, also calls for greater cooperation and consultation with the region’s leaders on global issues, including nuclear non- proliferation and climate change, according to the report.

It also commended Washington for its accommodation of new regional institutions, such as UNASUR, that currently exclude the U.S., but also suggested the two sides also focus in reforming the hemisphere’s oldest regional grouping, the Organisation of American States, particularly given its importance in establishing democratic norms.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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 Patricia Grogg
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

The Catholic Church in Cuba expects people to welcome Pope Benedict XVI with warmth and enthusiasm, even though Catholics are not a majority here like they are in Mexico, the first stop on the pope’s Latin America tour that begins Mar. 23.

“Of course I plan to go to the pope’s mass. We are waiting for him,” said Liliana Fuentes, who lives in the working-class neighbourhood of San Pedrito in the westernmost province of Santiago de Cuba, 860 kilometres from Havana. “We are ‘paleros,’ that is our religion, but we also go to church,” she told IPS.

Palo Monte is an Afro-Cuban religion that is widespread in the eastern region of the country, where spiritualism is practiced as well. “People say that in the morning, Santiago families go to church, and in the evening, they go to the bembé (a party that honours the orishas, Afro-Cuban deities),” commented Omar López, director of the Santiago City Conservation Office.

“We feel proud about this visit by the pope. Santiago is very actively preparing to receive him,” López told a group of journalists who were invited to the city Feb. 22-23, when brigades of workers were fitting out Antonio Maceo Plaza for the mass that Benedict will celebrate there.

According to the pope’s agenda, which was released on Mar. 1 by the Catholic bishops conference, he will arrive in Santiago de Cuba on Mar. 26 at 2 p.m. local time (17:00 GMT). He will be received by President Raúl Castro, Havana Archbishop Jaime Ortega and other religious and government authorities.

The mass in Santiago’s plaza, which has a capacity for 250,000 people, is set for 5:30 p.m. on the same day. The bishops issued a message inviting “the entire town” to welcome Benedict with the “warmth and enthusiasm of the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” and to participate, along with the faithful, in the masses to be held in Santiago and Havana.

On the evening of the 26th, the pope will stay at a guest house built near the Basilica del Cobre, the shrine to Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint. The reinforced concrete building, with its sombre-looking exterior, has seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms, a living room, dining room and all necessary comforts.

“It is in a discreet place and meets all of the internal and external security requirements,” commented engineer Fausto Vélez, who oversaw the construction project, which according to his estimates cost about 86,000 dollars. Vélez also oversaw the restoration of the basilica in El Cobre (which means “copper” in Spanish), a former mining town about 12 kilometres from Santiago.

Indigenous Cubans and African slaves were mercilessly exploited in the local copper mines, and the first major slave uprising in the country occurred here in the 18th century. That event is commemorated with a monumental sculpture at the top of Los Chivos Hill, formerly known as Cardenillo Hill.

On the morning of Tuesday the 27th, the pope will visit the shrine to Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre. It houses a 25-cm statue of the Virgin that was found floating in the nearby Bay of Nipe in 1612.

The Catholic Church has called on “all Cubans,” whether or not they are Catholic, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of that discovery, and declared 2012 a Jubilee Year.

Sources with the archbishop’s office of Santiago de Cuba told IPS that 8,000 to 10,000 people weekly visit the sanctuary, which has a capacity for 500. National and international pilgrimages are expected to increase through December as part of the Jubilee Year.

After his visit to the basilica, Pope Benedict will travel to Havana, where he will meet privately with President Castro. The official agenda does not mention any contact with former president Fidel Castro, although that is a possibility, Catholic media outlets reported.

According to protocol, during his second meeting with the Cuban president, the pope will introduce his entourage and Castro will introduce his closest associates and his family. One of his daughters is sexologist Mariela Castro, a tenacious advocate of sexual diversity rights.

José Félix Pérez Riera, assistant secretary of Cuba’s Catholic bishops conference, told foreign correspondents on Thursday, Mar. 1 that the pope’s programme did not include meetings with other churches or representatives from the world of culture, in contrast with the five-day 1998 visit by Pope John Paul II.

But like his late predecessor, who was the first pope to visit Cuba, Benedict will not meet with representatives of Afro-Cuban religions or dissident political groups that have no legal status in this country.

According to anthropologist María Elena Faguaga, people who follow Afro-Cuban religions are a majority in this Caribbean island nation.

African-based religions are a “cultural reality that the Church respects and tries to evangelise according to its mission,” Pérez Riera told IPS.

According to official Catholic records, about 60 percent of the Cuban population has been baptised in the Catholic Church. But experts say this does not mean a majority of Cubans are practicing Catholics. It is estimated that members of evangelical and other Protestant religions total more than one million in this country of 11.2 million.

“The number of practicing Catholics in Cuba is quite small in proportion compared to the number of Catholics in Mexico or other Latin American nations,” Orlando Márquez, spokesman for the archbishop’s office and editor of the magazine Palabra Nueva, admitted in an article published on the website of the bishops’ conference.

“However, the pope wants to be here with us, with the Catholic minority and with the majority devoted to Our Lady of Charity, all of whom comprise the Cuban nation, and he also wants to be with those who are in neither of these two groups,” Márquez wrote.

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The search for oil in Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico waters, launched by the Spanish firm Repsol, has triggered speculation about future prospects for Cuba and the possibility of this country one day making the transition from importer to exporter of crude.

Moreover, given its strategic importance for both the United States and Cuba, some analysts believe that energy offers a potential area for cooperation that could eventually help pave the way to the normalisation of relations between the two countries.

For the moment, the Cuban authorities and oil industry personnel are remaining discreetly silent on the subject. CUPET, the state-owned oil company, has limited itself to officially confirming the arrival in the country on Jan. 19 of the Scarabeo 9 oil rig for “the resumption in the coming days of deepwater drilling for oil exploration.”

Drilling operations presumably began in late January. According to CUPET, the goal is to continue testing to determine the potential for oil and gas production in Cuba’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Gulf of Mexico. The results of the drilling will contribute to defining that potential.

After opening up its economy to foreign investment in 1991, Cuba divided the EEZ, which covers an area of 112,000 sq km, into 59 oil and gas exploration blocks. On Jan. 18, Rafael Tenreiro, director of exploration and production at CUPET, reiterated a previous estimate of a potential 20,000 million barrels in the area.

At the launching of the book “Perforación de pozos petroleros marinos” (“Offshore Oil Well Drilling”) by Rolando Fernández, supervisor of the Gulf of Mexico operations group, Tenreiro stated that it was “possible” that Cuba could become an oil exporter.

“We have to prepare the country for this good news,” he added, stressing the need for the production of technology and participation in the entire process.

In 2011, more than 20 offshore exploration blocks had already been leased to large foreign energy companies, including, in addition to Repsol, StatoilHydro of Norway, ONGC Videsh of India, PETRONAS of Malaysia, PetroVietnam, Gazprom of Russia, Sonangol of Angola the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.

Reflecting on the potential ramifications should Repsol’s exploratory drilling prove successful, university professor Fernando Martirena told IPS that large-scale development of the Cuban oil industry would obviously provide a boost to the government programmes currently underway, since it would represent “a needed injection of fresh foreign currency into a tense national economy.”

This scenario, “combined with the package of measures being implemented as a result of the ‘updating’ of the Cuban economic model, will heat up the issue of the blockade,” said Martirena. Under the U.S. economic embargo against this Caribbean island nation, in place for 50 years this month, U.S. companies are shut out from profiting from a potential oil boom in Cuba.

In Martirena’s view, if the U.S. Congress wants to be pragmatic, “it will have to choose between continuing to support the hysterical Cuban-American bloc that does so much lobbying around the issue of the blockade, or simply accepting reality – that there is no reason to maintain this policy.”

Cuban-American members of Congress headed up by the chairwoman of the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have attempted to block Repsol’s drilling operations in Cuban waters. While they claim that their opposition is based on concerns for the environment and the security of the United States, analysts believe that their motivation is primarily political.

Before arriving in Cuban waters, the Scarabeo 9 drilling rig – built in China and assembled in Singapore, and therefore exempt from the prohibitions of the U.S. embargo – successfully passed inspection by personnel from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard.

CUPET has also vouched that the cutting-edge equipment leased by Repsol for its drilling operations has been duly verified to include the necessary features to guarantee the utmost efficiency and safety. The exploratory drilling is expected to last roughly two and a half months.

“Technically speaking, the chances of a mishap occurring in Cuba’s economic area are extremely small, not only because of the precautions taken, but also for purely statistical reasons. This is one drilling rig out of the countless rigs operating outside of Cuban waters” in the Gulf of Mexico, economist Luis René Fernández commented to IPS.

An expert on Cuba-U.S. relations, Fernández noted that while there are political risks associated with the issues of security and environmental impacts, there are also experiences that indicate that these “could and should be reduced.”

“(Socialist) Venezuela has not stopped supplying oil to the United States, although it has tried to diversity its markets,” he mentioned as an example.

He also pointed to the migration accords signed by Havana and Washington and Cuba’s purchases of food from U.S. companies despite “all of the restrictions and limitations.”

“In these cases, among the reasons for a certain type of communication and collaboration, it always boils down to the importance of geography. There are common issues in which it is more beneficial for both sides to address them directly and even to cooperate. Not doing so could have high costs, not only economic, but also for the environment and security,” he said.

Fernández stressed that the U.S. government is not a “unified actor” and that there are different agencies that deal with matters such as energy and the environment.

“There are experts and professionals who fulfil their missions and could have real impacts on the concrete political situation,” he said, due to geographical proximity but also because “it is advisable to cooperate in spite of political and ideological differences.”

In his opinion, both countries are moving in the mid term and especially in the long term towards the normalisation of relations, regardless of the particular political circumstances in the United States. “On the Cuban side, there is a well-known willingness to cooperate and even to debate, on respectful and equal terms, all of the aspects of the bilateral conflict,” he stressed.

“This could be another important area for cooperation, precisely because of the strategic significance of energy sources for both the United States and Cuba. Are there risks? Without a doubt. But the benefits of cooperation definitely outweigh them,” Fernández concluded.

Caribbean islands are doubly exposed by the convergence of weak economies heavily dependent on foreign imports and greater vulnerability to climate change, according to ECLAC Executive Director Alicia Bárcena.

Alicia Bárcena speaking at the University of Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños

The region is also highly indebted – in particular the English- speaking islands – and faces great difficulties recovering from the effects of the economic meltdown in the United States and Europe, from which it receives much of its income in sectors such as tourism and services, according to this official of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Bárcena, a Mexican biologist, arrived in Cuba on Feb. 6 on a three- day visit to meet with local authorities and exchange views on several issues, including the progress of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations (CELAC), a new 33-nation continental bloc created in December 2011, which she sees as “an enormous opportunity” for regional integration.

“We have a very dynamic relationship and we work close together” with the National Statistics and Data Bureau to obtain economic and social measurements, Bárcena said. “We are very interested in the (population and housing) census” Cuba plans to conduct in the second half of this year, she added.

In response to a question from IPS at a press conference held during her visit, Bárcena said that small Caribbean islands are vulnerable to natural disasters caused by events such as hurricanes and floods.

“It is no doubt one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change” and especially to rising sea level, she said.

However, she noted that the impact varies within the region, with some areas more affected than others, and that this needs to be assessed.

“We are in the process of identifying (these differences) and focusing on preventing measures, to prepare for the impact. It is important for the region to be prepared,” she added.

In her opinion, Cuba has “a great lead” in this area, “with a very advanced and sophisticated weather system, which can even be shared with the rest of the region.”

Frequently hit by hurricanes, this Caribbean island nation has a comprehensive prevention plan to protect both human lives and material goods in the event of natural disasters.

Havana recently defined a programme for adapting to climate change that covers prior hazard, vulnerability and risk studies, including the assessment of possible impacts from the rise in sea level, and the adoption of any necessary sectoral measures.

Reports by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) project that three percent of Cuba’s mangrove forests may be lost with a one- metre rise in sea level, and that a 50 cm rise in sea level could lead to serious inundation in more than 60 percent of beaches in some areas of Grenada. They also foresee an increase in the incidence of waterborne or vector-borne diseases.

By 2050, Cuba – which in 2008 suffered an estimated 10 billion dollars in losses as a result of three hurricanes – could lose 2.32 percent of its territory to rising sea levels. Adaptation measures in at least 79 seaside settlements are thus necessary to minimise the impact of this phenomenon.

A 2009 ECLAC study found that Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the regions in the world worst hit by climate change. This is due to several factors, namely that it is located below the hurricane belt and has numerous island nations and low coastal areas, it depends on the Andean snowmelt for urban and agricultural water supply, and it is exposed to floods and forest fires.

That 2009 report, entitled “Climate Change and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean,” urged governments to shift their focus to climate change adaptation, as “most measures” thus far had been “spontaneous or reactive in nature” and “focused on the handling of natural disasters and the subsequent recovery efforts.”

In this sense, the ECLAC report considered that an adaptation approach “implies absorbing the losses expected in the primary sector and in public revenue and anticipating the expenditures that the public sector will have to make to tackle the negative and potentially concurrent direct consequences of climate change, such as droughts, floods, epidemics, heatwaves and infrastructure damage.”

On a regional level, Bárcena said that the United Nations agency she heads supports the creation of CELAC as a space for cooperation, and not just for discussion.

“We’re firmly behind the CELAC system… We want it to be a successful process,” she said, noting that Chile currently occupies the interim presidency of the body, and will be succeeded by Cuba, a member along with Venezuela and Chile of the troika that heads this new American bloc, of which only the United States and Canada are not members.

Both in the conference she delivered at the University of Havana on Feb. 6, and her statements to the Cuban and foreign press, the executive director of ECLAC spoke of the process led by Raúl Castro in Cuba, which faces many challenges, including preserving the “Revolution’s achievements” in the areas of health, education and social equality.

“I’m very excited with what is being done here (…) there’s a dynamic of moving forward very great determination,” she said in reference to the country’s efforts to update the economic model through measures and reforms set out in a programme adopted in April 2011 by the governing Cuban Communist Party.

Bárcena said that these “social and economic policy guidelines of the party and the revolution,” as the programme is known, are “just what is needed” to update “without any ruptures” the equality and equity agenda that Cuba mapped out for itself many years ago.

“There is a determination to give socioeconomic density to the country’s national project,” she said.

More than a decade ago, solar electricity changed the lives of several mountain communities in Cuba. Now this and other renewable power sources are emerging as the best options available to develop sustainable energy across the island.

Luis Bérriz, a renewable energy advocate, performing control tasks. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“If the world’s clean energy potential exceeds our consumption needs, why do we insist on using the polluting kind?” asked Luis Bérriz, head of the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (CUBASOLAR), a non- governmental organisation that promotes the use of alternative and environmentally-friendly power sources.

According to his calculations, the amount of solar radiation Cuba receives is equivalent to 50 million tonnes of oil a day.

“If we covered the 1,000-kilometre-long national highway with solar panels we would generate all the power currently used, without using fossil fuels or occupying a single square metre of agricultural land,” Bérriz said to IPS in an interview.

Moreover, “nobody can block the sun; it belongs to all of us,” he added.

Bérriz is a researcher and long-time advocate of renewable power sources who prefers to talk about “reversing” climate change – which he says is caused by “the destructive actions of today’s societies” – instead of “adapting” to it.

In his opinion, adapting to what others destroy sounds more like “conformism”. Industrialised countries are responsible for 75 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which cause global warming. The leading GHG is carbon dioxide (CO2).

For Bérriz, the best course of action is to move from oil to clean energy sources, which exceed power needs. The way to do this is to develop the knowledge, technology and industry necessary to tap into the various renewable energy sources most available in each area, he says.

Key components of this process, Bérriz argues, are the training of scientists, technicians and skilled workers to cover human resource needs, and the creation of an energy and environmental culture that will raise the awareness essential for the development of solar power based on “fairness and solidarity”.

Cuba’s greatest achievement in this sense is in the field of scientific development and education, which it shares with other countries of the region through cooperation efforts.

The contribution of wind power, hydroelectric and sugarcane biomass equipment to Cuba’s National Electric Power System in 2010 was 178.1 gigawatt-hours, which is equivalent to four days worth of power generation and replaces almost 46,000 tonnes of oil.

According to the official statistics table published by CUBASOLAR’s magazine Energía y Tú, Cuba has 9,624 solar panels, 8,677 windmills, 6,447 solar heaters, 554 biogas plants, 173 hydroelectric plants, four wind farms with 20 wind turbines, and 608 stoves for wood biomass pellet production.

In addition, the island has 57 turbo generators and 67 boilers in 61 sugar mills. The new boost to the sugar industry – managed by a business group since 2011 – includes increasing the potential for power generation based on bagasse and other sugarcane byproducts to supply the sector year round.

Experts see as a good sign the government’s decision to tap into the range of renewable power sources, giving priority to those with the greatest economic impact, as established in an extensive programme aimed at modernising the economy and enhancing its efficiency, launched in April 2011.

“The country is improving in terms of organisation. Work and planning efforts for the next few years are under way in this and other renewable energy-related lines of work,” Bérriz said, insisting that Cuba has all the conditions to move forward in the use of clean energy infrastructure.

Plans include reactivating windmill factories, revitalising the hydroelectric turbine industry, and further developing solar panel production, as much as possible, as these have been the best options in a rural electrification programme implemented over the past 10 years.

“We can’t move at a faster pace (in the industry’s development) due to the country’s huge financial limitations. With more resources we could advance much faster on the path to renewable energy and share it with other nations,” the expert says.

Other experts note that Cuba needs a specific support mechanism to speed up the introduction and use of alternative generators “towards a sustainable energy development” that does not overburden the state, is an attractive and reliable option for foreign investors, and encourages national industries to use these sources.

In this sense, Conrado Moreno, a researcher and member of CUBASOLAR’s board, points to agricultural cooperatives as a “yet untapped niche” where, along with food production and sale, renewable energy sources emerge as “a promising solution in the economic model that is approaching.”

According to Moreno, this form of production will receive incentives through legislation that is currently being discussed and will be passed shortly.

Several Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, already have legal frameworks in place to provide policy and financial support for the development of environmentally-friendly power generators.

World Bank studies reveal that this region produces only six percent of the world’s GHG emissions from the power industry, and only 13 percent if deforestation and agriculture are factored in. This relatively low proportion is due to a great extent to the widespread use of hydroelectric power.

However, as industry and transportation continue to expand the situation may change in the next 25 years, said Ede Ijjasz-Vásquez, World Bank director of sustainable development for Latin America and the Caribbean.

If the current trends continue, by 2030 CO2 emissions from energy use will have increased by 33 percent per capita in the region, as compared to a global average of 24 percent, he said. With such prospects ahead, power diversification is the best option.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s visit to Cuba served to further strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries, leverage the South American giant’s investments in the Caribbean island, and deepen political ties.

On Feb. 1, Rousseff travelled to Haiti, where she was set to meet with government officials to discuss a number of issues, including migration and the reconstruction efforts underway since the devastating January 2010 earthquake. Brazil and Cuba are backing the establishment of a healthcare system in that impoverished Caribbean nation.

Brazil’s first woman president arrived in Havana on Jan. 30, where she held talks with her Cuban counterpart Raúl Castro, paid a visit to his brother, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro -who she said she felt “immensely honoured” to meet – and toured a logistics hub being developed with Brazilian investment in the port of Mariel, some 50 kilometres west of Havana.

According to official press accounts, during her stay in the capital she signed several agreements with Cuba, but no details of their content were released. In her only statements to the press, on Jan. 31, Rousseff defined her country’s cooperation with Cuba as a contribution to economic development in the current state of affairs.

The Cuban government is implementing a number of reforms under what it calls “updating the economic model,” which includes opening up to private initiatives such as self-employment and non-state managed business ventures, in particular in the services sector, and the granting of productive lands to individuals.

In what was her first trip to Cuba, Rousseff judged as wrong “a blockade that denies a people access to food,” in reference to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, and said her government would be granting 350 million dollars in credit for food purchases from Brazil.

“We also agreed to finance the purchase of equipment, machinery, small tractors, and harvesters, with a 200 million (dollar) credit to boost food production in Cuba,” Rousseff said, and insisted on a partnership between the two nations that will help the island’s development and ensure better living conditions for its people.

Accompanied by Raúl Castro, Rousseff toured the industrial development works in Mariel that are led by a Brazilian company and which include a major renovation of the port and all the infrastructure necessary to receive ships of up to 15-metre drafts.

The works are expected to turn Mariel into a development hub, with the port operating as the main receiving point for future trade activities, linked to the tapping of what is thought to be a major oilfield within Cuba’s exclusive economic zone in Gulf of Mexico waters.

The works, valued at some 900 million dollars, of which Brazil contributes a little over 600 million, are part of a significant medium and long-term development planned by Cuba, which includes expanding the Cienfuegos oil refinery to bring production up from the current 65,000 barrels to 150,000.

Located 254 kilometres southwest of Havana, Cienfuegos has attracted oil investments from Venezuela and China. Plans there include the construction of a liquefied gas plant and a 320-kilometre gas pipeline.

Another area mentioned by Rousseff as a target for Brazil’s contribution is the medical and pharmaceutical industries, where both countries have already been working together for some time.

Cuba “as a country and a people excels in biotechnology and medical sciences, and Brazil benefits from” cooperation in these fields, she said.

According to Brazilian sources, in 2011, bilateral trade between the two countries hit a record 642 million dollars, 31 percent higher than in 2010, making Brazil Cuba’s fifth largest commercial partner, after Venezuela, China, Canada, and Spain.

Rousseff is the first Latin American head of state to visit President Castro this year, following the establishment of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) in December 2010.

“The press did not give much importance (to the Celac founding summit), but to me it was one of the most important ever,” the Brazilian president said.

For Castro, the main advantage of Celac is its independence from the United States. It also consolidates “the concept of a united and sovereign region, committed to a common destiny,” Raúl Castro said.

Celac groups 33 nations from Latin America and the Caribbean, with a combined population of 580 million people.

On the issue of human rights, Rousseff avoided criticising the island, as some opposition sectors hoped she would do, and opted instead for a conceptual approach.

“I am willing to discuss human rights from a multilateral perspective; it is a commitment of all civilised people,” she said.

The state of human rights needs to be improved everywhere in the world, she said. “Human rights are not a stone to be thrown from one side to the other.”

Regarding Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez’ request for support in obtaining an exit visa to travel to Brazil for a film festival, Rousseff said her country had granted her an entry visa and “the rest is not up to the Brazilian government.”

Cuba’s communist leaders have mapped out a strategy to modernise their country’s one-party socialist model and make it more efficient, which implies making it more inclusive and representative of a society that is increasingly diverse.

The National Conference of the governing Cuban Communist Party (PCC) held two days of sessions Jan. 28-29, for the first time in the PCC’s nearly 50 years of existence. It analysed and approved policy guidelines that it is hoped will perfect its work to ensure “the continuity and irreversibility” of socialism on this Caribbean island.

The conference was a continuation of last year’s Sixth Congress of the PCC, the sole legal political party in Cuba, which drew up a road map for economic change. “Both these meetings resulted in far- reaching agreements for the present and future of the revolution,” President Raúl Castro said at the close of the conference.

President Castro, elected first secretary of the PCC at the Sixth Congress in April 2011 in the place of his elder brother Fidel Castro, dismissed out of hand the idea of restoring a multiparty model which, he said, existed in Cuba when it was “under neocolonial domination by the United States”.

He defended the one-party system as “a strategic weapon for unity among Cubans” and pointed out that the Cuban constitution, “approved by 97.7 percent of voters in a referendum by means of a free, direct and secret vote” in 1976, defines the Communist Party as the “supreme leading force of society and the state”.

However, analysts insist that the social and economic changes experienced in Cuba since that time, including the consequences of the break-up of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, turn this decision to carry on as the only political force in the country into a challenge of the first order.

“The first challenge for the PCC should be to get closer to the social reality of the island, without schematics or dogma,” said Lenier González, deputy editor of the Catholic magazine Espacio Laical, during a debate about the “present and future” of the party, organised by the magazine.

While the draft document before the 811 delegates, who were there representing some 800,000 party members, did propose a number of guidelines related to this need, the conference’s main focus was on internal PCC organisational matters.

According to a statement published in the official Cuban press, the draft document was discussed and modified at earlier meetings of PCC and Young Communist League (UJC) militants. The final version, approved by the conference, contains 101 working guidelines for the party.

Prominent among these are the decision to prioritise action by the party to prevent and combat “corruption, lawlessness and indiscipline,” which Castro said were “one of the main enemies of the revolution,” and more dangerous than the “United States government’s subversive and interventionist programme” against Cuba.

The president announced that the PCC will expel members implicated in corruption cases that are currently under investigation, without prejudice to their administrative or criminal liability. “Within the framework of the law we will be implacable against corruption,” Castro said.

In the past few weeks, videos about some of these corruption cases have been aired at screenings aimed at party militants. Sources consulted by IPS estimated that over 300 people at different levels of leadership were implicated, including several deputy ministers.

Among the guidelines emphasised in the conference resolution is a determination to eliminate once and for all the remnants of prejudice and discrimination of all kinds, and to vigorously enforce the constitutional mandate that prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race, skin colour, sex, country of origin or religious belief.

The PCC should also be more inclusive in appointing to political, governmental and public positions persons belonging to socially disadvantaged groups such as women, Afro-Cubans, mestizos (persons of mixed ancestry) and young people, “based on their personal qualities, qualifications, experience and achievements,” the resolution says.

Castro stated that the proposal approved by the Sixth Congress to limit tenure in the highest political and state positions to a maximum of two five-year terms, will be implemented in tandem with progress in making the necessary constitutional and legislative adjustments.

Another resolution authorised the 115-member PCC Central Committee, designated by the Sixth Congress, to fill the vacancies that arise within it, up to a limit of 20 percent of its total membership, during the period of “its present mandate.” PCC statutes call for party congresses to be held every five years.

No one who lives in this fishing village on the south coast, 70 km from the Cuban capital, can forget the devastation wrought by hurricanes in 2008.

People living in low-lying coastal areas are most exposed to sea-level change. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

If any reminders are needed, the destroyed houses, the erosion and a beach that no longer appeals are right there in plain sight.

“The sea flooded all this area. It also piled up mountains of sand, so much so that they had to take it away in trucks. They say that the cyclone of 1944 was similar, and that people died in it. This last time no one was killed, because they evacuated the entire population, as usual,” said Mario, a voluble bartender in the small tourist complex, completely empty during this winter season.

The emergency plans put in place ahead of the hurricane season, lasting from June to November each year, prevent loss of human life or reduce it to a minimum. However, they are not so effective against economic damage.

Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma which lashed this Caribbean island within a three-month period in 2008, caused damages officially estimated at 10 billion dollars.

So there is no doubt that, while prevention is a good thing, so is adaptation to the consequences of climate change, of which the rise in sea level is among the most fearsome. Yet it is a risk that families living on the coastline do not always appreciate.

“Yes, yes, we know that we are close to the ocean, but the water has not risen much here. Besides, we’re building our new house on higher ground,” said a woman relying on her own resources to put up her new home. “My son receives cash remittances from his father, and he helps me with the building work which we are doing a little at a time, as we are able,” she said.

Studies by Cuban scientists on the vulnerability of coastal ecosystems in the Caribbean region warn that the sea level will rise by 27 to 85 centimetres between 2050 and 2100, a prospect with major geographical, demographic and economic implications for island states.

Official estimates indicate that 2.32 percent of Cuban territory may be permanently under water by 2050. If the necessary adaptation measures are not taken, as many as 79 coastal settlements will be affected and 15 will completely disappear.

Coastal ecosystems occupy five percent of the total area of the island, which has 588 km of beaches. An estimated 250 km of coastline are urbanised, and 1.4 million people live in 244 settlements, 63 of them urban and 181 rural.

“Above all, people need to know why and what adaptation is necessary,” Gisela Alonso, head of the government’s Environment Agency, told IPS. “We are undertaking climate studies in Cuba, and we have our own evaluations and our own models to predict the impact levels we have to face.”

She said financial resources, knowledge, technology and a national infrastructure of both material and human resources are needed in order to combat problems that are not primarily of developing nations’ making. “How can they take climate adaptation on board, when they lack education, health and nutritional security?” she asked.

A study carried out in eight Caribbean island nations, published in 2010 by the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), said these countries could lose up to nine percent of annual GDP due to storms and floods, believed to result from climate change.

Cuba is facing “above all, increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, particularly related to water circulation in the atmosphere, on land and underground, including not only tropical hurricanes but also drought, serious floods, higher temperatures and – for us as an archipelago, one of the greatest dangers – rising sea level,” Alonso said.

However, the expert said Cuba has “a certain advantage” because it has developed its scientific potential, with the result that for many years now it has been able to evaluate and offer alternatives for social measures “within which health issues are essential”, and for economic and environmental problems.

According to Alonso, the island nation has a programme on climate change that covers previous studies on hazards, vulnerability and risks, including possible impacts from rising sea levels, as well as action that should be taken by each sector.

The plans, as yet unpublished, include land use measures that establish how far from the coast tourism investments and new urban zones should be located; and the replanting and recovery of mangrove forests, which together with coral reefs are important natural barriers protecting the coastline. On the agricultural front there will be close monitoring of water used for irrigation.

“The island of Cuba rests on a layer of karst (rock dissolved by groundwater, forming interconnected caves), and sea level elevation will increase saline infiltration. Water tainted with seawater will increase soil salinity, harming agricultural production,” Alonso said.

From the educational and social point of view, Alonso said, the community ought to know what it is up against, because climate change added to soil degradation, water pollution, shortage of water for human consumption and other environmental problems are creating a complex global scenario.

The Cuban government energetically rebutted what it regards as another campaign to discredit it, following the death in prison of a man who, according to the authorities, was not a dissident nor on hunger strike, as the opposition alleges.

In separate declarations, the Cuban Foreign Ministry rebuffed expressions of concern over the demise of prison inmate Wilman Villar by official sources in the United States and Spain, the countries where the fatality aroused most condemnation.

Cuban diplomats regarded the occurrence as regrettable, but “unusual in Cuba”. Villar, who died Jan. 19 in a hospital intensive care unit, was buried in the cemetery of his home town of Contramaestre in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba on Jan. 20.

The controversy over the event comes at a time when preparations are in full swing for the forthcoming visit to Cuba of Pope Benedict XVI in late March. His programme will include celebrating an open-air mass in Santiago de Cuba, the capital of the province of the same name, 861 km east of Havana.

A government communiqué published Jan. 21 in the newspaper Granma stated that Villar had been serving a four-year prison sentence for contempt, assault and resisting arrest. It added that his mother-in- law had reported him to the authorities for creating “a public scandal in which he assaulted his wife and injured her face”, and that he had subsequently been freed pending trial.

In contrast, human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez told IPS that the 31-year-old Villar belonged to the dissident Cuban Patriotic Union group, and had been on voluntary hunger strike since he was imprisoned in November 2011 as a protest against the “summary” trial he had been subjected to.

But the government communiqué insisted that “there is abundant proof and testimony that shows that he was not a ‘dissident’ nor was he on hunger strike.” It also said that Villar’s links with dissident groups in Santiago de Cuba were formed only after he had committed the crimes for which he was tried.

The “counter-revolutionary elements” with whom he made contact “convinced him that apparent membership of mercenary groups would allow him to escape justice”, according to the official information. Sánchez, on the other hand, blamed the government for Villar’s death, calling it a “tragedy” that in his view “could have been avoided”.

According to the official version, Villar died Jan. 19 in the intensive care unit of the Dr. Juan Bruno Zayas Clinical Surgical Hospital in Santiago de Cuba from “multiple organ failure following a severe respiratory infection leading to septic shock”.

“His closest relatives were aware of all the procedures employed during his medical care and recognised the efforts made by the team of specialists who treated him,” said the official report released the evening of Jan. 20.

Later that day, another communiqué was distributed to accredited foreign journalists, in which the head of the Foreign Ministry’s North America division, Josefina Vidal, said comments on the case from the U.S. Department of State and the White House were an example of “hypocrisy and double standards”.

Washington criticised Villar’s death, describing him as a “courageous defender of human rights in Cuba”, and calling for greater international scrutiny of this Caribbean island, including “full access to prisons” by United Nations Special Rapporteurs and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“An unfortunate yet unusual event in Cuba has again been distorted and manipulated by narrow self-serving political interests to justify the policy of blockade against our country,” retorted Vidal, according to whom Washington’s statements are better suited to the record of human rights violations in the United States than in Cuba.

“It is not in Cuba where 90 prisoners have been executed since January 2010, while another 3,222 inmates remain on death row, awaiting execution. It must be remembered that the United States has already held its first execution of 2012 and its government ruthlessly represses those who dare to denounce the system’s injustice,” Vidal said.

Meanwhile, an unnamed spokesperson for the Cuban Foreign Ministry countered the claims and complaints of the centre-right People’s Party government in Spain, and of the European Union. The spokesperson told Prensa Latina, a Cuban state news agency, that neither Madrid nor Brussels have the moral authority to pass judgement on Cuba.

In the Foreign Ministry source’s view, both Spain and the EU should concern themselves rather with “investigating and punishing the numerous deaths in detention that occur in their institutions and the frequent acts of police brutality against demonstrators that occur systematically in Spain and other EU countries.”

Villar’s death comes nearly two years after that of Orlando Zapata, who died in prison Feb. 22, 2010 after an 85-day hunger strike, which created an uproar over human rights on the island. The tensions were assuaged by an unprecedented dialogue between President Raúl Castro and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

The conversations in mid-May 2010 between President Castro, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana, and Dionisio García, president of the Cuban Bishop’s Conference, breathed fresh air into the political ambience and led to the release of 130 prisoners over the next few months up to early 2011.

Late last year 3,000 prisoners – most of them ordinary inmates – were granted presidential pardons in time for them to be home by Christmas. On Dec. 23, Castro announced the early release of 86 foreign prisoners to parliament, most of whose releases are still being processed.

A condition of these prisoner releases is that the governments of their countries of origin must accept the repatriation of their compatriots. As far as is publicly known, four Spanish citizens who were serving sentences for crimes committed in Cuba have already been released, and one of them has arrived back in Spain.

When he announced the pardons, Castro said they were in response to, among other considerations, requests from relatives and from religious institutions. At the same time they are a gesture of goodwill in the light of the pope’s forthcoming visit and the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the statue of the Our Lady of Charity, the patroness of Cuba, whose shrine is in El Cobre, near Santiago de Cuba.

In the run-up to the first National Conference of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the insistence of government sources that the meeting will concentrate on internal party matters seems to imply that social issues are to be excluded from the agenda.

The meeting is to be held Jan. 28-29 as a continuation of the Sixth PCC Congress in April last year.

According to analysts, modernising the PCC – the sole legal political party in Cuba, in power since the 1960s – is a strategic priority, but so is finding a comprehensive solution for the aspirations of civil society sectors regarding problems that were not adequately addressed or went without mention at the 2011 PCC Congress.

However, President Raúl Castro dampened expectations for the forthcoming First Party Conference. “The party congress was the definitive meeting, so there should be no great illusions about the conference, which… is an internal party matter,” he told the international press Jan. 12.

The Sixth Congress laid out the road map for economic policy changes on this Caribbean island, and left the conference to decide matters such as changes in the country’s political “nomenclature” and whether to adopt a rule limiting terms in the party and the government to a maximum of 10 years.

According to official sources, the conference should also “examine, with a realistic and critical spirit” the work of the party and the changes required for it to exercise its role as “the highest leading force of society and of the state”, as defined by the constitution.

The conference is also empowered to update the work style and methods, cadre policies and structures of the party and to continue what Castro calls “a gradual process of renewal and rejuvenation of the chain of political and state positions”.

The National Conference may be convened between Party Congresses to deal with important matters of party policy, and this is the first time that this internal instrument is being made use of by the PCC.

The conference agenda was made public in a “basic document” which includes social issues as well as internal party organisational matters.

Unlike the document on Economic and Social Policy Guidelines prepared for the April congress, which was discussed by the population in open debates before being approved by the congress, the key conference text has been analysed only by members of the PCC and the Young Communist League, the PCC youth organisation.

In the view of essayist Víctor Fowler, the forthcoming party conference could have made more of a splash if the media – and in general, the life of the country – had put their energies into a citizen-driven, public national discussion of the work style of the PCC, as well as its role and proper place today.

Participating with other Cuban intellectuals in a debate on the conference convened by the Catholic Church publication Espacio Laical, Fowler contrasted the “anaemic” information available for this meeting with the great social assembly, based on discussions in local neighbourhoods and workplaces, that was held on the congress guidelines.

In December, the second secretary of the PCC Central Committee, José Ramón Machado Ventura, said that as a result of the consultations with PCC members, 78 out of the 96 goals proposed in the basic document for the upcoming conference had been modified, while five new ones had been added. The new text has not been published.

Both the original and the modified versions of the basic document refer to particularly sensitive problems that have been kept silent for a long time, like confronting “prejudice on the basis of race, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation and any other that can give rise to any form of discrimination”.

Pre-conference working committees have even collected concrete proposals for solving these problems.

“We have made a lot of progress in the last five years, and a large number of barriers that hindered certain issues have been removed,” psychologist Sandra Álvarez, the author of the blog “Negra cubana tenía que ser” (Had to Be a Black Cuban Woman), told IPS.

The basic document also proposes analysis and agreement on actions to “confront gender and intra-family violence, and the violence that is manifested in communities”, as well as strengthening “actions directed at preventing and confronting manifestations of social indiscipline, illegality, corruption and other crimes”.

The key documents for the Sixth Congress and the National Conference, however, did not meet the expectations of some of the experts.

“Both should have had much stronger and more explicit social content,” sociologist Mayra Espina said in an interview with IPS.

In Espina’s view, the guidelines lacked an explanation of how the platform of social change would be brought about in practice, something that should have been made clear because they are the principles on which the Cuban reform is based. The conference text, meanwhile, lacks a more explicit commitment to social equity, she said.

Coincidentally, as 2012 begins, a government regulation came into force Jan. 15 that provides a state subsidy to persons on low incomes who need to repair or build their homes. This is the first step in a gradual change toward subsidising persons, rather than products, as has previously been the case.

By - - and Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Jan 2 2012 (IPS)

On his upcoming visit to Cuba, Pope Benedict XVI will find a country immersed in dramatic changes, as it “modernises” its socialist system and continues to open up to religion, marking a difference from the society found by John Paul II when he visited almost 14 years ago.

The Our Lady of Charity pilgrimage ended Dec. 30, the anniversary of Cardinal Jaime Ortega's 30 years as archbishop. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In Santiago, 861 kilometres east of the capital, the Pope will celebrate mass in Antonio Maceo Revolution Square and stay overnight at the El Cobre rectory. The next day he will visit the sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity to pray before the statue found floating on a board in the ocean 400 years ago.

At midday on the 27th, the Pope will continue his official visit in Havana, where he will meet with Castro, who in 2010 promoted channels of dialogue with the ecclesiastical hierarchy that eased internal and external tensions. In Castro’s opinion, the talks strengthened “the unity of the nation.”

On the morning of the 28th, the Pope will say mass in José Martí Revolution Square, which on Jan. 25, 1998 was the site of a massive liturgy presided over by John Paul II (1978-2005), with former President Fidel Castro in a front row seat.

The local Church released the papal agenda, coordinated by the Cuban Conference of Catholic Bishops and Cuban authorities after the conclusion in Havana on Friday of a national tour of the statue of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, part of the festivities marking the 400th anniversary of its discovery.

The 16-month, 28,000-kilometre pilgrimage, which included visits to hospitals, senior citizens’ homes, cultural institutions and even prisons, ended with an open-air mass alongside Havana Bay, celebrated by Cardinal Jaime Ortega. The ceremony was broadcast later the same day on state television.

In his homily, Ortega, who is archbishop of Havana, asked the Virgin to intercede on behalf of those who have “government responsibilities in the country, so that they can continue advancing without mishap in those necessary changes to economic and social life for which the Cuban people are waiting.”

It was an explicit reference to the changes approved by the Sixth Congress of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba to “update” the country’s economic system, a process that some believe is overly slow and timid. Castro has said that efforts would continue “without hurry or improvisation.”

The most far-reaching change is a major reduction in inflated state-sector payrolls, which began in 2010 with the ultimate goal of reducing public sector employment by more than one million jobs, in this country of 11.2 million people.

To that end, 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.

Ortega acknowledged that authorities had respected the “right” of the Church to look after the welfare of the people. “One example of this has been the willingness and support offered by authorities for carrying out the pilgrimage of the statue of the Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre,” he said.

The 400th anniversary celebration of the discovery of the statue of Cuba’s “mother” and patron saint culminates in a Jubilee Year in 2012, organised in all of the country’s dioceses. During that time, many pilgrims from around the nation and the world are expected to visit the El Cobre sanctuary.

In the El Cobre basilica, about 12 kilometres from the city of Santiago, the original statue of the Virgin is on public display. It was found in 1612 by two brothers, Juan and Diego de Hoyos, and a free black man, Juan. According to the legend, the statue was floating on a plank inscribed with the words “I am Our Lady of Charity”.

In his remarks, Ortega noted that John Paul II crowned her as “Queen and patron saint of all Cuban people during his historic visit” to Cuba, and that the Cuban president had marked the 400th anniversary by granting a pardon to almost 3,000 prisoners, “almost all of whom were able to go home for Christmas.”

Ortega and Castro held unprecedented talks in mid-2010, with the most visible results being the release of some 130 prisoners, including the remaining 52 of the group of 75 dissidents sentenced in 2003 who were still incarcerated. Most of the released political prisoners went into exile to Spain and other countries with their families.

In referring to the issue during his central report to the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party last April, Castro said the releases occurred “in the context of a dialogue of mutual respect, loyalty and transparency,” with viewpoints that did not always concur, but were constructive.

“With this action, we have favoured the consolidation of the most precious legacy of our history and of the revolutionary process: the unity of the nation,” he said. According to analysts, reflecting this dialogue and rapprochement in the party’s central document was an endorsement of the policy to be followed in relations with the Catholic Church.

In addition, combating prejudice against religious beliefs, along with discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation or other grounds that can be used to limit the exercise of people’s rights – such as holding public office – are among the issues to be discussed at the party’s national conference, set for late January.

Relations between the Catholic Church and the Cuban state were extremely troubled in the initial decades following the 1959 revolution, but John Paul II’s visit marked the first stage of mutual understanding. Benedict XVI’s visit is also expected to strengthen the rapprochement and expand the space gained by the Catholic Church.

Excerpt:

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:

By - - and Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Dec 29 2011 (IPS)

Only seven prisoners convicted of political crimes are among the nearly 3,000 inmates pardoned by the government of Raúl Castro. Most of the prisoners have reportedly already been released.

Cuba’s Official Gazette published on Wednesday Dec. 28 the decree signed by President Castro and the names of the 2,991 prisoners granted early release. The mass pardon was announced by the government on Friday Dec. 23, at the end of a meeting of the Cuban parliament.

Human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez told IPS that the process began to be implemented on Dec. 24, just hours after Castro’s announcement. “The first beneficiaries of the measure began to leave the prisons on Dec. 25,” he said.

In statements on Thursday Dec. 29 Sánchez confirmed that Alexis Ramírez and Modesto Martínez had been released the day before. The two men were serving sentences for sabotaging and hijacking a small airplane to defect. “They bring to a total of seven the pardoned political prisoners,” the dissident said.

In the Dec. 23 decree, the president of the supreme court and the ministers of the interior and justice were given 48 hours to carry out their respective parts.

Castro also announced that the government would grant early release to 86 foreign nationals from 25 countries, including 13 women, convicted of committing crimes in Cuba, under the condition that the governments of their respective countries agree to their repatriation.

The names of the foreign inmates have not been published, although Cuban authorities clarified from the start that they did not include Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the state.”

Cuban authorities say Gross was providing sophisticated communication technology to dissident groups, while the U.S. government claimed his work mainly involved distributing laptops and satellite phone equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba.

A total of 11 U.S. citizens are serving sentences in Cuba, for different crimes. Gloria Berbena, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba, confirmed to IPS that none of the U.S. nationals have been freed so far.

On Saturday Dec. 24, the U.S. State Department said it was “deeply disappointed” that Gross was not on the list of the prisoners to be released.

Washington says no normalisation of relations will be possible until he is set free.

Havana, meanwhile, continues to demand the release and repatriation of the Cuban Five, a group of Cuban agents convicted of spying and given lengthy jail terms in the U.S. in 2001.

In this country the Cuban Five are hailed as heroes in the fight against terrorism, because they had infiltrated and were monitoring violent anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in Miami, Florida.

At the end of the last annual session of parliament on Friday Dec. 23, Castro said that in the case of the foreign nationals to be released, the necessary information would be provided through diplomatic channels “shortly”. There are fears that this procedure will delay the process.

The La Jornada newspaper of Mexico reported Thursday that 23 Mexicans are in prison in Cuba. The Mexican embassy in Havana had not yet received any communication from the government with regard to the release of any Mexican nationals.

With respect to the early release of Cuban prisoners, the president explained that the decree favoured women, people with health problems, prisoners over the age of 60, and young people who have made an effort to receive education and better themselves in prison, thus improving their chances of social reinsertion.

With “rare exceptions,” he said, people serving sentences for espionage, terrorism, murder, drug trafficking, pederasty with violence, rape, corruption of minors, and home burglary with forced entry were not included on the list.

“But some people convicted of crimes against state security, who have served a large part of their sentences with good behaviour, will be released,” said Castro, who called the pardons “one more show of the generosity and strength of the revolution.”

Besides age and health, the process took into account the characteristics of the crimes committed, and the good behaviour of inmates, many of whom have completed a large part of their sentences.

The mass pardon also responded to requests from family members of inmates and different religious institutions, and was a special gesture ahead of Pope Benedict’s planned visit to Cuba, and for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the statue of Our Lady of Charity, the “mother and patron saint” of Cuba

An even larger mass pardon occurred when some 3,600 inmates were released on Nov. 20-21, 1978, after meetings between representatives of the Cuban exile community and Cuban authorities. And 299 prisoners were released on the occasion of Pope John Paul’s visit in 1998.

Meanwhile, humanitarian talks between the Catholic Church and the government brought about the release, in 2010 and early this year, of more than 100 political prisoners, who mainly went into exile to Spain and other countries.

That process completed the release of the group of 75 dissidents sentenced to lengthy prison terms in 2003 on charges of conspiring with Washington to subvert the government. The authorities did not consider them “political prisoners” but “counterrevolutionaries” working to undermine national security.

Excerpt:

The Cuban parliament finally included the problem of racism, long a taboo issue in this country, in its debates this week. And the question is also on the agenda of the governing Communist Party’s upcoming national conference.

The thorny issue of racism is finally being discussed in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“The inclusion of the racial issue on the parliamentary agenda was a long-standing demand of the Cofradía de la Negritud,” said Tato Quiñones, one of the activists involved in that citizen movement which emerged over a decade ago with the aim of raising awareness on discrimination based on skin colour in Cuba.

Quiñones told IPS that the Cofradía sees this as “a first step on the long, arduous path that still lies ahead for Cuba with regard to this fundamental problem.”

The Cofradía regularly holds debates in which academics and researchers analyse the issue of racism from different angles.

It also launched nearly 50 proposals this year for actions to gradually wipe out discrimination on the basis of skin colour in Cuban society, and to reduce racial inequality, which the group says has grown in recent years.

The very first proposed action was for parliament to hold a hearing on the issue.

Esteban Morales, an Afro-Cuban economist and political scientist who is a leading researcher on race relations in Cuba, put special importance on “the more explicit, public and, especially, institutional recognition of the racial question” since Fidel Castro addressed it in several of his speeches immediately following the 1959 triumph of the revolution.

“It’s true that Fidel and Raúl (Castro) have raised the issue on several occasions,” Morales told IPS. “But they were individual speeches, and aside from these exceptions, the official media denied the existence of the racial problem, which has been growing and can no longer be ignored on the political front.”

In his view, after “having declared open war on corruption,” acknowledging racism would be one of the most important political steps to be taken by the government of Raúl Castro in the process of “perfecting Cuban socialism.”

The fight against corruption is essential, he said, “because it is the biggest threat to the efficient, credible management and functioning of the economy,” while tackling racism is also fundamental “because it undermines social equality, our national and cultural identity, and national unity.”

Morales was expelled from the Communist Party in 2010 for writing two articles in which he warned about the serious risks of corruption, which he described as “much more dangerous than the so-called internal dissident movement.” But his membership was reinstated about a year later.

The president of parliament, Ricardo Alarcón, culture minister Abel Prieto, the head of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) Miguel Barnet, and the president of the Book Institute Zuleika Romay took part in the legislative discussions on racial issues.

Also participating as a guest was Mariela Castro, the director of Cuba’s National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX), who wrote in her personal blog on Thursday Dec. 22 that people in the meeting commented on the need for a law against all forms of discrimination.

But she said this legislation “must also describe specific forms of discrimination.”

“If we do not carry out permanent educational and social communication strategies, like the ones we have been developing in CENESEX over the past few years with respect to the question of sexual orientation and gender identity, Cuban society will not be able to bring about the cultural changes needed to achieve real justice,” the sexologist said.

She also wrote that “above and beyond penalising discrimination, we must carry out a broad labour of dialogue and participation in this complex process of transformation of our awareness.”

On that point she concurred with Alarcón, who said it was naïve to believe that racism could be overcome by laws or decrees.

By attempting to solve the problem through legal measures, “we run the risk of contenting ourselves with that, as if the problem had been solved,” said Alarcón, according to a Cuban television report on the parliamentary debate, which are generally held behind closed doors.

But Barnet, the president of UNEAC, stressed that any act of discrimination, whether on racial, sexual orientation or gender grounds, must be punished, with the person fully identified.

In other words, there was no consensus on “questions of a practical nature, with regard to the increasingly frequent expressions of discrimination,” Quiñones said.

The activist noted that racial discrimination is explicitly banned in the constitution. “But that ban requires a complementary law to put it into effect. The issue has begun to be debated, and it has its detractors and proponents, and it’s healthy for the debate to have gone up to the National Assembly,” he said.

In any case, there was agreement on the indispensable need for work on the cultural front, and for the government-controlled press to also help address the issue.

In addition, the participants in the debate said educational curricula must be revised, from the day care level up to university.

“Until we identify the need to fight for the dignity of persons, for respect for differences, for respect for each person’s freedom to make their own decisions about how to live their lives…I think the progress we make will be limited,” Romay said.

The central document to be discussed at the Communist Party national conference, slated for late January, also proposes dealing with the issue of prejudice on the basis of racial questions, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation or any other kind of discrimination.

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.”

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