Golf in Cuba: Is the communist gov't really game?

Golf in Cuba: Is the communist gov't really game?
By Will Weissert, Associated Press Writer
VARADERO, Cuba — The two revolutionary icons were playing the
gentlemen's game in fatigues and combat boots. And they weren't playing
well.

Che Guevara shot a 127, besting Fidel Castro's 150 on a par-70 golf course.

Their 1961 round a month before the Bay of Pigs invasion was the
beginning of the end for golf in Cuba soon the communist government had
eliminated the sport from the island almost entirely.

Only one 18-hole course remains, the Varadero Golf Club in this beach
resort 85 miles east of Havana. On Friday and Saturday it hosted two
one-day pro-am tournaments featuring half a dozen Cuban golfers paired
with wealthy foreigners.

Organizers say the events are small steps in a campaign to bring golf
back to Cuba, a country that is both the best and worst imaginable place
to play.

The Tourism Ministry says it would like to build 10 new courses around
the country and attract high-rollers from Europe, Canada and even the
United States should Washington ease its 48-year trade embargo.
Investors in Europe and Canada have long clamored to build courses,
presenting plans that include luxury hotels, apartments and health spas.

But those proposals have remained stalled for years, with not even one
foreign-financed project having broken ground.

Cuba is "the sand trap from hell," said John Kavulich, senior policy
analyst at the U.S. Economic Trade Council in New York.

"The conflict is imagery versus profit," said Kavulich, whose group
advises U.S. businesses on trade with Cuba. "Concerns about the image of
golfers in the worker's paradise. And, if accepted, how does Granma (the
Communist Party newspaper) explain the obese U.S. golfer with poor
clothing color coordination, running about in their 'Caddyshack' like
golf cart, betting one each hole?"

It does indeed seem hard for Granma to stomach golf, with its refined
decadence. But Antonio Zamora, a Miami attorney and expert on Cuban real
estate, said the government has overcome old ideological concerns and
sees the sport as a way to get foreigners to visit the countryside,
rather than simply staying in Havana and other cities.

The state-run tourism concern Palmares is developing golf, but Zamora
said it has moved slowly because it plans to build courses in clusters
of three or more, enticing players to stay in particular areas long
enough to try all courses.

"There's been a lot of work done. This is not just 'blah, blah, blah,'"
Zamora said.

Among those playing in Saturday's tournament was Canadian Graham Cooke,
a top golf course architect. At a similar event last year, three-time
major winner Ernie Els made an appearance to represent his development
company.

In June 2008, Britain's Esencia Hotels and Resorts announced the Tourism
Ministry had approved construction of the Carbonera Country Club for
around $300 million on a stretch of beach not far from Varadero. In
addition to an 18-hole golf course, the development calls for 800 luxury
apartments and 100 villas.

Cuba does not recognize the right to buy or sell property and prohibits
foreign ownership, but Esencia said it was hammering out a 75-year lease
on the property. Construction was slated to begin in 2009, but has now
been postponed indefinitely.

On Friday, Esencia CEO Andrew Macdonald took a group of investors to the
site where the Carbonera project would be built, offering a tour of a
windy beach amid high reeds that faced a rocky and narrow blue lagoon.

"It's spade ready," he told The Associated Press, offering a map showing
that where he stood could one day be a small wooden pier in front of a
luxury hotel. "We could go tomorrow."

Macdonald said the proposal has been endorsed by Cuba's Tourism and
Foreign Investment Ministries, but that more than 20 other government
ministries have to approve the plan before it can go ahead.

"If you haven't done anything for 50 years, you want to do it right," he
said. "They're totally committed to this. It's just a timing issue."

Macdonald said the golf course and some of the homes could be built in
two years once the project is approved, but he is through speculating on
when exactly that might come.

Gilberto Avila, a Tourism Ministry promotional communications officer,
said Cuba solicited foreign companies for proposals to build 10 golf
courses across the island, and had received at least 11 such proposals
since 2007 though he offered no explanation on why none has moved forward.

Cuba's vacation industry set records for foreign visitors each of the
last two years, despite the deep recession. In 2009, over 2.4 million
tourists came, mostly from Europe and Canada. But many stayed fewer days
than usual, and tour operators offered deep discounts to keep them
coming, meaning revenues slumped nearly 12 percent.

Golf could bring tourists ready to spend regardless of how dire the
world economy looks.

"You've got a cigar and you are playing golf with the beach right
there," said Jose Tovar, general manager of the Varadero Golf Club.
"It's perfect."

There were about a dozen topflight Cuban courses before Castro came to
power on New Year's Day 1959. The PGA Tour hosted an annual Havana
tournament in the 1950s that attracted Arnold Palmer, among others.

Castro and Che's round at Havana's Colinas de Villareal course was meant
to thumb their noses at the Kennedy administration. Many claim Castro
wanted to eradicate the game because he wasn't good at it, something his
son Antonio has denied, saying his father liked trying all sports.

The grounds of the Havana Country Club were converted into a music and
dance academy, and another course, the Havana Biltmore Club, became a
military zone where Castro now is believed to keep one of his many
homes. Colinas de Villareal also became a military camp.

Just one golf course survived in the capital, the nine-hole Havana Golf
Club, located off the road to the airport. The course was originally the
British-owned Rovers Athletic Club and was spared mostly so foreign
diplomats could play, said Johan Vega, the local pro. Sticks and tree
branches are used as flag poles on some holes and an antiquated
irrigation system makes it difficult to keep the grass from turning brown.

Vega was not invited to the Varadero tournaments. He doesn't believe
golf is too capitalist for his country, but said he's not hopeful it
will take off in Cuba because "there's no national golf culture."

Things are far less bleak at Varadero, the only golf course built since
Castro's revolution. It opened in 1999, after more than five years of
construction and with the Cuban government financing all of its $20
million budget, said Tovar, the general manager.

The course's clubhouse, high on a bluff, used to be "Xanadu," an
11-bedroom mansion built by U.S. chemical tycoon Irenee DuPont.

There was a seven-hole golf course on the grounds two holes were
destroyed by a hurricane until the Soviet Union disbanded, ending its
billions of dollars in annual subsidies to Cuba and bringing the
island's economy to its knees. Officials then embraced foreign tourism
and built the full-size course to attract golf-hungry visitors.

Varadero hosted qualifying tournaments for the European Tour in 1999 and
2000, but since has been unable to afford to stage more, and efforts to
promote golf languished until pro-am tournaments this year and last.

But Tovar said Cuba can no longer afford to not build more golf courses,
given the sport's global popularity.

"From a golf course, it's a different view of our country, maybe it's
not so cultural," he said. "But it's still Cuba."

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/golf/2010-04-24-3741522714_x.htm

United by pain, Cuba's Ladies in White vow to keep marching

Posted on Saturday, 04.24.10
LADIES IN WHITE

United by pain, Cuba's Ladies in White vow to keep marching
Raúl Castro has clearly had enough of the Ladies in White, who have
grown from a handful of protesters into a symbol of the Cuban dissident
movement.
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

The women met each other in Villa Marista, tenebrous headquarters of
Cuba's political police, while visiting some of the 74 husbands, sons
and fathers arrested in a 2003 crackdown on dissent.

``We didn't know each other because most of us were not dissidents, just
wives, mothers, daughters,'' recalled Berta Soler. ``But we started to
chat, and to organize, and we became the Ladies in White.''

They sought support and publicity in a Havana church frequented by
foreign diplomats. And they marched on the streets, at first
tentatively, then daringly to the very symbols of the regime that
sentenced their men to up to 28 years in prison.

More importantly, they became the only group that regularly staged
street protests in Cuba, giving their persistent demands for the freedom
of their men and all other political prisoners a level of visibility
rare in communist Cuba.

Today, the Ladies in White have become icons of the Cuban dissident
movement, condemned by the Raúl Castro government and little known in
their country but praised around the world, defended by Cuba's often
timid Catholic church and even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

``To win the streets is the basic issue for the dissidents, and no other
group has won that space,'' said Cuban sociologist Haroldo Dilla. ``They
are so vulnerable and fragile that they are difficult to repress.''

State security officials blocked the women's marches the last two
Sundays, a clear sign Castro has had enough of their very public
activism. The officials have warned the women that if they insist on
marching, police may not be able to ``protect'' them from the
government-organized mobs of civilians that regularly harass them.

But the women have vowed to keep at it, and will try to march again
today (Sunday) as is their custom after attending the 10:30 a.m. Mass at
the Santa Rita church, wearing white clotes and carrying pink gladioluses.

``We will continue to try to march every Sunday,'' said Soler, whose
husband Angel Moya Acosta is serving a 20-year sentence. ``For the
freedom of our men, we will continue going into the streets.''

``This will be a struggle of resistance, for which we are prepared,''
declared group spokeswoman Laura Pollán. ``If there's something that we
have, it is patience, perseverance and resistance. We have shown that
through seven years of peaceful struggle.''

Cuba's government has certainly tried to stop the women in many ways
since 2003.

Most of their marches are harassed by government-run mobs that hurl
insults at them -- including ``paredón!,'' slang for a firing squad --
and sometimes hit them on their backs, pinch their arms and stomp on
their feet, the women say. Security forces broke up several of the
protests by dragging them into buses and driving them away.

State security officials also regularly threaten the women and their
jailed relatives with worse prison conditions if the women continue
their protests, said Soler, and can delay or block prison visits and
deliveries of food and other supplies.

Many of the Ladies in White suspect the government has infiltrated
snitches in their midst, and Pollán found a microphone in a wall socket
in her home three years ago.

Virtually all are unemployed, most of them fired from their jobs in a
country where the government controls 95 percent of all economic
activity. Others resigned because of the withering pressures.

Soler, a microbiologist at a maternity hospital, quit out of fear she
would be blamed for a death. ``I had to keep my eyes wide open all the
time, to make sure I would not be framed for something,'' she told El
Nuevo Herald by telephone from Havana.

Cuban officials also have put pressures on the Ladies in White's
children, other relatives, friends and neighbors, the women say.

Gisela Delgado, whose husband Hector Palacios was sentenced to 25 years
but was freed in 2006 for health reasons, said their daughter Giselle
was expelled from the University of Havana because of her parents' activism.

Yolanda Huerta said her 9-year old son was given a psychological test in
school to determine ``whether he had been imbued with his father's
ideas.'' Her husband, Manuel Vasquez Portal, was freed in 2004 and the
family now lives in Miami.

Delgado said state security agents also have tried to set the prisoners'
mothers against the wives, and to recruit boyfriends and girlfriends of
the older children to spy on the families.

``This is psychological torture against our families. This is state
terrorism,'' she said via telephone from Havana.

Police also have told neighbors that the jailed men were convicted
killers, said Soler. Her son Luis Angel, now 15, got into a fight in
primary school with another kid who called his father a murderer and
``now he's marked as a troublemaker'' in school records, she added.

``To be the child of a dissident in Cuba is worse than being the child
of a thief,'' said Maria Elena Alpizar, an independent journalist in
Cuba who wrote often about the Ladies in White and now lives in Miami.

Cuba brands the women, like other dissidents, as ``mercenaries'' paid
from abroad to criticize the government. In 2008, it made public a
receipt signed by Pollán for $2,400 to be distributed to nine women over
two months -- $133 per woman per month. The government alleged the funds
came from a Miami group with links to a supporter of anti-Castro
militant Luis Posada Carriles.

The women don't deny that some of them receive money from a number of
individuals and groups abroad -- including the plantados, a group of
former political prisoners in Miami -- but they angrily deny the
allegation of being ``mercenaries.''

``First, nobody pays us to defend democracy and human rights,'' Delgado
said. ``This aid comes primarily because all the women are unemployed,
and it's a minimum for maintaining the family and delivering some food
and other things to men in prisons that are not like those in other
countries, where they have a proper diet.''

A bag with a month's supply of canned and dried foods, soap, toothpaste
and maybe some towels runs anywhere from $100 to $140, the women say.

``More important than the dollar value of the aid is the support that
one feels, that one is not totally unprotected, that there are people
who worry about you,'' Alpizar added.

The Ladies in White clearly remain little known inside Cuba, where the
government-controlled domestic news outlets seldom mention them. But if
history is any guide, the women will manage to persevere.

They first met at Villa Marista, where many of the 74 male dissidents
were detained after the 2003 crackdown known as Cuba's Black Spring.
Another jailed dissident was Martha Beatriz Roque.

Only three or four were already activists, said Blanca Reyes, a member
until her husband, journalist Raul Rivero, was freed in 2004 and they
left for Spain. She now represents the group in Europe.

The women started talking about staging some sort of protest to demand
the release of their men, and learned there was already a group of
mothers of pre-2003 political prisoners -- the Leonor Perez Mothers'
Committee, named after the mother of independence hero José Martí -- who
wore white in summer and black in winter for their activities.

They regularly attended the Sunday masses at the Santa Rita church on
Fifth Avenue. But the mothers' group never tried to march down the streets.

A handful of relatives of the 74 dissidents first turned up at the
church March 30, 2003, dressed in white, Alpizar said. The headline on
one her dispatches, posted on the Internet May 28 under the pseudonym
``10,'' gave the group its name, Las Damas de Blanco.

``We started just standing at the church door after Mass'' to buttonhole
the diplomats and plead their case, Reyes recalled. ``Then we started
reciting the Ave Maria. Then we started walking, then walking a bit
further, and so on.''

``We were so close, I can't even remember who first said, `let's march,'
'' she said by telephone from Madrid.

The initial marches generally stayed close to the church. But on March
19, 2004, 17 of the women marched to the government agency that runs
prisons and the national legislature to hand over petitions for the
release of all political prisoners.

And on Feb. 18, 2005, in their most daring sally, the women delivered a
similar petition to the ruling Council of State on Revolution Plaza --
the iconic meeting place for Castro and his followers.

``No matter what the government has done or will do, we will continue
trying to march, trying to demand liberty for our dear relatives,''
Soler said last week. ``We will never give up, because what unites us is
our pain.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/24/v-fullstory/1596985/united-by-pain-icons-vow-to-keep.html

Mariel boatlift tested Miami's strength, then made it stronger

Posted on Saturday, 04.24.10
THE MARIEL BOATLIFT

Mariel boatlift tested Miami's strength, then made it stronger
Thirty years later, South Florida government leaders and others recall
the Mariel boatlift -- a life-changing experience.
Mariel Memories: Cesar Odio
Cesar Odio, who was Miami Assistant City Manager during Mariel, talks
about the difficulties the city faced with the wave of immigrants that
came in.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
achardy@ElNuevoHerald.com

This is part of an occasional series that will run through September to
mark the 30th anniversary of the Mariel boatlift.

Cesar Odio was at his office at Miami City Hall one morning in late
April 1980 when his desk phone rang.

A top federal immigration official was on the line asking Odio's help in
locating a big enough place to hold dozens of Cuban refugees who had
just arrived in Key West aboard a crowded boat.

It was one of the first boats laden with refugees boarding vessels in
large numbers from the Cuban port of Mariel, 20 miles west of Havana.

It was also the beginning of the Mariel boatlift, which brought more
than 125,000 Cuban refugees to U.S. shores between April and September 1980.

Thirty years after the biggest refugee exodus from Cuba, local officials
who played key roles in the crisis recalled the historic events in
interviews with El Nuevo Herald.

While many local officials and private citizens were involved in
handling the refugee flood, only a handful came to be widely associated
with the boatlift mainly because media attention then fell on them as
veritable first responders to the unfolding crisis.

They are people like Odio, then an assistant city manager; Maurice
Ferre, then Mayor of Miami; Merrett Stierheim, then Dade County manager
and Sergio Pereira, an assistant county manager.

Private citizens whose names remain linked to the exodus include Lula
Rodríguez, sister-in-law of then Hialeah mayor Raúl Martínez, who worked
as a volunteer in the refugee processing camps, and Siro del Castillo, a
human rights activist who helped Mariel refugees at the Krome detention
center.

For all, Mariel was an unforgettable experience.

``It simply changed my life,'' said Rodríguez, now doing consulting work
on corporate communications in Miami.

She says that the plight of many Mariel refugees remains seared in her
memory and that the exodus made her realize just how terrible the Castro
regime was.

``I saw people who were taken from mental hospitals,'' Rodríguez
recalled in a recent interview. ``Many of them were dazed. They asked
questions like `when is the doctor going to see me?' They were not even
aware that they were in another country. That's when I realized the
monstrosity of Fidel Castro.''

While many top South Florida officials came to deal with Mariel, Odio is
perhaps the one whose name is more closely linked to the event.

That's because he ran the Orange Bowl refugee shelter and the tent city
under Interstate 95. To this day, thousands of Mariel refugees recognize
Odio on the street and stop to thank him for his help.

When Odio talked to El Nuevo Herald recently at La Carreta restaurant in
Key Biscayne, the waiter who took the order remembered Odio from the
time he arrived in Miami as a Mariel refugee himself.

At the time, Odio was a young official, recently hired as assistant city
manager during Ferre's administration. Odio had been in that position
for four months when Mariel erupted.

It was his baptism by fire.

The boatlift exploded in Odio's life during one morning in late April
1980 when the first wave of boats began unloading refugees at Key West.

The federal immigration official who called Odio was desperate to find
out where the refugees could be held while they awaited processing for
formal admission into the United States.

``The call came just before lunch,'' Odio recalled. ``Immigration called
and said `we have a problem.' ''

Odio said the immigration official told him that many Cuban refugees
were coming aboard boats and that authorities did not have a big enough
space to hold them. He advised that they be taken to the Manuel Artime
Community Center in Little Havana, named after the civilian leader of
the ill-fated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

``I picked that place because it was in Little Havana and the refugees
were Cuban and their relatives probably lived nearby,'' Odio explained.
``I went there to receive the refugees and from that moment my life
changed. I worked literally 24 hours a day on the issue.''

`CRIMINALS, CRAZIES'

When Odio arrived at Artime, a crowd had gathered outside -- mostly
relatives of the arriving refugees. The large number of relatives calmed
his fears that the refugee wave would swamp city resources.

But Odio's initial optimism faded when he saw some of the passengers on
the first boats.

``It was an example of what Fidel Castro was sending us,'' Odio said.
``Criminals and crazies, who had no families here. I began to worry.''

As more boats arrived, Artime was swamped.

``We immediately started looking for another place,'' Odio said.

He and his county counterpart, Pereira, got together and Pereira moved
the refugees to the grounds of the Dade County Youth Fair in west
Miami-Dade.

``We responded admirably despite having a 10 percent increase in the
population in just 31 days,'' Pereira recalled.

Ferre, then Miami's mayor, telephoned the White House and asked for an
appointment with then-President Jimmy Carter.

Ferre was told Vice President Walter Mondale would receive him.

The next morning, Ferre was on a plane to the nation's capital.

``I sat for over an hour waiting for the vice president who was meeting
with senior officials on Mariel in the Roosevelt Room of the White
House,'' Ferre said.

When the meeting broke up, Mondale approached Ferre and told him a
National Security Council aide would see him instead.

``My question to federal officials was `what are you guys going to do?'
'' Ferre recalled.

U.S. officials told Ferre they were prepared to stop the exodus by
preventing exiles from leaving Florida for Mariel to pick up relatives.

Ferre said he urged federal officials to use caution, and argued in
favor of admitting the Mariel refugees.

``I said `you have to be very careful,' '' Ferre said. ``And I also
said, `I think you ought to let these people in.' ''

`UNPREPARED'

Meanwhile, back in Miami, local officials were growing alarmed because
the Carter Administration did not seem to be reacting forcefully.

``The federal government was totally unprepared,'' Stierheim said
recently. ``As a result, local governments really had to step in and
relieve the problem.''

While Stierheim remains upset about the federal response, he praised the
reaction of the Cuban exiles. ``The community showered us with tons of
donations in supplies for the arriving refugees,'' he said.

Though the days of the boatlift were ``very dark indeed,'' in the end
``our county emerged stronger from the experience.''

Stierheim and Ferre said Miami and Miami-Dade County worked closely
together to deal with the exodus. Both remembered setting up a
city-county executive crisis committee on which various officials worked
together to respond to the exodus.

``We met periodically to assess the situation and needs,'' Stierheim said.

Local officials received substantial help from Cuban exiles,
particularly young Cuban-Americans eager to welcome the refugees.

Among the young volunteers was Rodríguez, a University of Miami
sociology student who later became a senior State Department official
under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Rodríguez served at some of the main refugee processing sites including
Opa-locka Airport and Krome.

At Opa-locka, she was assigned to interview arriving refugees and gather
basic information from them.

She had a lot of empathy toward the arriving refugees because she
herself had fled Cuba with her sister and brother under the Pedro Pan
program that brought 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban children to the U.S.
mainland 50 years ago.

She was also hoping to see her mother, who had stayed behind in Cuba,
among the arrivals. She never did. Her mother died in Cuba last year.

Her most memorable moment came when a young boy sneezed as she
interviewed him and his relatives.

``I said `Jesús,' to the boy, which in Cuba meant `bless you' after
someone sneezes, and the boy turned to me and said, all serious, `My
name is not Jesús, it's Carlos,' '' Rodríguez recalled. ``Then the
mother reminded him about how back in Cuba they used to kneel and pray
at night and he was not supposed to talk about it.

``That stayed with me because it shed light on the oppression and fear
people in Cuba suffered under the regime.''

After Opa-locka, Rodríguez went to work for the Public Health Service,
which established a clinic to check arriving refugees. By the time the
exodus wound down, Rodríguez had become director of the PHS clinic at Krome.

A closed Cold War missile basis, Krome was reopened as a processing and
detention center as Mariel unfolded. Siro del Castillo became Krome camp
commander at some point working for the State Department and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.

``After 30 years, the legacy of Mariel is everywhere in the Cuban
community in the United States in all fields, economic, cultural,
social,'' Del Castillo said recently.

INTEGRATED

``Also, today there is no more talk of the ``Marielitos'' as a separate
and distinct class of Cuban refugees. Today they are assimilated into
society, like all immigrant groups in the past. They are doctors,
engineers, nurses, teachers, fully integrated.''

As more and more refugees arrived, it became obvious that a big place
was needed to hold them.

On May 2, the Orange Bowl stadium opened as a temporary refugee shelter.
Refugees housed there were bused in from Key West and then to Opa-locka
Airport where immigration officials formally processed them, releasing
those who had relatives.

By then it was clear the exodus was unstoppable, that it was going to
continue for weeks or months. It went on until Sept. 26, when the
boatlift officially ended.

In July, Miami began emptying the Orange Bowl of refugees. The city
formally shut down the stadium as a refugee shelter on Aug. 10 to make
way for football season.

Many of the refugees were then relocated to the tent city under I-95,
where Odio became a fixture in media interviews.

Odio said the I-95 tent city was a deliberate effort to send a message
to the rest of the nation that Miami needed help.

The site opened on July 29, days before the Orange Bowl was vacated.

Eventually, unsponsored refugees were taken to other sites, including
Krome, as well as military bases and prisons elsewhere in the country.

Mariel was traumatic for South Florida, Odio said -- but it also
prepared the community to deal more efficiently with future crises,
including the rafter exodus of 1994.

On balance, Odio and other former officials said, Miami and Miami-Dade
benefited from Mariel because the majority of the refugees went on to
become successful citizens.

``Mariel was very bad in the beginning, but it was very good in the
end,'' Ferre summed up. ``The vast majority of these people were honest,
decent, hard working, industrious people . . . who are now doctors,
bankers, entrepreneurs and who really uplifted the community.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/24/v-fullstory/1596981/mariel-boatlift-tested-miamis.html

I despair for victims of Chávez

Posted on Sunday, 04.25.10
VENEZUELA
I despair for victims of Chávez
BY ALINA FERNANDEZ REVUELTA
alinacubalibre@bellsouth.net

`Every day, we're one and the same,'' Raúl Castro said when he bade
adios to Hugo Chávez in Caracas on Wednesday.

A little over half a century ago, Cuba exported sugar, tobacco, rum and
some nickel, which had to be processed, by the way, in Missouri.

Long before then, the citizens' rights and duties alternated in that
cosmopolitan island under more-or-less colorful presidents whom the
people mocked with sayings like: ``How much longer will Menocal's
fighting cocks be chicken?'' -- a reference to President Mario Garcia
Menocal's love for raising fighting cocks.

Others were ridiculed by Havana smart-alecks who nicknamed President
Ramón Grau San Martín's fountain, ``Paulina's bidet,'' after his wife.

Grau is remembered in history more as the designer of a large pail with
a spout to facilitate feminine hygiene than as Fulgencio Batista's
protégé. Yes, Batista, the former army sergeant who remained in the
shadows until he staged a coup d'état in 1952.

What times those were! People became indignant, sewed banners, hid guns,
conspired!

Sacrifice, death, everything was valid to preserve the slow march of
civil society in Cuba.

The fact is that we were moving slowly forward as a republic when that
military power-climber ruined everything.

According to history (which is always told by the winner), nobody liked
Batista. Cuban society assumed combat positions.

The enlightened Cuban society, that is, which existed as the middle
class, with children studying in private schools in Europe and the Americas.

The youth mobilized against Batista.

The poor man had not a single follower among the students, the
intellectual vanguard and some plutocrats. The reason was -- as legend
goes -- that he was a mulatto.

The fact is that discontent, political ignorance and the indolence
typical of the Caribbean contributed to the creation of a caudillo who
gave Batista a dose of his own medicine: Fidel Castro.

Castro came to power precisely because of a widespread habit in Latin
America -- the coup d'état. And Cuba put its fate in the hands of
another putschist, perhaps with more charisma, rosier-looking than Batista.

Only seven years had passed and Cubans were applauding someone who had
used the same technique as the man they repudiated -- a coup
romanticized as the ``people's revolution.''

People have a very short memory. Maybe that's why Raúl Castro could
bluntly assert in Venezuela: ``Every day, we're one and the same.''

Glory dulls the memory, but if you look back you may remember that Hugo
Chávez also was a putschist.

Chávez failed in his first attempt, but he didn't even remove his
uniform to go on the political attack once more until he ``won'' an
election.

There are so many similarities between Venezuela and Cuba that I
despair. I despair because, in the 21st Century, one of the most archaic
forms of reaching power has triumphed, and that such a simple formula is
the key to successfully turn defective democracies into regal tyrannies.

As a Cuban, I feel guilty for knowing what awaits so many Venezuelans --
and being unable to do anything to prevent it.

In this half-century, I have learned a lesson: Whenever a chief of state
who came to power in a coup utters the slogan ``Motherland or death,'' I
shall flee in despair to a place where decency and love share a nest.

Nobody can convince me to live in a dead society where history repeats
itself like an inalterable nightmare.

Alina Fernández Revuelta is the author of Castro's Daughter: an Exile's
Memoir of Cuba and a radio talk show host on 1140-AM.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/25/1595390/i-despair-for-victims-of-chavez.html

Miami project spotlights Cuba dissidents' attackers

Miami project spotlights Cuba dissidents' attackers
By Pascal Fletcher
Reuters
Saturday, April 24, 2010; 10:53 AM

MIAMI (Reuters) - Four Cuban American lawyers and a Miami-based
television station have launched a campaign to identify and publicly
name Cuban state security agents and pro-government militants who attack
dissidents on the island.

Called "Cuba, Repression ID," the project that began this week solicits
public support from the Cuban exile community in the United States and
also from people inside Cuba to identify, through photographs and film
footage, individuals seen beating or harassing unarmed critics of Cuba's
communist government.

In recent weeks, TV footage of Cuban state security agents and mobs of
pro-government supporters heckling, harassing and forcibly breaking up
dissident rallies and marches has drawn widespread international
criticism of Cuba's rulers and renewed calls for them to free political
prisoners on the island.

Cuba's government led by President Raul Castro, who took over from
ailing elder brother Fidel Castro in 2008, rejects the criticism and
calls dissidents U.S.-backed mercenaries.

The promoters of the "Repression ID" initiative backed by
Spanish-language Channel 41 AmericaTeve say they want to name and shame
identified persecutors of Cuban dissidents, both as a historical record,
for possible future legal action, and as a way of trying to halt such
violence and intimidation.
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"Here are the images, the faces of repression," reads the advisory on
AmericaTeve's website www.americateve.com, above a gallery of 28
photographs of men and women who were captured on film breaking up
peaceful rallies by Cuba's Ladies in White dissidents. Members of the
public are requested to e-mail or call in the identities of those shown.

"Who are they? What are their names? Where do they work? Where do they
live?" the website asks.

TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES DRIVE DISCLOSURE

Since Wednesday, the TV station in its A Mano Limpia (A Clean Swipe of
the Hand) current affairs program has also been broadcasting the faces,
inviting viewers to put a name to them. The initiative's promoters, who
request several sources for an identification, say several have been
identified so far.

"We're hoping to provide a bit of protection and support to those who
are suffering. We also want to make it known to those who abuse
defenseless people in Cuba that they can't act with impunity," one of
the Cuban American lawyers involved in the project, Wilfredo Allen, told
Miami's Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald in comments published on Saturday.

Although Internet access, along with the media, is tightly controlled in
Cuba, advances in telecommunications technology, and greater Cuban
American travel to the island opened up by President Barack Obama, mean
that much more information and images of what happens on the island are
coming out.

"Beating defenseless people is equivalent to torture," Luis Fernandez
Arena, another of the lawyers in the initiative, told El Nuevo Herald.
"These abusers have to be identified, because in the future they could
come to the United States and try to seek asylum as though nothing had
happened."

Cuba's government portrays the Cuban exile community in Florida as a hub
of U.S.-backed "counterrevolution" aimed at overthrowing its socialist
system. Havana says Cuban exiles, with Washington's blessing and
support, have launched numerous armed incursions and terrorist attacks
against Cuba since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution overthrew dictator
Fulgencio Batista.

The "Repression ID" initiative may find it hard to identify full-time
Cuban state security agents -- these mostly use assumed names while
working, to protect their real identities.

But the promoters of the project hope that members of the Cuban security
services who have defected to the United States over the years can help
by identifying former colleagues.

The Obama administration has eased curbs on Cuban Americans traveling
and sending money to Cuba and initiated talks with Havana on migration
and mail service. But Obama has said the longstanding U.S. economic
embargo on Cuba will stay until its rulers improve human rights and free
political detainees.

(Editing by Will Dunham)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/24/AR2010042400943.html

Tweeting from Cuba frightens regime

Posted on Saturday, 04.24.10
Tweeting from Cuba frightens regime

Excerpt from Yoani Sanchez's Generation Y blog from Havana:

Last night I was visited by a friend who lives in Las Villas, who, to
reach the capital, must overcome the transportation problems as well as
the circle of vigilance that surrounds him.

He told me that a few weeks ago he was detained, and they confiscated
his mobile phone for a couple of hours, until an officer appeared,
annoyed, with the small Nokia in his hands.

``Now you're in trouble,'' said the State Security officer holding him
at the station, over and over.

The reason for such alarm was that his phone's address book included an
entry for Twitter, accompanied by a number in the United Kingdom.

``No one can save you from 15 years,'' threatened the officer, while
asserting that sending a Short Message Service item to someone with such
a strange name who lived so far away was a crime of enormous proportions.

He didn't know that our tweets travel to cyberspace through the rough
sending of text-only messages by way of cellphones.

Nor could he imagine that instead of ending up in the hands of a member
of the British intelligence services, our brief texts go to this blue
bird that makes them fly through cyberspace.

It is true that we broadcast blindly and that we cannot read our
readers' replies or references, but at least we are reporting on the
island in 140 character fragments.

Always thinking in terms of conspiracies, agents and plots, they haven't
noticed that the technologies have turned every citizen into his or her
own mass media.

It is no longer foreign correspondents who validate a given story in the
eyes of the world, but rather, increasingly, it is our own forays on
Twitter that are turned into informative references.

My friend recounted it in his own way, ``Yoani, when we were coming to
Havana we had a big operation behind us. I drafted a text message in
advance to alert people if they stopped us.''

Maybe it was the brightness of the Nokia display or the conviction that
something new would intervene between pursued and pursuer that stopped
them from putting him in a patrol car.

If they had intercepted him, a brief click of a key would have sent his
shout across the Web, telling what the international press would have
taken hours to find out.

As I saw him off at the door he had his cellphone in his hand, like a
dimly lit lantern.

In the folder marked ``drafts'' an already prepared text would protect
him from the shadows that awaited him below.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/24/1595730/tweeting-from-cuba-frightens-regime.html

No surprises expected in Cuban election Sunday

Posted on Saturday, 04.24.10
No surprises expected in Cuban election Sunday
The turnout will be huge and the results highly predictable in Cuba's
municipal elections. No opposition candidates were allowed to run.
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Municipal elections that the Cuban government trumpets as the most
democratic in the world will be held Sunday, as usual with a massive
turnout guaranteed but no campaigning or opposition candidates.

The numbers for the local elections, held every 2 ½ years, are certainly
impressive.

More than 8.4 million Cubans aged 16 or older will be able to vote in
29,856 polling places for more than 15,000 candidates for seats on the
island's 169 municipal councils.

More than 200,000 men and women will run the voting, and results will be
sent to the National Electoral Commission by telephone or, in remote
locations, ham radio, horseback, bicycle and even carrier pigeons.

But no dissidents are among the candidates -- selected by neighbors in
Town Hall-styled meetings -- although 27 put their names forward around
the island, said Silvio Benitez, president of the Liberal Party, which
is not recognized by the government.

14 VOTES

Most received only one or two votes, he said, but his bid in District 47
of the town of Punta Brava near Havana did surprisingly well: 14 for
Benitez, 50 for the official candidate and 50 abstentions.

``The government staged a comedy, so that not one independent voice
would be nominated,'' Benitez said by phone from Havana.

Sunday's elections are officially nonpartisan and anyone can be
nominated, though the vast majority of the candidates selected are
members of the Communist Party, enshrined in the constitution as the
country's ruling party. National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón
nevertheless said earlier this year that ``millions of people around the
world would want to have votes as free and democratic as Cuba's.''

Although voting is not legally mandatory, government supporters go
around neighborhoods every election day strongly urging everyone to cast
their ballots, and keeping track of those who don't.

``Not voting can have negative consequences in social and labor
circles,'' wrote Cuban blogger Laritza Diversent. Voting, she added, is
therefore little more than ``a mandatory electoral service that citizens
provide to guarantee the continuity of communist power.''

Turnout in the last municipal elections in 2007 was reported at 95
percent, compared to 97 percent in the previous balloting, a drop that
Cubans say reflects the belief that local officials do not have the
power to deal with problems like broken water mains and potholes.

The National Electoral Commission has highlighted that this year's crop
of nominees for candidacies is younger and has more women than such
groups in the past.

Of the 34,766 Cubans nominated this year, 75 percent were aged 16 to 50,
compared to the 53.9 percent of Cuba's 11.2 million people who are in
that age range, according to commission figures. The 12,431 female
nominees made up 35.7 percent of the total, well above their 28.9
percent in the 2007 balloting, the commission added.

No campaigning is permitted in the elections for municipal, provincial
or national posts, and the only publicity permitted are fliers with the
candidates' qualifications that are posted around the districts.

FEW MEETINGS

The 614-member national legislature, the National Assembly of People's
Power, is elected for five-year terms but the full legislature meets
only for a few days twice a year. In between, the Council of Ministers
manages state affairs.

The most recent elections to the National Assembly were held in 2008.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/24/1595731/no-surprises-expected-in-cuban.html