Regime cerceia e prende ativistas para frustrar manifestações em Cuba

Os protestos organizados por ativistas contra o regime de Cuba, marcados para esta segunda-feira (15), foram frustrados pelo cerco policial imposto desde a véspera dos atos. Os locais de Havana que receberiam os manifestantes ficaram praticamente vazios.

Até as primeiras horas da tarde, vários dissidentes foram presos para evitar que saíssem às ruas na manifestação cuja realização foi proibida pelo regime. Os organizadores do protesto, entre eles o coletivo Archipiélago, alegam que a Constituição permite protestos pacíficos.

Os atos foram marcados para este dia 15 por ser o primeiro dia em que turistas poderiam voltar a visitar a ilha, depois do início da pandemia, e porque se trata do feriado de aniversário de Havana.

Entre os detidos estão Manuel Cuesta Morua, 58, vice-presidente do Conselho para a Transição Democrática. Segundo declarações de sua mulher, Nairobi Scheri, à AFP, o marido foi levado ao tentar sair de casa, por volta das 13h locais (15h de Brasília).

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/2021/11/vigiados-e-cercados-manifestantes-tentam-sair-de-casa-em-cuba.shtml

 

Is Cuba’s Communist Party Finally Losing Its Hold on the Country?

On Sunday, July 11th, the world took note of a historic event in Cuba, as thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against the government. Many shouted “Patria y Vida!”—Fatherland and Life—the title of a banned but extremely popular rap song that riffs on a slogan coined by the late Fidel Castro: “Fatherland or Death.” Many also shouted “Libertad!”—Freedom—and similar phrases that are not only heretical but, when shouted in protest, illegal in Cuba, where the Communist Party is the sole legal arbiter of political life.

The uprising began in San Antonio de los Baños, a sleepy town near Havana that had been hit by a recent string of long power cuts. But Cubans across the island have become frustrated by their government’s inability to provide them with even such basic amenities as food and medicine, amid a slow vaccine rollout and spiking COVID infection rates. The protests metastasized quickly, as the news and images of what was happening shot across Facebook, Twitter, and other messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp. Within hours, there were protests in as many as sixty towns and cities, from Havana to Santiago, at the southeastern end of the island, five hundred miles away. During the past decade, despite long-standing official restrictions on the media and most other sources of independent information, Cuba’s government has gradually allowed its citizens access to cell phones and the Internet, both of which are now in widespread use. Just as skeptical Party apparatchiks had feared, this technology is proving to be a threat to their order. As Abraham Jimenez Enoa, a young Cuban friend who reported on the protests, told me this week, “The only certainty right now is that the people of this country want a change, and the Internet is helping us fight for it.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-cubas-communist-party-finally-losing-its-hold-on-the-country

 

La protesta de los que nada tienen que perder

E n Cuba hay varios entendidos políticos que, a fuerza de repetirlos, todo el mundo los conoce. Uno de ellos es que “la calle es de los revolucionarios”.

En la isla, la política —y la tranquilidad de una persona— se mide en ser o no ser revolucionario: a la usanza de Hamlet, no hay términos medios. Esto significa, desde el punto de vista gubernamental, quienes están a su favor y en su contra. Entendiendo que ellos son la Revolución: sus herederos y los únicos que poseen la verdad sobre ese término.

Cuando el 11 de julio de 2021 salieron a la calle miles de personas a protestar en todas las provincias del país, ocurrió algo relevante e inédito en los últimos 60 años. Lo trascendente de ese acto, más que lo que podría significar en el futuro, fue el hecho en sí: que las gentes tomaran las calles y ocuparan un espacio público sacralizado y propiedad exclusiva de los “revolucionarios”.

Sobre el mediodía del domingo en las redes sociales comenzaron a aparecer videos de las protestas en San Antonio de los Baños, un pueblo en el suroeste de la capital, en el interior del país. Comenzaron en el parque y llegaron hasta las sedes del Partido comunista y del gobierno local. Los participantes se sumaron en bicicletas, motos eléctricas o caminando; se conocían unos a otros y compartían los mismos reclamos: gritaban hasta cuándo esto, no hay medicinas, vacunas, abajo el gobierno, libertad.

https://www.connectas.org/cuba-protestas-2021-soscuba/

 

Cuba After the Castros

Since 1975, Cuba’s ruling Communist Party has periodically convened a congress at which, in keeping with the arcane rituals of socialist states during the Soviet era, the Party makes public official policy guidelines. This year, the eighth congress ended after a four-day session that was arguably its most momentous: it coincided not only with the sixtieth anniversary of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which led to the breakdown in relations with the United States and helped to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but also with a historic curtain call for the Castro era.

At the opening session, on April 16th, Raúl Castro, the younger brother of the late Cuban jefe máximo, Fidel Castro, confirmed his plans, as he had promised he would, to step down as the First Secretary of the Communist Party. This was the last senior post he held, since he vacated the Presidency, in 2018, to make way for his handpicked Party loyalist, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who now also succeeds him as First Secretary. Raúl, who will turn ninety in June, has held the position for ten years, just as he held the Presidency for two five-year terms, after succeeding his ailing brother, in 2008. (Raúl had, in fact, served as Cuba’s de-facto leader for the previous two years, after Fidel nearly died from a bout of diverticulitis.)

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cuba-after-the-castros

 

40 grados de represión en Cuba

La temperatura de la represión en Cuba sube como la fiebre en días de pandemia. Se trata de una represión sistemática, casuística, celular –lo primero que hace la policía política cuando detiene a un artista es incautar y desfigurar su móvil–, que quiere volverse rutinaria, normal, pero no lo consigue. Ciertos episodios, cada vez más frecuentes, como los arrestos de la artista Tania Bruguera y el hostigamiento al Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) o el encarcelamiento, tras un proceso irregular, del también artista Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, hace unos meses, sacuden la abulia.

El Movimiento San Isidro es un colectivo de jóvenes artistas visuales, poetas, músicos e intelectuales, cuya sede se encuentra en una de las barriadas más pobres de La Habana. A principios de noviembre, la policía irrumpió en la casa de uno de sus miembros, el rapero Denis Solís. Tras un intercambio de ofensas verbales, el joven fue arrestado, sometido a juicio sumario y condenado a ocho meses de prisión por desacato. Los miembros del colectivo se movilizaron, fueron a estaciones de policía y, en vez de respuestas, recibieron detenciones arbitrarias. Hicieron vigilias en parques de la ciudad y fueron disgregados a la fuerza.

https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/politica/40-grados-represion-en-cuba

 

In Its Fight with Venezuela, the Trump Administration Takes Aim at Cuba

Amid the barrage of breaking news in the ongoing Trump scandals, one overlooked story is that of Cuba, which is experiencing severe fuel shortages and other difficulties, owing to sanctions levied by the Trump Administration. On September 28th, Sarah Marsh, a Reuters correspondent in Cuba, uploaded a video to Twitter. The thirty-second clip, shot on her phone from a moving car, shows vehicles stalled on a roadway: trucks, buses, modern taxis, and vintage nineteen-fifties Chevys and Studebakers in a line that appears to be half a mile long. All of them were waiting for gas. Marsh tweeted, “So I thought the fuel situation in #Cuba had improved somewhat, until I passed this multi-hr queue for diesel on the highway. This is only a fragment of what I filmed.”

Cuba’s energy shortage has begun to affect life on the island in a wide variety of ways. A week before Marsh posted the video, she reported that the government had urged its citizens to save fuel during daylight hours, warning that its supply was inadequate to cover the island’s needs for the month. Air-conditioning had been shut off in public buildings, while schools and universities had cut back on school hours, and some public-sector workers were told to stay home, because of a lack of fuel for public transportation. Oxen were replacing tractors in agricultural fields; wood was being used to to fire ovens in state-run bakeries, and a number of factories had either cut back on production or shut down altogether.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-its-fight-with-venezuela-the-trump-administration-takes-aim-at-cuba

 

Mexico, Cuba, and Trump’s Increasing Preference for Punishment Over Diplomacy

In his approach to the carrot-versus-stick equation that is central to statecraft, Donald Trump always opts for the stick. Apparently unaware of, or unconcerned with, the advantages offered by the canny use of public diplomacy, coercive tactics have become a main feature of his Presidency. On the international stage, Trump has used rhetorical bluster, unleashed financial sanctions, and threatened military action against adversaries such as Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, and has deployed withering tariffs to initiate an ongoing trade war with China. It is not only against nations with which the White House has ideological differences that Trump has chosen such an approach; he has also made rumblings about slapping tariffs on imports from long-standing American allies, including Canada, France, and Germany.

The weaker the country, the more bullying Trump’s behavior. In March, for instance, in a bid to pressure the nations from which much of the current surge of migrants is arriving, he announced cuts to U.S. humanitarian aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. On May 30th, he moved to punish Mexico over immigration, as well. He peremptorily announced, via a pair of tweets, that he had decided to tax all Mexican imports with a five-per-cent tariff, beginning June 10th, “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time the Tariffs will be removed.” His idea was that the tariff would rise by five per cent at the beginning of every month until it reached twenty-five per cent—the same rate he has levied against China.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/mexico-cuba-and-trumps-increasing-preference-for-punishment-over-diplomacy

 

Orgullo gay vs. Represión en las calles de La Habana

Activistas y miembros de la comunidad LGBTIQ en Cuba marcharon este sábado de manera independiente por las calles de La Habana en defensa de sus derechos tras la cancelación de la llamada Conga por la Diversidad que anualmente organiza el Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX). La celebración pública del orgullo gay no solo fue vigilada de cerca por las autoridades, sino también interrumpida y reprimida violentamente.

https://www.revistaelestornudo.com/orgullo-gay-vs-represion-en-las-calles-de-la-habana/

 

El último año en la vida de Díaz-Canel

Hace un año ya que Raúl Castro, entre aplausos coreografiados, se levantó de su butaca de la Asamblea Nacional y caminó hacia el estrado del Palacio de las Convenciones de La Habana. Alina Balseiro, presidenta de la Comisión Electoral, acababa de hacer público que 603 de los 604 diputados habían elegido como presidente del Consejo de Estado y de Ministros de Cuba al ingeniero electrónico de 57 años Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, único pretendiente al cargo.

Doce años antes, en 2006, Raúl había llegado al poder de manera interina gracias a los designios de su hermano, Fidel Castro, quien, al borde de la muerte debido a una enfermedad intestinal, delegó todos sus poderes políticos a modo de herencia familiar. Raúl estuvo dos años cubriéndole los cargos públicos a su hermano mayor, hasta que en 2008 fue electo de manera oficial como presidente de la nación.

Cuando en la mañana del jueves 19 de abril de 2018 Raúl Castro dejó atrás su asiento para dirigirse a la tribuna, en medio de la consabida ovación de un Parlamento en pleno de pie, llegaban a su fin dos mandatos presidenciales de cinco años —límite que él mismo propuso instaurar— para que asumiera las riendas de la isla, por primera vez, un hombre nacido después del triunfo revolucionario del 1 de enero de 1959. Más tarde, Raúl tomaría con su mano izquierda el antebrazo derecho de su sucesor y lo elevaría hacia las luces del salón: un gesto que la prensa al servicio del Estado vendió al mundo como la imagen de la «continuidad revolucionaria».

https://www.revistaelestornudo.com/el-ultimo-ano-en-la-vida-de-diaz-canel/

 

Animals Keep Creating Mysteries by Sounding Weird

In late 2016, American diplomats living in Cuba started hearing a strange noise in their homes. It was high-pitched, deafening, and persistent—and no one could work out where it was coming from.

In the following years, the mystery ballooned into an international incident. Many of the diplomats experienced dizziness, insomnia, hearing loss, and other troubling symptoms. A team from the University of Pennsylvania examined 21 affected people and concluded that they had “sustained injury to widespread brain networks,” based on evidence that other neurologists said was “almost unbelievably flimsy.” Donald Trump, without evidence, accused Cuba of being responsible. Various parties argued that the strange noise was the result of a sonic weapon, a microwave attack, or malfunctioning eavesdropping equipment.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sound-haunted-diplomats-cuba-crickets/579637/