Cuba’s bloggers are as sharp abroad as at home

Under the new Constitution, journalism not controlled by the Cuban Communist Party faces a demonizing of the access to funds from international organizations. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 17 May 2022 — The new Cuban Penal Code, recently approved by the National Assembly and which will enter into force in the coming days, is a detailed compendium of the main fears of the ruling party. Like any authoritarian model, the island’s regime is forced to break down each prohibition and enumerate all the punishments, trying to anticipate even the new forms of confrontation and rejection that may arise from the citizenry.

When reading between the lines of the new regulations, and separating what it inherits from the previous Code in terms of penalizing common crimes, the great panics that keep Cuban leaders awake at night emerge. The independent press, activism, popular protests in the style of the one that occurred on July 11 (11J), and the possibility that individuals unite in initiatives to revoke the economic political system, these are at the center of the tremors that run through the Plaza of the Revolution.
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Cuba: A People on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – Translating Cuba


With the inexhaustible fuel of indignation, Amelia Calzadilla offered a detailed tour of the hardships that families face every day to put food on the table. (Collage)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 10 June 2022 — One day you explode. The reason may be a power outage, the poor quality of the bread or the excesses of a police officer. The seriousness or insignificance of what happened doesn’t matter, because you carry layer upon layer of discontent settled inside you and in a second you can no longer contain it. They it explodes everywhere. Amelia Calzadilla, a Cuban mother of three, knows what she feels at that moment when the years of swallowing her anger are over.

A resident of Havana with a bachelor’s degree in English, this week Calzadilla stood in front of a camera and launched a diatribe of a little over eight minutes against Cuban officials, ministers and leaders. With the inexhaustible fuel of indignation, she offered a detailed tour of the hardships that families face every day to put food on the table, put shoes on their children’s feet, or pay the electricity bill. And she did it with a sincerity and desperation that is already prompting a barrage of messages supporting her words.
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Unlike the German city of Berlin, the de-balconization that Havana has been suffering has not been due to the projectiles of war. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 18 June 2022 — A German academic was especially happy when his friends came to visit and he was able to give them an insightful tour of Berlin. The history of the gradual loss of the balconies suffered by the area of the city that had come under communist control after the Second World War was never missing in those journeys. The impact of the bombs during the conflict, the tendency to wall up those parts of the building instead of rebuilding them when peace came, and a socialist architecture more oriented towards the practical than the beautiful, led to the “de-balconization” of the GDR capital

After recounting everything that happened in great detail, the German professor pronounced that peculiar concept in his own language. After a breath, he began to detail how after the fall of the Berlin Wall the reverse process began, the “re-balconization” of the city. At that moment, he made a stop and confirmed that it was only when he explained that architectural detail of his country’s history that he could use that word. On no other occasion did that term pass his hips, hence he was doubly grateful to his patient listeners for the opportunity to shake up his vocabulary.
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Yoani Sanchez – Translating Cuba



14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 15 July 2022 – “What we need here is Sri Lanka,” “Remember Sri Lanka,” and “We’ll see you at the pool… like in Sri Lanka,” are some of the phrases Cubans are using right now to greet their friends. The mention of the Asian nation is not accidental: after several weeks of protests, thousands of people entered the luxurious residence of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and forced him to flee the country.

For months, the protesters denounced the mismanagement by the Sri Lankan Executive of the economic crisis, long power cuts and inflation, three evils that also fuel outrage on this island. It is enough to read the reports of foreign press agencies accredited in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s major city, to easily find the coincidences between the discomfort of its residents and the weariness that is heard in every Cuban corner.

In our case, the allusions to Sri Lanka are also a form of social self-criticism, recognizing that in the face of inefficiency and crisis there are people who choose to pack their bags and remain silent, while others go to the house of those responsible for so much disaster and force them to resign. Nor is it the first time that we Cubans have made use of the parallels offered by other geographies to denounce our situation and, incidentally, evade censorship.
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The popular uprising known as El Maleconazo began on Avenida del Puerto and many people joined along the Havana Malecon. (Karel Poort)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 5 August 2022 — Shirtless and with protruding ribs, this is how the protesters on 5 August 1994 took the Havana coastline during the Maleconazo. The few photos that have been released of that day show faces with sharp cheekbones and a desperate look. From that uprising, continuing to July 11 of last year, Cubans learned several civic lessons and adopted new methods of protest, but the regime, also, has surpassed itself in repression.

While those who gathered 28 years ago rushed to Havana’s main avenue, desperate to board any ship that would take them off the Island, those of the summer of 2021 were looking not to escape, but to stand up to a system that has condemned them to material misery and the lack of freedoms. The scant cohesion in that earlier outburst, in the middle of the Special Period, has little in common with the compact groups, setting the pace with slogans of freedom and heading towards key points in the cities that were seen on 11 July 2021, the protests now called ’11J’.

In the earlier action, the Malecón wall functioned as a mousetrap between the protesters and the shock troops, dressed in civilian clothes, launched by Castroism against those ragged and hungry people; but a year ago the “organism” of popular protest was already sufficiently evolved to spread through central squares, in front of the institutions of power and travel through streets where new voices were added.
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Sandokan said:

Things have changed a lot on the island lately. The hunger, misery, epidemics and the excesses of the regime have managed to wake up the majority of the people. The protest of July 11, the filling of the regime prisons with thousands of detainees, some of them sentenced up to 30 years, have opened eyes to the cruelty of the regime.

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An office of the Cuban state telecommunications company Etecsa on Obispo Street, in Old Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 12 September 2022 — “We have not reported any breakages in that area,” the customer service employee of the Cuban telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa, answers in a tired voice. It is the fifth time that I have called on the same day to complain because web browsing from my mobile does not work, but Etecsa only gives vague explanations: “Perhaps there is congestion on the network.” Almost four years after internet access on cell phones appeared on this island, staying connected is still a headache.

With more than seven million active mobile phone lines, and rates that allow Etecsa to pocket figures in the millions of dollars each month, anyone would assume that this state-owned company has engaged in a process of investments and improvements over the years that enhance the experience of its subscribers. However, instead of benefits and new functionalities, we Cubans have seen our connectivity to the great world wide web deteriorate in recent months. Like a crab, the Etecsa networks have gone backwards in stability and data transmission speed.

It should be clarified that the impairment of the service is not the same for everyone. In the editorial office of this newspaper, it happens, more and more frequently, that the 4G network that is working at five in the morning disappears by the time dawn arrives, leaving our mobile phones disconnected and practically useless for certain journalistic tasks. Coincidentally, the service is restored in the afternoon or at night, without any company operator knowing what answer to give us about the reasons for the interruption. Something similar happens to other independent journalists, activists and opponents in Cuba, but Etecsa does not respond – at all – to their rights as customers who pay for a service.
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Twenty Years Separate the Two Letters of Ignominy in Support of Repression in Cuba – Translating Cuba


A group from Cuba’s National Special Brigade of the Ministry of the Interior known as the ‘black berets’. (EFE)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 8 October 2022 — Almost twenty years ago, Cuban society looked the other way when numerous heavyweights of the national culture signed a letter justifying the execution of three young people who hijacked a boat to reach the United States. The letter also supported the imprisonment of 75 dissidents in March 2003. Before that shameful text, silence, complicity or indifference were the most widespread responses of those who lived on the Island.

Is what is happening now is that a new “letter of ignominy,” which this time is on the side of the repression against popular protests, is causing such a different reaction here on the island? The first contrast lies in the signatories themselves. If among those who signed phrases such as “Cuba has been forced to take energetic measures that it naturally did not want” true intellectual and artistic wonders stood out, the list of the current signatories seems more like the list of members of a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution or of a Rapid Response Brigade than of figures from the cultural parnassus of this nation.

The absences are also more noticeable and speak for themselves. Each renowned troubadour, plastic artist or writer whose signature is missing at the bottom of this new letter weighs much more than fifty official spokespeople, watchdogs of the word and ideologues of Castroism that abound so much among those who support it. Although there are also surprising presences, one can imagine the threads of pressure that some of those signatories must have suffered. However, no threat, possible fall from grace, or loss of privileges can justify not having had the greatness of a “I do not sign” declared clearly and directly.
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Elizabeth Meizoso, Héctor’s niece who died in the event last Friday

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 1 November 2022 — Héctor Meizoso’s life has taken a tragic turn since last Friday. Ten of his relatives were traveling in the boat sunk by the Cuban Border Guards north of Bahía Honda, in Artemisa, and three of them died in the attempt to leave the island, in an incident that the man classifies as “murder.”

“They [the rescue brigades] are no longer searching. The relatives are the ones who are finding the deceased,” the young man, a graduate of the Maritime Fishing Institute, in Mariel , told 14ymedio . “That was not an accident, that was murder, because it was on purpose,” insists the Artemiseño, who lost his niece Elizabeth Meizoso and his cousins Yerandy García Meizoso and Aimara Meizoso in the sinking.

“They had to have let it [leave],” he now reflects on the boat in which at least 25 people were trying to leave the country and reach the shores of the United States, seven of them have been confirmed dead and at the moment one is missing . “In any case, it was not the first and it will not be the last,” adds the young man, who confirms that several of the survivors are still being questioned by the police.
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‘Don’t Quote Me or Publish My Face’, the Fear of Cuban Migrants – Translating Cuba


Journalism cannot be nourished only by anonymous sources, it needs people to show their faces. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Mexico City, 5 December 2022 — He has been in Miami for half a year, has two jobs and a suitcase full of fears. “Don’t quote me or publish any photo where you can see my face,” he says emphatically when an independent Cuban media outlet approaches him to take his testimony. He had the courage to cross the Darien jungle, to deal with coyotes and cross the Rio Grande, but when it comes to the Cuban political police, fear does not diminish despite the distance.

It is more and more frequent that a migrant from the Island refuses to appear with their name and surnames in a press report, for fear of being denied entry to their own country, when they decide to travel to visit their family and take the necessary products that will alleviate their critical economic situation. They live in a society where they can express themselves freely, choose what they eat and the newspapers they read, but when it comes to Cuba they continue to be locked behind the bars of totalitarianism.

Recently, an article we prepared for this newspaper came across the harsh reality that people who demonstrated in Florida, in the United States, against Castroism, with T-shirts that carried slogans in favor of the freedom of political prisoners and a democratic change on the Island, refused to have their testimonies appear with their names attached. The reason for that refusal is summed up in one sentence: “I am going to return to visit my family and I do not want to have problems.”
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The “emerging teachers” who began to train at the beginning of this century have been followed by all kinds of pedagogical projects to shorten teaching times. (EFE)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 22 December 2022 — He is 15 years old and in a few days he will begin a seven-month course to train as a chemistry teacher, a job that will take him back to junior high school, from where he has just graduated. This time he will be in front of a classroom. Gabriel is one of the many teachers trained at full speed to try to stop the exodus of professionals from Cuban schools, but his vocation is minimal and his knowledge is scarce.

On December 22, when Teacher’s Day is celebrated on the Island, the tradition is to treat those who teach from the simplest letters of the alphabet to the most complicated mathematical formulas with gifts. However, the economic crisis and shortages have cut back those presents this year. “My children are going to take a packet of detergent and that’s it,” a mother of two primary school children told me this Wednesday.

Where before flowers, glass vases, perfumes or liquors abounded, now more urgent products appear: laundry soaps, tubes of toothpaste, chicken-flavored bouillon cubes and, from the hands of the families with the greatest purchasing power, a teacher might get a package of sausages or turkey mincemeat. “There are people whose relatives in Miami have sent their gifts ahead of time, but I don’t have anyone abroad,” says another neighbor with twins in high school.
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The lines, although nothing new, have been a focus of attention this year, including those formed to buy dollars in a Cadeca (currency exchange) in Centro Habana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 29 December 2022 — To end this year, and together with several journalist colleagues, we prepared a list of the people and projects that had set the tone in Cuba during 2022 . The list of names was also a journey through the most important moments of these twelve months and a painful review of the crisis and tragedies that have hit the Island. Curiously, among the faces and events chosen there were more deceased than living people; more catastrophes than achievements.

Why is the balance of this year so gloomy in a country that is not at war nor has suffered a cataclysm of great proportions? The answer to that question lies in the persistence of the error, in the stubborn continuity of maintaining a model that has had six decades to prove its inability to deal with reality. This has been the year in which the long lines to buy food multiplied everywhere, in which families had to say goodbye to almost a quarter of a million migrants, and in which the hopes of that spark that caused the protests of 11 July 2021 vanished.

In 2022, we Cubans saw the Saratoga Hotel in Havana explode, taking 47 lives with it; the Supertankers base in the city of Matanzas burned for days, which also claimed another 17 souls, and we also attended the silent funeral of tens or hundreds of rafters who shipwrecked in the Florida Straits or Cuban migrants who died in the Darien jungle. A deadly year that, about to end, has not even brought the publication of the results of the expert and official investigation of its greatest misfortunes.
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Posted on January 30, 2023 by Yoani-Sánchez

This Island contains millions of lost souls eager to escape who cannot count on a sponsor. (Coast Guard)
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, 30 January 2023 — It was the early morning of January 23 when the raft, with 28 people on board, capsized on the north coast of the province of Matanzas, Cuba. At least five rafters died and another 12 are still missing. The tragedy, which once again puts the families of this Island in mourning, occurred barely two weeks after the start of a new immigration program conceived by the United States to stop the flood of Cubans that has been arriving at its southern border.

“I need a sponsor, whatever the cost,” a neighbor who has plenty of gray hair and lacks resources told me, looking at me without blinking. Trapped in the elevator of this concrete block, the man felt safe enough to launch his request my way: “Someone to get me out of here and I will pay with work, whatever it takes.” In his apartment in a building that was built with a Soviet subsidy in the 1980s, his wife, his two daughters and three grandchildren hope that his efforts will bear fruit as soon as possible.
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Feminist groups have begun to wear a black ribbon tied to the wrist to symbolize their rejection of male violence. (YoSíTeCreo)

14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 8 March 2023 — Gladys lives in Caibarién, a small coastal city in the center of Cuba. Two months ago, her son left with other young people on a rustic raft to try to reach the United States. She since then she has heard nothing from them. A teacher by profession and retired a decade ago, the woman spends her hours checking social networks and calling the family of the other disappeared rafters to find out if they have any news. This March 8, International Women’s Day, will be longer than usual for her: without celebrations or laughter.

“There, that’s where they killed her,” says a resident of Camalote, in the province of Camagüey, when someone inquires about 17-year-old Leidy Bacallao Santana. On February 3, the young woman sought refuge at the police station in the face of threats from her ex-boyfriend, but he chased her and ended up killing her with a machete in front of the uniformed officers. Since the beginning of the year, 16 Cuban women have died in sexist attacks in a country where official propaganda refuses to recognize the femicides that leave so many families in mourning. From the Government, the only stories narrated are those of happy woman, fulfilled and grateful for the system.
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Instead of turning setbacks into victory, Cuba is living in a time of total make-up, of crude cosmetics applied to reality. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 11 April 2023 — Few phrases are as illustrative of Cuban voluntarism as the one that calls for “turning setbacks into victory.” Fueled by the whim of Fidel Castro, the maxim has summed up, since 1970, a way of doing politics in which boasting of victory was more important than achieving the results. It doesn’t matter if people lose their lives in the fight, if the country sinks into crisis or the economy is destroyed, but each failure must be transformed into a new, more ambitious goal to celebrate at full speed.

There was a time when that ideological compass was oriented towards delirious campaigns that presented the passage of a hurricane as a battle against nature, in which we pretended that we had the upper hand in the face of strong winds that left houses collapsed and fields devastated. After the passage of a meteor, one had to boast that the houses would be rebuilt, even more spacious and beautiful than when the cyclone knocked them down. We stuck out our tongues at the gusts and taunted the downpour with a one-finger salute.

Before each blow or setback, the response was revolutionary arrogance insisting that that misfortune was nothing compared to the “strength of a people.” Thus, we accumulated misfortunes for which we were not even allowed to mourn because we had to raise our fists and laugh from ear to ear as if we were engaged in eternal revelry. The failure of the sugar industry, the successive mass exoduses, the deterioration of the housing fund and the economic crisis received, indistinctly, the arrogant response of the ruling party and its consequent strategy to make the fiasco invisible.
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