Honduras: A coup d’état concealed behind euphemisms

Author: ALBERTO NÚÑEZ BETANCOURT
Havana, July 7, 2009

A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Honduras is living proof that, if describing the violators of democracy is up to powerful mass media, we’ll never see words such as ‘coup d’état’ or ‘usurping government’, let alone phrases like ‘legitimate, constitutional president acclaimed by the majority of the people’ to talk about Honduran dignitary José Manuel Zelaya.

Once again, injustice hides behind euphemisms: ‘coup’ is replaced by ‘forced succession’, a term often used by CNN in its Spanish broadcastings, as if to make sure it ends up engraved on the mind of its large audiences.

Since June 28th, when the coup took place, CNN News has reported that a new government ‘unanimously’ approved by Congress had been legally set up and was even ‘consolidating’ its newly appointed cabinet.

That day an anchorwoman kept proudly repeating that all e-mails received in the network stated their support of the de facto regime. Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega was right when he said that CNN was the coup faction’s channel.

Just hours after the swipe, plenty of carefully edited footage showed a rally in support of Micheletti, whose actions enjoyed extensive coverage while the popular opposition was barely mentioned despite the fact that increasing numbers of people were gathering in the area around the Presidential House and all roads and highways were jam-packed with citizens who were heading for the capital city from all over the country. ‘Groups of Zelaya’s supporters’ is how CNN in Spanish prefers to call that great mass of citizens seemingly undeserving of many camera shots.

You’ve got to laugh at the argument initially employed by the CNN correspondent that she could not get anywhere near the Presidential House to take pictures of the first demonstrations in favor of the Honduran constitution. Nevertheless, she fought for, and managed to get in no time, an interview with Micheletti, whom she even called ‘President’, in clear recognition of he who had just taken the Presidency by force.

Meanwhile, a fearless Telesur network got by at best it could to transmit objective news from streets and rooftops at the cost of seeing its film crew arrested.

History repeats itself. Much like in Venezuela in April 2002, powerful media are now striving to do a real balancing act to justify the coup in Honduras. Everything goes, from blaming Chávez for the conflict caused by a stubborn Honduran oligarchy to presenting analysts who swear that Manuel Zelaya violated the Constitution, hinting at the convenience of a ‘political solution between the parties’ to help the country return to normal, or fabricating a climate in which Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are portrayed as enemies of Honduras’s sovereignty.

No information monopoly is in the least interested in clarifying that Zelaya’s intention to hold a referendum is by no means in violation of his nation’s Magna Carta.

Why don’t they explain in one of their many news programs that the current chaos in this Central American country is a result of a crystal clear conspiracy planned by the brass hats, the judiciary and power-thirsty congresspeople? Why not remind us that the Hondurans were peacefully getting ready to take part in a plebiscite? Why not decry the gag order given since day one by the de facto government?

Countless questions come to mind on what the big media have to say now about their much-trumpeted concepts of democracy and freedom of the press, because their outrageous attitude makes their words sound empty or funny, to say the least.

No less noticeable is the fact that some networks would rather broadcast the latest jet-set gossip or cartoons for entertainment and misinformation than what’s going on in Honduras today.

Euphemisms as masks: that’s some lesson we’re receiving these days from the media at the service of oligarchs and liars!

 Alberto Yarini: Legend and mystery of a pimp

07/29/09 – Cubarte: News Service (Havana)

By Graziella Pogolotti

A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Among my most distant memories, the name of Alberto Yarini comes to mind. Grown-ups would mention him with a wicked smile, which aroused my curiosity. I gradually came to learn that he was a famous pimp who had been killed in a fight by his French rivals in the San Isidro neighborhood. Supremely elegant, he projected a singular image, that of an aristocratic pimp riding around the city. Later Carlos Felipe turned the legend into myth. With his famous Requiem, he gave a tragic flavor to the announced death of a hero of a nocturnal and marginal Havana, a recurrent obsession of the author, who also wrote El chino. The director Gilda Hernández, however, provided quite a different perspective of the production on the occasion of the premiere of the play. The realistic approach showed the character-portrayed by Helmo Hernández-in his underpants in a sordid setting. Social referents were emphasized by this point of view, including the stage curtain which served to project obituaries of the family of resounding names and of the Conservative Party, signed by generals and commanders of the Liberation Army as well as by notorious San Isidro pimps.The character has come back to the present in the recently premiered feature film, Los dioses rotos (The Broken Gods).

The second edition of San Isidro 1910, by the researcher Dulcila Cañizares, was launched at a recent book fair. Supported by numerous testimonials and a conscientious exploration of archives, the book reveals the character’s environment, located in the limited urban universe where he exercised control. The examination is intentionally made from the bottom in a republic which had hardly freed itself of colonial ties.

The neighborhood is brought back to life by a meticulous reconstruction of squalid tenements, cheap eateries, small stores, movie houses where musicians, who would some day be famous, play, places where pornographic images are viewed. From the background of this sordid everyday life emerges the indistinct figure of Yarini, settled in his house on Paula Street, surrounded by his harem, flanked by his staunch friend Basterrechea, an ambiguous bond of unknown origin.

Self-contained, the neighborhood lies on the city’s fringes, just as Carlos Felipe sensed it in his classic Requiem. But strong and subtle steel threads connect him to the ruling classes of the newly-formed republic. Barely a silhouette designed in the background, Yarini represents the link between these two worlds. Hence the reason for his actual strength and his lasting symbolic image. Deep down, beyond any differences imposed by social conventions, a common substratum converges in the field of values, a trap that subjugates whoever gets involved in politics, where no one manages to avoid the mud stains on their white attire. Yarini goes through the concentric circles of the Havana society of the time. Born into a well-established family, both financially and professionally, he stops by the bohemian and semi-parasitic scene of the “Louvre sidewalk”-also suggested by Estorino in some of his plays-where white slave trade and the commerce of journalism subsist, to establish his personal domain in San Isidro.

Coinciding with the pattern devised by Carlos Felipe, the anthropological perspective adopted by Dulcila Cañizares constructs the character as seen through the eyes of others. Unlike the playwright, the researcher places the neighborhood and its memories at center stage. The main character will grow and will be recognizable following his death with the significance of his remains and complicities extracted from the impersonal prose of legal documents. Here, as on the stage, class differences are noted in the refinement of the wardrobe and the value of the pendants, in contrast to the vulgar striped shirts and pants worn by small-time pimps. The quick execution of the French victim takes place by way of a pearly pistol and an accurate shot to the middle of the forehead.

The search for the truth is carried out through the disclosure of successive layers that hide new, perhaps unfathomable, mysteries. In Dulcila Cañizares’s book a key character, unknown until now, is outlined. Basterrechea, the inseparable shadow of the famous pimp, the handsome young man with green eyes who lacks trade and lineage will be his avenger. A shadyarea in his sexuality is sensed in the “San Isidro macho” with his harem of women that never included virgins. The documents of the period hint at actions taken by powerful political authorities to abandon the legal process and wipe Yarini’s avenger’s record clean. Jail will be for others, for the second-class perpetrators in the settling of scores with the French pimps. Basterrechea survived the republic in total obscurity, living on small government positions that were always available to him despite the frequent dismissals, hurricane winds that were inseparable from every electoral process. His silence was, without a doubt, part of the commitment made to the people who ultimately freed him from the administration of justice. At the time of the outcome, he left the scene in the same manner as the mysterious lady in black restored by Carlos Felipe. They left no trail. Memory and legend preserved only the reminiscence of the surprising social pact represented in the funeral where the neighborhood prostitutes and the representatives of the so-called active classes of the nation, representatives of high politics and high society, converged. The great show removed the stains, dressing the most sordid complicities in clean clothes. From a multiple set of voices and documents, Dulcila Cañizares opens up the silent zones and gives us back a disturbing vision of a past that is also a part of our cultural heritage. Because the yesterday that is within us has dazzling luminosities of struggle, generosity and creation. Inscribed in a context of values forged in the needs of survival, the memory of a sordid past, the source of a corruption that permeates society, interacting with the high and low strata of society, still lives on. These are the ones that are revealed in Carlos Felipe’s universe and, with more restrictive precautions, in Miguel de Carrión’s as well. Let us welcome then this necessary evocation of San Isidro 1910.

An Interview with Camilo Guevara, Son of El Che
10/16/98 – HUMO (Belgium)

A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Q: You didn’t really know your father. You where five years old when he  died. You probably know him like we all do: out of books.

Guevara: I have a few memories, but vaguely, things I’m not even sure off  that they really happened or that I dreamed them, fantasy. I know him  through the stories that my mother, family and friends of my father have  told me.

Q: For believers in the free market and the Americans, he is a devil.

Guevara: That’s their problem, not mine. He is a devil for the U.S.  government and American multinationals. Not for the North-American people. I  am convinced that many North-Americans admire and respect El Che, that they  love him and that they fight injustice in American society under his banner.  In the U.S. there is a movement that declares its solidarity with Cuba and  tries to lift the economic blockade.

Q: Your father’s life ended in controversy. He left Cuba because the Soviets came, whom he did not trust, so they say, and had problems with Fidel Castro  who became more and more a pragmatic head of state.

Guevara: That isn’t true. My father left Cuba because he was an eternal  revolutionary. He wrote as much in letters that might soon be published. He  had no quarrel with Fidel at all. Fidel and Che stayed friends, brothers and  comrades until the end. That they had problems with one another is a lie  which was already launched before El Che’s death. The period he was in Congo  during the sixties and the capitalist countries didn’t know where he was,  the Western press wrote some crazy stories: he was dead; he was locked up in  a Cuban jail. With these lies they wanted to harm the Cuban revolution and  Fidel Castro as one of the international leaders of the left and of the poor  in the world, still eighty percent of the world population today. On the  other hand they tried to convince people that the revolutionary Guevara,  this great symbol, wasn’t all that, but a man who had to flee from Cuba  because he had problems with his colleague – revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Q: How is life for the son of El Che in Cuba?

Guevara: You want to know if I’m privileged? Children of ‘the symbol’ have  one advantage: a great part of the Cuban people still loves El Che. I often  feel awkward about it, but a lot of Cubans treat us, the children of El Che,  more warmly than others. I feel that the Cubans convey the affection that  they had for my father onto me and my family. In that way we are indeed  privileged.

Q: How are things in Cuba today? The economic situation seems to improve  gradually?

Guevara: 1994 was rock-bottom for us. After that the Cuban economy gradually  began growing again, which was a miracle, really. And El Che had nothing to  do with it! (Laughs) Or maybe, a little. That year made a great impression  on us all. Imagine: a country which is the victim of a rigorous economic  blockade all of a sudden also loses eighty percent of its trade due to the  collapse of Eastern Europe. At the same time the blockade is even tightened,  and the prices of Western goods, which we desperately needed just like any  other Third World country, keep on rising. And still we managed to let our  economy grow. That is the miracle. A very dangerous example. We achieved  this without one cent from the International Monitary Fund, nor of any other  international financial institution whatsoever! We have showed that you can  achieve a lot without money, but with a great political will. I suspect that  capitalists around the world are a bit anxious that this example might be  followed in other countries. That’s why they try to destroy us with even  greater vigour.

Q: El Maximo Lider Fidel will sooner or later disappear from the scene. He  is 72 now. What will happen then? In Florida huge groups of Cuban exiles are  waiting for the day they can reclaim Cuba.

Guevara: There are few thing of which one can be sure in this world.  (Laughs) The Cubans in Florida where already convinced back in 1959 that  they would re-conquer Cuba quickly. Ha! We are forty years further now, and  they are still in Florida. When Eastern Europe collapsed, they knew for  certain: we take Cuba back! In the meantime that’s nine years ago.

For sixty years, from the beginning of the century until the end of the  fifties, Cuba was a colony of the U.S. . We know capitalism, we have  experienced its deeds. Until Fidel and a group of youngsters launched the  revolution. What do you think the Cuban people are going to do after Fidel’s  death? Do you think that everybody wants to go back to the period before  1959; that the people will allow the U.S. to come and boss us around?

Q: Wouldn’t it be possible that the Cuban regime imploded? The consumption  goods of capitalism are very seductive. One notices it these days in Havana.

Guevara: In the West capitalism seduces many people, yes. And maybe a few  ignorant people in the Third World too . . .

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Q: Oh come on, the Cuban youth wants Nikes and Marlboro’s, Coca-Cola and  walkmans too.

Guevara: Without a doubt, without a doubt. But that isn’t the majority of  youngsters. Never! The Cuban people have reached a level of political and  cultural awareness that cannot easily be ignored. The Cubans have seen what  has happened to Eastern Europe: before the collapse of the Berlin Wall they  had promised these people heaven, but what did they get? Nothing, absolutely  nothing, except chaos and exploitation. We Cubans know this, we see it and  we don’t want it to happen to us. OK, there are still some people that want  to sell us out to the U.S. . But they are a minority.

Q: Wouldn’t it be wiser to completely ignore the U.S. and tighten the  economic ties with Europe?

Guevara: The Europeans aren’t philanthropists either, hey. You have to be  realistic: our relationship with Europe depends on what we can earn from one  another. But the U.S. executes pressure onto Europe, a lot of pressure.  Northern-Europe resists the Helm-Burton law (American law that tries to  prevent non-American industry to trade with Cuba) and we are glad about  that. But is that because the Europeans are in love with Cuba? No, its a  question of sovereignty. How can one country accept that another country  forbids it to trade with the rest of the world?

Q: Until recently Cuba was a isolated socialist ‘paradise’. Now you receive  thousands of tourists and businessmen from Europe and South-America. Is that  positive?

Guevara: Cuba has never been as isolated as you think. We have always had  good contact with Europe. With Eastern-Europe, sure. But we have always been  open to the European culture. In the past we have never promoted mass  tourism from Western-Europe because we didn’t need it. Now it has become our  most important source of income and a way to attract foreign investments.

Q: But mass tourism has a shadow side too: prostitution.

Guevara: For me it has more to do with the crisis of human values all over  the world, than with tourists coming to Cuba.

Q: You really believe that?

Guevara: There’s prostitution in Belgium as well. I have seen it with my own  eyes. People who have enough money to live on don’t prostitute themselves.  People who lack money, do. Why?

Q: Because they want money?

Guevara: No! If I had no money and would go hungry every day, I would not  prostitute myself! It is a question of values. So, what can we do about it?  Must we throw out all tourists, or do we have to make sure that people do  not only have enough money, but also have respect for the essential human  values? In any case we are working hard to force back prostitution.

Q: You work for the Ministry of Fishery. Strange that you have such  ministry. Cubans hardly eat fish.

Guevara: That’s true. But there is improvement. In the past, eating fish was  for the poor. Or food for cats and dogs. Now we try to promote the fish  consumption through fairs and feasts.

Q: Even Fidel seems to interfere?

Guevara: Yes, he once did an advertisement on TV. One saw an empty table in  an empty room. Fidel entered and sat himself behind the table, looked into  the camera very seriously but didn’t say a word. After a while a waiter  entered and served him a plate of fish. Fidel ate the fish in silence. This  took a few minutes. When only the fish-bones where left on his plate, Fidel  rose up, looked imperatively into the camera, and spoke to his people the  historical words “And now, YOU” And now we all eat fish. 

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.