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Cuban Exiles on the ‘Unwanted’ List Can Never Go Home Again

Cuban passport with the “sticker” that allows its holder to board a plane from Madrid to Havana Of all the check-in lines at the Barajas Airport there is one that is longer and slower. This is the Air Europe flight that leaves from Madrid for Havana. After Iberia cancelled its service to the Island, Cubans living in Spain have been left with only one direct option for their travel home.

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Cuban passport with the “sticker” that allows its holder to board a plane from Madrid to Havana

Of all the check-in lines at the Barajas Airport there is one that is longer and slower. This is the Air Europe flight that leaves from Madrid for Havana. After Iberia cancelled its service to the Island, Cubans living in Spain have been left with only one direct option for their travel home. Here they are, carts loaded with suitcases, filled with presents they have accumulated over months for their families waiting on their native soil.

Two airline employees intercept the line at one point. They have a trained eye to detect tourists going on vacation. If you weren’t born in Cuba you can continue to the ticket counter to hand over your luggage.

But if you have the blue passport with the lone palm shield, then the treatment is different. For natives of the largest of the Antilles, airports are never easy expeditious sites through which they pass and continue on their way. Rather, each border is a heartache; each migratory process is twice as complicated as for other nationalities. The inspection of documents is slow, meticulous.

The Air Europe workers must guarantee that no Cuban boards the plane without permission to enter his own country. If they make a mistake, the airline itself will have to bear the cost of expatriating the passengers. So they take their time to make sure that the customer completes all the requirements before being letting him board the plane.

Most likely they have passed a special training, because they immediately look for the pages of the passport called “enabled”: authorization to enter for exiled Cubans. If everything is in order, they place a small sticker on the cover of the document. Without this scrap of paper you will never pass through the departure gate.

With the new Immigration Reform, which came into effect on January 14, the pre-flight inspection has become more complex. Now airlines flying to Cuba have to check if the passenger is within the range of a 24-month stay abroad allowed by the current law. For those who emigrated in previous years, everything is even more difficult.

The person could belong to the large group of those who are prohibited from entering the Island. Almost always for ideological reasons. Having made critical statements about the government, being a member of an opposition party, engaging in independent journalism, making a complaint to some international organization, deserting from an official mission, or being a target of the whims of power, are some of the causes that block the entry of thousands of our compatriots.

A few days ago, the case of Blanca Reyes, a member of the Ladies in White who lives in Spain, jumped into the headlines when she was denied the possibility of visiting her own country. With a 93-year-old father and a family she hasn’t seen in more than five years, Blanca requested an entry permit for the country where she was born. At the Cuban Consulate in Madrid the reply was terse: “denied.” So her passport was left without that other sticker of shame known as “enabled.” On the corresponding page there is no stamp on the watermarked paper that would allow her to return to Guayos, her little village in the central province of Santci Spíritus.

Without an “enabled” document, Blanca will not pass the scrutiny of those Air Europe employees, nor of any other airline flying to Cuba. For her, the longer and slower line at the Barajas Airport is an unattainable dream. As long as this absurd migratory restriction remains in force, she will have to stay — in the distance — accumulating presents and hugs to take to her family.


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Cuban Exiles on the ‘Unwanted’ List Can Never Go Home Again

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L’organisation internationale contre la torture lance une “intervention d’urgence” pour José Daniel Ferrer

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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Woman drinking (14ymedio)

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. 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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