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The investigation that brought about the downfall of several officials began three years ago
The investigation that brought about the downfall of several officials began three years ago – A video hints at Lage’s and Pérez Roque’s disloyalty to Cuba’s historical leaders – The then-vice president referred to them as fossils and dinosaurs.
By Gerardo Arreola, correspondent
06/29/09 – La Jornada (Mexico)
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Havana, June 28. The investigation leading to the demise of the most well-known faces among the new generation of Cuban leaders blew up three years ago after Raúl Castro received an anonymous tip, according to a video making the rounds of Havana in a series of closed-door meetings.
People who have seen the recording have told La Jornada that the said tip involved Dr. Raúl Castellanos Lage, advisor with the Cuban Institute of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery and cousin to then-vice president Carlos Lage, who allegedly leveled constant and virulent criticism at the government.
“We get plenty of anonymous tips and many of them we disregard,” Castro stated at the high-level meeting held on March 2 that ended with the dismissal of Lage and other officials. He mentioned, however, his order to put a tail on Castellanos.
The tape is about Operation Medusa, launched by the Cuban State Security, which includes footage, photographs, live and wiretap recordings now being disclosed to government staff, the armed forces, and members of the Communist Party (PCC) and its junior branch, the Young Communist League (UJC).
Back in the 1980s, Castellanos had worked with Carlos Aldana, then the powerful head of the PCC’s ideological and international division and regarded as Cuba’s ‘number three’ before he fell from grace in 1992. Sources have it that the tabs kept on Castellanos soon revealed his links with Conrado Hernández, an old friend of Lage’s and the second piece of the puzzle.
Hernández also drew attention to himself for the considerable leeway he had while moving around government circles, where he used cousin Lage’s name to get confidential information beyond his reasonable clearance as the Basque Country’s business representative.
It was by happenstance that Carlos Valenciaga, Fidel Castro’s personal secretary since 1999, was also brought to the fore.
On September 16, 1999, according to sources, Valenciaga celebrated his birthday in a party he threw at the Palace of the Revolution, very near where the Cuban leader was going through the most severe stage of the illness that eventually kept him away from public view.
Soon after it was set in motion, the surveillance of Castellanos, Hernández and Valenciaga led to Lage and others close to him, like Foreign Affairs minister Felipe Pérez Roque, Council of Ministers vice president Otto Rivero, and PCC International Relations secretary Fernando Remírez.
Hernández is said to be shown –and heard– in the outdoors section of El Templete, Havana’s most popular restaurant with diplomats and businessmen, as he arranged his cooperation with an official from Spain’s National Intelligence Service.
Consulted by this diary twice in the last two months, Spanish diplomatic sources have denied such relationship, although Madrid announced last month a reshuffle of their CNI’s personnel in Havana. Hernández was arrested last February 14 at the airport as he was about to leave for Spain, reportedly carrying copies of Cuba’s assessment of the Basque elections scheduled to be over by the first of March.
On March 2, Raúl Castro calls Lage, Pérez Roque, Rivero and Remírez dishonest for refusing to admit his accusations before he showed them everything that State Security had compiled on them.
Barring the charges against Hernández, the video allegedly does nothing but link data with footage and recordings. It comes to no conclusions; it just suggests.
What can be inferred is that there was disloyalty to the historical leaders, influence peddling, and abuse of privileges at odds with the public discourse of austerity.
Castellanos was taped as he talked with Lage on February 24, 2008, hours after Raúl had been elected Head of State and José Ramón Machado Ventura appointed second-in-command.
Castellanos implies they could have easily harmed Machado when the current first vice president underwent artery surgery, and is heard saying they would be doing the country a favor. Lage, in turn, speaks of a leadership of fossils and dinosaurs.
On March 2, 2009 Raúl Castro makes Castellanos’s arrest public, and points to a table covered with documents, pictures and tapes which he describes as evidence for the whole case available to whoever wished to take a look.
An angry Raúl speaks about Valenciaga’s party as he produces photographs of Fidel Castro’s former secretary wearing a soldier’s cap and holding a bottle in his crotch. It was an obscene party, the Cuban president remarks, while his brother was fighting for his life.
The video shows the bonds among the involved parties: how Rivero and his wife went on Conrado-sponsored trips to the Basque Country; Rivero’s briefings to the latter about plans of investment; gatherings at Conrado’s private farm in Matanzas province, where they enjoyed food and drinks way beyond the reach of ordinary Cubans; a river diverted from its course to benefit the estate; political reports that Remírez had given to Conrado; a diplomatic passport that Pérez Roque issued for him in a matter of hours, and even information he supposedly received about Fidel Castro’s health.
From Quebec, with love…
From Quebec, with love…
August 20, 2009
Author: MIGUEL FEBLES HERNÁNDEZ
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
From the cold and faraway Canadian city of Quebec arrive every year the warm solidarity and the sympathy of hundreds of citizens who turn a deaf ear to all anti-Cuban campaigns to travel to our land and get to know it through its people.
Colette Lavergne: “Every visit to Cuba makes us more confirmed in our conviction to fight for a better world”
So was the case of Colette Lavergne, a Quebecois through and through who found out in 1992 that the Cubans were something more than just a hospitable, party-loving people.
“I didn’t want to come. There’s so much misinformation and negative promotion about Cuba in my country, and they vilify and discredit the Revolution and its achievements so much that I expected to find here a sad, downhearted, oppressed people…
“It was quite the opposite, however: I found a happy, dignified and resolved people who defend what belongs to them. They have a country where they live with their head held high and not on bended knee. Since then I fell hopelessly in love with the Cubans.”
Two years later, when the special period had reached crisis point, Colette took her first steps as an activist for solidarity and friendship between Quebec and Cuba.
“I remember my first experience at the Cándido González High School in the city of Matanzas. Ten children had come with my daughter, who was then taking part in an international education program, and a wonderful unity and understanding grew among all those boys and girls.”
Their visit was such a success that in the following year reality went beyond all expectations:
“We organized a preparatory meeting for the following trip and over 300 people turned out who were eager to know Cuba. We had no choice but to rent a plane that we jam-packed with 160 Quebecois. That time we went to Consolación del Sur, in Pinar del Río province.”
Quebec’s solidarity has been steadily mounting ever since by means of various projects to become familiar with life in Cuba, not as simple visitors but through coexistence, involvement and mutual knowledge.
From family to family
Never did the little Guillaume Fournier ever imagine that Fidel and he had the same birthday, let alone that he would once celebrate his harvesting sweet potato, a root vegetable he’d never seen before to boot.
He came with his mom Manon, his sister Annie-Kim, and rest of the Quebec Solidarity Brigade members who these days are visiting Camagüey, since last year the host province for the so-called Family Camp program.
“This project –says Colette, leader of the solidarity organization ARO-International Cooperation– aims at the exchange between families. That’s why we have children with their parents and even a grandma now and then.
“Working in the fields like we’re doing now has been an unforgettable experience and a singular way to bring Cubans, Quebecois and foreign students who live here together in solidarity.”
Alain Menard, a post-office worker who brought his daughter Sabrina so she could see what he felt in five previous trips to Cuba, agrees with Colette:
“This is a country of simple, outgoing, nice people. Every time I come I return to Canada full of optimism and confidence that we can live in a peaceful world where human beings can be brothers and sisters.”
Since 1994, around 5,000 Quebecois have come to Cuba as part of the programs set in motion by Colette Lavergne, a woman who put aside one of her greatest passions –Medical Science– to devote herself body and soul to the work of solidarity with Cuba and its people.
A passion for baseball
- English
- Español
A passion for Baseball
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Over the last few years, groups of baseball history aficionados from the U.S. and Canada have been flying to Cuba to visit historic sites related to this sport and various ballparks to watch Cuba’s provincial teams at play.
Because of the measures implemented by the George W. Bush administration to strengthen the U.S. economic blockade, especially the travel ban imposed on American citizens, these groups are made up exclusively of Canadians, all of them Major League Baseball fans.
While here they meet with some of the country’s great sporting figures who used to play in a number of professional baseball leagues in the U.S. or elsewhere in our continent and whose careers and records are known to them, and share memories and news with the ex-players about others who live here or there or have passed away.
These groups also visit the graves of outstanding Cuban athletes, as well as commemorative plaques and monuments put up either to Cuban ballplayers or Canadian nationals in honor of their achievements in domestic or international matches.
Likewise, they get to greet, always with great admiration and respect, many of the current first-class players of Cuban baseball whose performance in Olympic or Pan American Games, world baseball championships or friendly games with MLB or other professional teams have brought them stardom.
Some of these Canadians even keep up with our National Tournament through the Internet.
Particularly emotional is their usual visit to the cemetery of Cruces, a town in the province of Cienfuegos, where Martín Dihigo (1912-1971) lies buried, and to the Municipal Museum, where there’s a hall dedicated to the famous Cuban player deemed by many the most complete the world has ever seen.
Martín Dihigo filled in every position in the field and is the only one included in four Halls of Fame in three countries: Cuba, Mexico and the U.S. (for his record in both the Big Leagues and the Negro League). He was a fantastic pitcher and a great hitter who set plenty of records, some of which are yet to be broken.
Another significant event is their meeting with Cuban veterans who played in the Majors and gladly share highlights of their life as ballplayers.
I attended one of such meetings where the fantastic African American hitter and Negro League Hall of Famer Monte Irving was present. Now in his eighties, Irving held a friendly argument with the Cuban former MLB pitcher Conrado Marrero, currently a nonagenarian, about a game they played 60 years ago in which the Cuban first struck him out with runners on base and then, in his next at-bat, Irving hit a huge homerun. They both remembered every detail of that game and had a great time exchanging other unforgettable moments of their long-lived friendship on baseball diamonds.
Striking, the way these visitors are delighted at the noncommercial character of Cuban baseball, something they put on a level with the original spirit of the game that North America has lost or is on its way to losing as a result of the growingly suffocating profit-oriented schemes imposed on sports.
If any of them grumbles about a defensive error caused by a flaw of the infield surface or complains that a quality game should not be marred by the use of worn-out balls, there’s always someone who remarks that the authenticity of this sport justifies everything.
It’s incredible to see, when they visit any of the many baseball fans’ discussion circles spread across the country, how well they communicate with the Cubans despite the language barrier, shatter by gestures that all baseball buffs master and use at will, not only in the hurly-burly of a stadium but also in their raucous give-and-take with foreign fans.
Batting averages, ball exit speed ratios, base-running skills, a coach’s strategy and tactics… they’re all described with baseball-like mime and lots of shouting on the side, enough to turn Havana’s Parque Central or any other venue into a genuine, if noisy, friendship forum.
I must point out that some local fans are somewhat distrustful of the visitors, as they don’t rule out the chance that the Canadians might be talent scouts with their eyes on Cuban ballplayers, motivated by political or simply profit-making purposes. They banish all suspicions from their mind, however, as soon as they hear Professor Kit Kriger, a longtime leader of teachers’ labor unions in the city of Vancouver and organizer of these trips, exhort baseball players and fans alike to maintain the purity of the game and keep it beyond the reach of merchants and state with certainty that Cuban baseball outranks American baseball both in terms of competitiveness –as evidenced by the final standings in the 2006 World Baseball Classic– and sportsmanship.
He urged our athletes to devote themselves totally to community sports, turn a deaf ear to siren songs, and always stand by their people, whose support is worth more than any amount of money or consumer goods.
Many of these Canadians interested in the history of baseball have strongly condemned the action taken by the U.S. government to prevent Cuba from being in the abovementioned Classic, as they came within an inch of frustrating one of the most significant events in baseball’s recent history. On the other hand, they highly praised the decision taken by the Cuban government and players to donate any money received at the tournament to the victims of hurricane Katrina, which had destroyed New Orleans only days before, mainly for lack of official involvement. It was Cuba’s attitude what saved the Classic, they assured.
The fact that Cuba finished second –ahead of every other team of the American continent– and even knocked the superpower’s super-team out of the Classic was described by some of them as proof that, far from contributing to the quality of the game, the exorbitant mercantilism ruling over baseball in today’s world detracts from it.
The damage caused by the four-decade-long U.S. blockade on Cuba amounts to more than $80 billion, that is, some $2 billion a year on average. And every year the world votes almost unanimously in the General Assembly of the United Nations against such a flagrant violation of international law.
Something that hardly any U.S. citizen knows is that every time a Cuban player succumbs to a financial offer –made for political reasons rather than for the athlete’s intrinsic qualities– and accepts a contract to play professional baseball in another country, the news travels fast as part as the smear campaign against the Island and its social and political achievements.
How sad that a game otherwise helpful to bring together the peoples of Cuba and the U.S. who love it so much –as shown by these group visits of North American baseball historians– should be used to distort the facts of the Cuban Revolution and encourage defection by promising resources completely alien to the humanism and solidarity values inherent to Cuban sports players.
“Socialism is voluntary”, goes a motto that Cubans proudly voice whenever any high-performance athlete makes such an unfortunate choice and decides to relinquish his or her compatriots’ admiration and affection.
Pasion beisbolera
Por Manuel E. Yepe
Espanol Here
So That the Victims of Torture are Remembered
- English
- Español
So That the Victims of Torture are Remembered
By Manuel E. Yepe
June, 2009
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Despite the impressive legal and institutional framework established to prevent it, the practice of torture remains widely tolerated or even used by governments, and there is still impunity for its perpetrators”.
So it was admitted by the United Nations Secretary General in the appeal issued every year by this organization ever since December 12, 1997, when its General Assembly passed Resolution 52/149 proclaiming June 26 International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
For a long time, the widespread, standard use of cruel and repressive methods, and especially the torture of prisoners, was held to be indigenous to prisons and military garrisons in Latin America during the second half of the 20th century.
Nowadays, however, there’s no doubt about the origin of actions and concepts that divorced the Latin American peoples from their soldiers and turned torture into a daily practice against the population.
When news –including pictures– on torture and other forms of inhuman treatment used by the U.S. army against prisoners in Iraqi jails and the detention center they illegally keep in areas of Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, old reports pointing at the School of the Americas (SOA), set up in Panama in 1946, began to take full credit.
Around those days, in 1947, the U.S. government also set in motion its gloomy, official criminal organization called Central Intelligence Agency, bound to write, in the region and the world over, the dirtiest chapters of abuse, barbarism and terror humanity has ever known.
Up until 1963, the SOA was named Latin American Training Center – Ground Division, reportedly designed to train acting military leaders and qualify new ones needed by armies throughout the continent.
After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, it took on more specific responsibilities as a result of the failure in the island of the center’s highly favored strategies. Now it would be used to train cadre called to stop the Cuban example from spreading across Latin America.
The space for “representative democracy” was considerably curtailed while military dictatorships mushroomed all over the region. Democratic traditions like Chile’s and Uruguay’s were no more respected than the size of mega-nations like Argentina and Brazil.
The SOA played a significant role as part of this ‘firm hand’ policy and its dreariest expression, the ‘Operation Condor’, for which it trained leaders, organized death squads to oppose insurgency, and designed interrogation and torture techniques.
Various dictators, chiefs of police and notorious torturers who played a decisive part in Operation Condor came from the SOA, many of whose professors and advisors took part in the dirty war against Latin America.
In 1984, following the Torrijos-Carter agreements and the signature of the Treaty on the Panama Canal, the SOA was relocated in Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia.
In 2001, owing to the huge wave of reports that the U.S. Congress had been receiving since 1999 to denounce the content of the torture training manuals that it used to train its students, the SOA’s request to operate was turned down.
The Pentagon “obidiently” renamed the school Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and made some cosmetic changes to conceal the most serious human rights violations that were a commonplace occurrence in its premises.
Whether cases of torture in secret prisons should be treated as confidential information is now under debate in the U.S., and in the meantime the world is witnessing in astonishment how Richard Cheney, who was vice president until a few months ago, openly defends the use of torture against prisoners and even demands more publicity for the ways such inhuman treatment redounds for the benefit of his country in order to gain more popular acceptance of that torment.
Beyond denunciations and protests about this practice, the world should also worry about saving another victim of torture: the American people, now faced with the morally degrading fact that so many of their young soldiers are being forced to inflict suffering on other human beings or trained for that purpose.
Spanish Headline Here
Por Manuel E. Yepe
Espanol Here
Depression Included in Medical Agenda
Depression Included in Medical Agenda
Author: Jose A. de la Osa
June 28, 2009
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Depression, an emotional disorder which is significantly growing in the world, was included in the scientific agenda of the 8th International Symposium on Biological Aspects of Mental Disorder celebrated in this capital with the participation of delegates from ten different countries.
Professor Ana Sarracent, chairperson of this event, told Granma that depression is caused by biological, psychological and social factors. Nowadays it represents 50% of all psychiatric consultations in a great number of countries.
Its medical and social importance is due to the fact that this disorder is the cause of suicides and suicide attempts at all ages.
During the Symposium Dr. Sarracent presided the session dedicated to “Suicide: beyond violence” because this behavior is the most frequent complication of this disorder.
This specialist, presently at the Calixto Garcia University Hospital of Havana, cautions that a depressed mood persisting during weeks, loss of interest in all activities, personality changes, crying, insomnia, withdrawal, excessive helplessness or guilt, lack of attention or appetite, and recurring death thoughts are all symptoms that require medical attention.
The symposium agenda also included sleep and eating disorders; sexual dysfunction; violence, pregnancy and breastfeeding; genetic and mental disorders and other non-pharmacological biological therapies like floral and bio-energetic therapies.
Cuba’s options
Cuba’s options
By Guillermo Almeyra
August 8, 2009
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Cuban Revolution is going through its hardest period ever, mainly because of an international situation marked by capitalism’s current crisis, which is bound to last for at least two more years. Even a slight recovery will still mean that imported goods such as food and oil will go up in price, and hopefully, the latter won’t go so high as to prevent Venezuela’s aid from increasing. At the same time, global warming has reached such levels that the whole Caribbean region is doomed to suffer the devastating effects of hurricanes and droughts on a regular basis.
Throw in the fact that the way U.S. policy on Latin America has evolved –suffice it to mention the role played by the State Department and the Pentagon in the coup d’état in Honduras, the threat posed by the IV Fleet hanging over the region like the sword of Damocles, and the seven military bases in Colombia that constitute a direct threat to Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil, just to mention a few examples– reveals that Obama’s intentions and views carry a lot less weight with the Establishment than the big business and the U.S. government’s imperialist nature. Therefore, Cuba must keep improving its preparedness, so much so now that it has fewer resources than ever to provide for people’s needs and well-being.
There’s also the fact that youth, especially in the cities, have known nothing but crises and special periods, and what’s worse, they have witnessed the sharp contrast between their austere and difficult life and the frenzied consumerism of foreign tourists. Unacquainted with pre-Revolution Cuba, they are fully aware that it was a terrible mistake to model their system on a Soviet bureaucracy they believed eternal and reliable, only to be left stranded in the end with no aim or sense or purpose. The Cuban Government is thus relying on a negative consensus, that is, the decision made by the vast majority of Cubans, whether or not they agree with the official policy, that Cuba will be neither another Puerto Rico nor a new addition to the Stars and Stripes. Not exactly small potatoes, but more is needed to lift their spirits and boost their confidence enough for them to undertake a project that will only bear fruit in the medium or long-term and demand, therefore, their courage, patience and creativeness while they live their life without consumer items.
Truth is, Cuba can be dependent on the brain drain no more than it can rely totally on oil imports, especially at a time that its Venezuelan friends are in Washington’s sights. It must work hard instead to produce a variety of quality foods and share them out effectively in the short term, even for reasons of internal political security, which the Cuban Government knows only too well. Now, an effective agricultural production calls for skilled, non-improvised labor and incentives to make up for the first rough encounter with rundown land overrun by thorny shrubs, essential tools, and consumables –since hoes and machetes are not enough– seeds and water. In other words, investments, a system of extensive agriculture and even the shock experience of an agreement with China, for instance, to set up model farming camps in some regions of Cuba to be manned by landless Chinese and Cubans.
Yet, producing is not enough: there must be an effective, affordable system in place to distribute the most urgently needed foodstuffs, some of which –say, meat and dairy products– must be sufficiently profitable for the producers who invested their time and money in the project. Lenin saved his country with a new economic policy, that is, a market policy implemented in agriculture and trade together with plans to manufacture clothes, machinery, and equipment for the new farmers’ market. How much does the island pay for a tourist industry bound to bring less and less hard currency in the coming years as it turns to cheaper destinations with less demanding moral and legal standards? Instead of funding great hotel chains empowered to buy expensive goods and foods, wouldn’t it be better to skim some money off that stock and use it to prod domestic production and design a more fair and equitable plan to distribute foods and services?
Why not consult the population about their needs and ideas to meet them? Why leave everything in the hands of a state apparatus made up of bureaucrats and technocrats who mean well but whose perception differs from John Q. Public’s and tend to solve things through managerial channels, using military labor rather than the working class’s energy and ingenuity? Why not hold people’s assemblies for production and self-improvement where the citizens can directly discuss, propose and resolve things? If the Party Congress has been put off –which further confirms that it neither has a life of itself nor does it control the State, but rather depends on a bunch of government leaders– why not turn this extraordinary conference into a forum for open, free, on-the-job debate where workers can make proposals? The techno-bureaucratic option is a fake option. Socialism cannot be built without the conscious involvement of the Cuban people. Cuba is in a state of emergency it can only overcome through the participation and will of all its workers and intellectuals.
Fernando Martínez Heredia
Fernando Martinez Heredia
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
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He majored in Law at the University of Havana in 1963. He graduated form several post graduate studies in Philosophy for 9 years. He was a Philosophy professor at the University of Havana, from 1963 to 1971, and Area Director and member of the University Council from 1966 to 1969. Since 1991 he is a “Professor Titular Adjunto” (Joint Senior Professor) of the University of Havana. He has graduated form numerous studies and post-graduate courses in diverse social disciplines. He has also taught numerous post graduate Philosophy and social courses in several institutions since 1966 until today. He has also given lectures in other post-graduate courses and taken part as a professor in the Seminar for Invited Investigators of the Ecumenical Department of Investigations of Costa Rica (1996) and in two courses at the Mothers of May Square Popular University in Buenos Aires (May-June 2000 and February 2001). He has also given lectures in numerous academic institutions in Cuba and of nineteen other countries.
He has been a Senior Researcher since 1985. He works at the “Juan Marinello” Cuban Culture Research and Development Center of the Ministry of Culture. He is President of the “Antonio Gramsci” Studies of that institution. Since 1964 he has carried out or participated in different social studies at the University of Havana (1971-73), the Western Europe Studies Center (1976-79) and the Study Center of America (1984-1996).He was also an Invited Investigator in the Center of Interdisciplinary Investigations in Humanities, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1994. He is a collaborator of the Current World Problems Seminar of the Institute of Economic Investigations of UNAM, since 1990. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Latin American Association of Sociology (ALAS) in 1997-1999, and member of the Ernesto Che Guevara Studies of FLACSO/Cuba and of the Mothers of May Square Popular University.
Since 1964 he has carried out or participated in research studies on multiple Cuban problems–social, economic, political, ideological, of thought–, and also on the historical process of the Cuban nation in general, and of the classes, races and other social groups in that process. For more than three decades he carried out investigations on a great number of Latin American topics for Cuban institutions, including: social movements, revolutionary and contra revolutionary wars, associations and religious thoughts, political parties, and situations of several countries. During 8 years he investigated the history and the contemporary processes in Nicaragua.
He was the Director of the theoretical monthly magazine “Pensamiento Crítico” (Critical Thought) (Havana, 1967-1971). He also directed the “Boletín Azúcar” (Sugar Bulletin), of the Cuban Sugar Ministry (1975-76). He is a member of the Councils of the magazines América Libre (Free America) (Latin American), Caminos (Roads) and Debates Americanos (American Debates) (Cuba), and of the Annual of the Fondazione Che Guevara (Italy). He has also been juror of numerous Social Studies Awards, both national and international, including the essays award of Casa de las Americas and the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists, and the National Prize of Social Sciences.
He won the Essays Award of Casa de las Americas in 1989. He is a member of the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists and of the National Union of Historians; and member of honor of the Hermanos Saíz Association. He has the Order “For the national culture” (1996).
His more recent books are: “Repenser le socialisme and Repensar el Socialismo (Rethink Socialism) (editions in French and in Spanish), Editorial CIDIHCA, Montreal, 2001; and El corrimiento hacia el rojo (Shift towards Red), Ed. Letras Cubanas, Havana, 2002 and 2003.
He is a joint author of eight books and author of chapters in others. He has published more than two hundred papers including essays and articles, in Cuba and in numerous countries.
A Brief History of Tourism
A Brief History of Tourism
Photo: Courtesy of Mintur/Granma/Archive.
By Graziella Pogolotti
May 3, 2017
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The image of the tourist was, at first, that of a traveler who, individually, undertook an adventure in search of new horizons to gain knowledge. Thus, exotic visitors began to show up in Cuba, who very often left testimony of their experience through letters, stories or books that proposed more ambitious insights.
The perspective of others gave us a vision of our singularity in the multiple planes that natural and human landscapes offer. For those persons who come from other lands, the richness of a prodigal natural universe –unaffected by the harsh rigors of winter– is striking.
The chromatic luxury of the environment made an impact at first sight. The true singularity was expressed in the human face of a cordial country, with open doors, where the refinement of customs was accompanied by the abandonment of the rigid formalism prevailing in other lands. The deepest bond was established in the human plane and there was also the first-hand approach to a culture forged under different circumstances. Thus, the characteristics of “being Cuban” were beginning to be defined.
Later on, in the twentieth century, workers’ demands gave the middle classes the right to vacation time. Inexpensive because of geographical proximity, access to a tourist trip was within reach of Americans encouraged by the stimulus of the warm climate and the exoticism of a certain folklore trivialized by the trinket trade.
In the winter months, the high season prevailed. It offered an enjoyable warm weather and coincided with the Havana carnival. In Parque Central, a maracas player stood at the door of a store that offered cheap musical instruments, along with belts, purses, and other articles made of genuine crocodile leather.
The flourishing business imposed its perverse features. When Prohibition was established in the United States, Havana was a space open to free consumption of alcohol. Bars multiplied and a malicious substrate became linked to the contraband privileged by the vicinity between the coasts of the two countries.
With its well-known ability to forge mentalities, neo-liberal globalization has appropriated large-scale tourism, associated with what is called with apparent innocence –eternal trap of words–: the leisure industry.
Its extreme expression is manifested in the cruises. In these, instead of observing the new, travelers contemplate each other in a coexistence that consumes most of the available time. In a tour of preset destinations, they pass through some paradigmatic sites and lunge into the search for small souvenirs, trophies to give to friends, once back home. The human landscape and the power of culture have disappeared from the picture. They will get to know, if at all, a masquerade willing to show –with roaring stridency– the expected exotic component.
Before becoming the grave of desperate emigrants, the Mediterranean’s natural environment suffered the predatory effects of tourism. There, too, on a short excursion, the testimonies of one of the original sources of so-called Western culture moved to the background
The Caribbean is the counterpart of that mare nostrum. We preserve virginal areas, but our being an island makes us extremely vulnerable. We have beautiful landscapes, but we lack abundant water resources to quench the thirst of a temporary overpopulation and maintain perfect lawns for golf courses.
In the cultural field, the dangers are even greater. While the Mediterranean tradition still evokes the glories of a dilapidated Parthenon and the infinite management of the Egyptian pyramids, –all victims of neo-colonial perspectives– our culture does not enjoy similar recognition.
Exoticism always maintains a component of underestimation, and our inhabitants have psychologically suffered from this conditioning. Expansive in the last half century, the leisure industry was already emerging, when “the Commander arrived and ordered it to stop.” [a refernence to the lyrics of a song, by Carlos Puebla, referering to Fidel putting an end to capitalist evils].
The hotels that multiplied in Havana were fronts for gambling halls, meeting points for high class prostitution, and business centers of an expanding mafia.
At that time, a master plan for the development of Havana was designed which articulated interests of a diverse nature. Speculation based on the price of the land oriented the growth of the city towards the east, where investments were made with a view to the creation of new neighborhoods.
The government would pay the expenses of infrastructure for investments with an absolute guarantee of profitability. New management centers were being directed there.
The historic city would be at the expense of the underworld. Since the space provided for that predatory universe was insufficient, a floating island would be built in front of the Malecon, for the free flow of large-scale gambling dens. The landscape value of the Malecón –complemented by the gentle hills that shape the profile of the city towards its geographical center, the present-day Plaza de la Revolución– did not matter. The capital of the country, the historical and cultural jewel in our crown, would be hopelessly dismembered.
For a country like ours, lacking in great mining wealth, tourism is a source of income of indisputable importance. The challenge is to devise strategies that enhance the possibilities of development in favor of the nation, culturally and humanly, because in the virtues of our people lies the soul of the nation.
The emergent demand for a large-scale project focused on the advantages of the availability of sun and beaches must be accompanied by the analysis of the risks involved, with the purpose of elaborating the indispensable counterparts. It is important to discard the notion of the leisure industry and to take into account that the fashion of beach enjoyment may be temporary.
Our true strength lies in our status as a large island, endowed with a multitude of possible options: many of them based on a cultural and historical tradition.
There is also the possibility of proposing designs aimed at valuing good living, latent in our large and small cities, in the varied landscape environment, and in the survival of little-explored corners made to the measure of the human being. To elaborate these projects, it would be advisable to complement the geographic and geological maps with a cultural map illuminated by a deep inward look.
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