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The Election 90 Miles Away – What’s at Stake for Raul Castro
Friday, the Cuban press issued an aggressive statement from the Ministry of Foreign Relations against the United States Interests Section in Havana (known as “SINA” from its initials in Spanish). A traditional verbal escalation toward our neighbor to the north, accompanied this time by a diatribe about an Internet room open to the public in its consular site. The place has been there for a long time and is visited by dissimilar people. From students doing research, to independent journalists needing to publish their news, to families of exiles who want to contact them by email
Friday, the Cuban press issued an aggressive statement from the Ministry of Foreign Relations against the United States Interests Section in Havana (known as “SINA” from its initials in Spanish). A traditional verbal escalation toward our neighbor to the north, accompanied this time by a diatribe about an Internet room open to the public in its consular site.
The place has been there for a long time and is visited by dissimilar people. From students doing research, to independent journalists needing to publish their news, to families of exiles who want to contact them by email. In a country where access to cyberspace is a luxury enjoyed by few, the long lines to access SINA’s Internet center annoys the government.
But after reading the bombastic statement, one immediately questions: Why now? If these rooms with web access have operated for almost a decade, why this week do they appear on the cover of the newspaper Granma? The answer points to what will happen this coming Tuesday at the polls in the United States. This is obviously a play that anticipates the results of the American elections.
The margin between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is narrow, as Raul Castro’s government knows well. So for months it has begun to adjust its verbal missiles, as much against one candidate as the other. According to official propaganda the current U.S. president is a man who “has strengthened the imperial blockade,” while his Republican opponent represents “anti-Cuban politics. From bad to worse they warn us on all sides.
From the Island, we look with curiosity and expectations towards elections in our neighbor to the north. There is too much in play across the Florida Straits. The politics of the Plaza of the Revolution defines itself starting from opposition to Washington, which establishes a very peculiar kind of dependence.
Raul Castro launches a timid travel and immigration reform program, and explains he could not go further because we are besieged by the Empire. Permission to legalize other political parties cannot be granted because “Uncle Sam lurks.” While accessing the Internet has to be gradual and selective, so that we are not overly affected by “the Pentagon’s media war.”
If we analyze this perennial rivalry, we have to conclude that the fate of Cubans has never depended on the United States more than it does now. Our everyday life has never been so subject to the decisions of the occupant of the Oval Office.
The man who sells fish on a Havana corner hopes that Obama will be reelected, so his brother will be able to continue selling him the special food these colorful animals require. A former political prisoner, however, wants Romney to win because “things have to get much worse before people will react.” And the clueless teenager is more likely to recognize the face of the White House occupant than that of the gentleman in the checked shirt that appears on television as Fidel Castro. Everyone is attentive, apprehensive.
With its bitter anti-imperialist discourse the Cuban government has ended up shooting itself in the foot. For weeks the official medial has talked more about the U.S. elections than about our own elections for the People’s Power, going on at that same time.
Intent on bringing out the negative aspects of the presidential elections, the TV commentators have forgotten the maxim: “Nothing is more attractive than the forbidden.” And so every aggressive adjective, every joke, every diatribe against Obama and Romney, have increased the unusual excitement about the first Tuesday in November.
All this is also marked by the progressive loss of the importance of Cuba in U.S. politics. The marked irrelevance of this Island has become abundantly clear during the presidential campaign, which has devoted almost no attention to us. That October of 1962, when nuclear missiles forced the whole world to pay attention to the largest of the Antilles, is in the distant past.
Now Obama’s gaze is directed towards other places and the victor will deepen this trend. Whoever is elected will first pay attention to the economic problems within the United States and try to stabilize its finances. The crisis in Europe will occupy a good part of his attention, as will the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and now Syria.
Raul Castro needs to regain prominence on the agenda of his eternal enemy, because he sees the power in it. His discourse, from Cuba and when he travels abroad, is based on that rivalry, he cannot exist without it. Thus, we see signs of an escalated diplomacy to force the American president to take a position.
The political language takes on a sharp edge, the insults are polished off, and little stabs of confrontation seek to force the next leader to react. These are times of trying to insert himself into the priorities of the neighbor to the north, regardless of the cost… but the strategy isn’t working.
Excerpt from:
The Election 90 Miles Away – What’s at Stake for Raul Castro
droits de l'homme
L’organisation internationale contre la torture lance une “intervention d’urgence” pour José Daniel Ferrer
MIAMI, États-Unis.- L’Observatoire pour la protection des défenseurs des droits humains (OPDDH), a lancé ce vendredi une campagne d'”Interventions urgentes” en faveur du prisonnier politique et de conscience cubain José Daniel Ferrer García, leader de l’Union patriotique de Cuba (UNPACU), selon une note de Radio Televisión Martí.
droits de l'homme
Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?
New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio) Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries. They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes
New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio)
Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries.
They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes. Some nights they would connect through routers and play strategy video games that made them feel powerful and free. Whoever wants to know them should know that they’ve had “emerging teachers” since elementary school and were taught grammar, math and ideology via television screens. However, they ended up being the least ideological of the Cubans who today inhabit this Island, the most cosmopolitan and with the greatest vision of the future.
On arriving at junior high school they played at throwing around around the obligatory snack of bread while their parents furtively passed their lunches through the school gate. They have a special physical ability, an adaptation that has allowed them to survive the environment; they don’t hear what doesn’t interest them, they close their ears to the harangues of morning assemblies and politicians. They seem lazier than other generations and in reality they are, but in their case this apathy acts like an evolutionary advantage. They’re better than us and will live in a country that has nothing to do with what we were promised.
A few months ago, these same young people, starred in the best known case of school fraud uncovered publicly. Some of those hoping to earn a place in higher education bought the answers to an admissions test. They were used to paying for approval, because they had to turn to private tutors to teach them what they should have learned in the classroom. Many of those who recently enrolled in the university had private teachers starting in elementary school. They are the children of a new emerging class that has used its resources so that their children can reach a desk at the right hand — or the left — of the alma mater.
These young people dressed in uniforms in their earlier grades, but they struggled to differentiate themselves through the length of a shirt, a fringe of bleached hair, or through pants sagging below their hips. They are the children of those who barely had a change of underwear in the nineties, so their parents tried to make sure they didn’t “go through the same thing,” and turned to the black market for their clothes and shoes. They mock the false austerity and, not wanting to look like militants, they love bright shiny colors and name brand outfits.
Yesterday, with the start of the school year, they received a lecture about the attempts of “imperialism to undermine the revolution through its youth.” It was like a faint drizzle running over an impervious surface. The government is right to be worried; these young people who have entered the university will never become good soldiers or fanatics. The clay from which they are made cannot be molded.
Excerpt from:
Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?
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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman
Woman drinking (14ymedio) 14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness
14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness. Instead of the urgent demands they should mention, all I hear is this appreciation directed to a power as manly as it is deaf.
It’s not about “helping” to wash a plate or watch the kids, nor tiny illusory gender quotas that hide so much discrimination like a slap. The problem is that economic and political power remains mainly in masculine hands. What percentage of car owners are women? How many acres of land are owned or leased by women. How many Cuban ambassadors on missions abroad wear skirts? Can anyone recite the number of men who request paternity leave to take care of their newborns? How many young men are stopped by the police each day to warn them they can’t walk with a tourist? Who mostly attends the parent meetings at the schools?
Please, don’t try to “put us to sleep” with figures in the style of, “65 percent of our cadres and 50 percent of our grassroots leaders are women.” The only thing this statistic means is that more responsibility falls on our shoulders, which means neither a high decision-making level nor greater rights. At least such a triumphalist phrase clarifies that there are “grassroots leaders,” because we know that decisions at the highest level are made by men who grew up under the precepts that we women are beautiful ornaments to have at hand… always and as long as we keep our mouths shut.
I feel sorry for the docile and timid feminist movement that exists in my country. Ashamed for those ladies with their ridiculous necklaces and abundant makeup who appear in the official media to tell us that “the Cuban woman has been the greatest ally of the Revolution.” Words spoken at the same moment when a company director is sexually harassing his secretary, when a beaten woman can’t get a restraining order against her abusive husband, when a policeman tells the victim of a sexual assault, “Well, with that skirt you’re wearing…” and the government recruits shock troops for an act of repudiation against the Ladies in White.
Women are the sector of the population that has the most reason to shout their displeasure. Because half a century after the founding of the caricature of an organization that is the Federation of Cuban Women, we are neither more free, nor more powerful, nor even more independent.
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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman
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