Granma 187
For March 8 (and beyond)
For March 8 (and beyond)
In what way and where, by whom and with what effects do we construct the image of what a woman is? Better yet, in what way are the limits of what is considered – at a given moment in a particular society – possible for a woman to be and to project?
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
A friend of mine posts on her Facebook wall a comment in which she regrets what she considers to be an example of insufficient diversity in the images that, on the television screen, were used to present (and represent) Cuban women in the celebration of March 8. My friend is black, with a deeply dark skin tone.
Here’s a topic, I say to myself, and then I remember that years ago I wrote an article for the newspaper Juventud Rebelde about the transformations that -in terms of beauty standards- had taken place in the country since the years of my childhood.
The article focused on the perceptions and meanings of black people’s hair and hairstyle and, on this basis, proposed assessments in which racism and freedom, the hidden mechanisms of domination and the battles of the subjects in search of their real emancipation were confronted.
After that I wrote two other articles, which were not published at the time:. The first aimed to analyze the connections between obesity, beauty and social control; the other took as its motif the case of a woman in England who had announced on her personal website that she would stop shaving her legs and who – from then on – began to receive dozens (eventually hundreds) of denigrating messages, some of which contained threats to her physical integrity.
How and where, by whom and with what effects do we construct the image of what a woman is? Better yet, in what way are the limits of what is considered – at a given moment in a particular society – possible for a woman to be and project? What participation do we have, even those of us who are willing to swear that we are not part of the process, in the infinite number of actions through which this “ideal” of what is supposedly feminine is molded?
This inevitably leads us to understand (and propose for debate) not only the responsibility in the production, distribution, control and consumption of images, but to lead us to a point where we are forced to ask ourselves: What have we done or do? What role do we play in the various forms and scenarios in which actions of micro-oppression of women are manifested?
Another friend tells me about the time when, at the exact moment of wearing a new dress for a night out she was looking forward to, she discovered -just as she arrived at the place- that the rush had made her mix up the ornaments and that she had put on two different earrings. She doesn’t know how much she taught me and I learned from her response when, contemplating her face in the mirror of a bathroom on-site, she said to herself: “it doesn’t matter: you are the fashion”.
I admire that way of not obeying the dictates of a codified norm, which pretends to define what you are in a perverse game, where visuality is supposed to make transparent the moral condition of the person and even her history itself. I admire that inner strength and will to self-affirmation.
A third friend uses her menstrual emissions, exactly that which, in a more evident way, transmits the “weakness” or “flaw” of the woman, to create -with that intimately personal matter- works of art. As in the previous example, the logic that presides over the action is that of the search for and expression of the most absolute freedom.
What is a woman, where is she, what are her limits, how is she represented/presented?
The face perfectly aligned with the Hellenic beauty patterns or the very dark skin accompanied by thick lips and a wide and flattened nose; the youthful figure that communicates agility and the other that moves with effort due to age; the straight hair, the implants, the straightening under the effect of keratin, the hair in the form of “afro”, in the so-called “carreritas” or in long and powerful “drelos”; the thin or overabundant, obese contour; the gesture of a dapper style or with a wider arc in the movement of the hands; the image of a “traditional” femininity (in which ideals of “fragility”, “delicacy” and “sensuality” prevail) or the reverse of the “masculinized” female, which is usually attributed to the lesbian; with tattoos, “piercings”, hair dyed in unusual colors (green, blue, orange): it’s all women.
Peasant women, highly skilled professionals, housewives, workers in an industry or construction site, we need images of the most extraordinary diversity possible to “refresh” our images and approach women, ask questions, get closer to their struggles, offer them solidarity and push together with them the limits of presence, representation and participation in new worlds.
And that is what a Revolution is: a new world.
I end with a personal story. A few years ago my children Kenneth, Karen and I got tattoos. On that occasion the one that my wife dreams of for herself was left pending: the Elvish word for FREE.
Tomasito, Between Books and Battles
Tomasito between books and battles
Tomás Fernández Robaina will receive the Distinction for National Culture today
Author: Pedro de la Hoz | pedro@granma.cu
March 4, 2021 23:03:32 PM
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
One fine day, looking for proximity between home and work, Tomás Fernández Robaina left behind his job as an accountant in a light industry establishment and joined the José Martí National Library. That was not a simple job exchange, but a radical change of life, because it was the beginning of the parallel takeoff of a substantive work in Cuban bibliography, and in the historical research related to the African legacy in national culture and the fight against discrimination because of skin color.
On the verge of 80 years of existence, five and a half decades of which he has spent at the prestigious cultural institution, Tomasito inspires respect and admiration for the impetus and passion he puts into every intellectual endeavor.
Those qualities nurtured the construction of one of his exemplary contributions to the field of island librarianship: the General Index of Periodicals. It was the result,” he recalled, “of an analysis of the indexes that had traditionally been prepared in the Library after the Revolution. As Salvador Bueno’s assistant, looking for information for the work I had to do in view of the popular literacy campaign, I realized that finding information was not very easy, because it was necessary to register a large number of directories. There were so many indexes that had been compiled that we really had to find a new way. I envisioned the project in two ways: to consolidate all the contents of the indexes that had already been compiled, and to begin to compile a repository that would include the contents of all the periodicals that were emerging”.
Having been the compiler of the Bibliografía de estudios afroamericanos (1969) and the Bibliografía de temas afrocubanos (1986) allowed researchers, professors, students and readers in general to have valuable tools of knowledge, and in his personal case, to confront sources that would be extremely useful for monographs and essays.
In 1990, one of his most far-reaching and impactful works, El negro en Cuba 1902-1958, was published. Although the author modestly stated that he was limiting himself to offering notes for the history of the struggle against racial discrimination, the documentation provided and the judgments derived from it, as well as the punctual record of the milestones, turn this essay into an essential reading.
Tomasito’s publications also include Hablen paleros y santeros, Recuerdos secretos de dos mujeres públicas, Cuba: personalidades en el debate racial and Identidad afrocubana: cultura y nacionalidad.
A member of the Cuban Association of Librarians (Ascubi) and of the Association of Writers of UNEAC-he is one of the most resolute activists of the José Antonio Aponte Commission-, Tomasito maintains, as a currency, to share what he has, to stimulate the spiritual growth of the new generations and never stop fighting to complete the work of social justice of the Revolution, especially with regard to the conquest of the fullest equality.
Lies, foul language and unimportant things
THOUGHT
Lies, foul language and unimportant things (+Video)
When Trump won the elections for the U.S. presidency in November 2016, Diario de Cuba was among the media outlets that broadcast a video where several Cuban “opponents” show their euphoria over that “resounding victory”
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Illustration: Cubainformación
On the same day that the declarations of Presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama were made public, announcing a path towards normalization between the United States and the uncomfortable neighbor located 90 miles from the Florida peninsula, the website Diario de Cuba published false news about the [supposed] sinking, by the Cuban government, of a ship in the bay of Matanzas.
Dozens of people who were emigrating to the U.S. were supposed to have died. In the midst of the announcement made by both presidents, the main information of that day, the “news” of Diario de Cuba passed without pain or glory to the history of falsehoods fabricated by a publication that, since its origin, has received several million dollars from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for propaganda against the Cuban government.
The NED’s web page contains these figures, and the most recent one, published there, establishes the allocation for 2019 at $600,000. The nefarious role of the NED is not communist propaganda, even the not at all leftist newspaper The New York Times has established its condition as a screen for the CIA and its involvement in the financing of coups d’état in dozens of countries.
When Trump won the elections for the U.S. presidency in November 2016, Diario de Cuba was among the media that disseminated a video where several Cuban “opponents” show their euphoria for that “resounding victory”. Their words are eloquent:
(Trump) The man we need to get out of this whole situation (in Cuba).
We dragged all the communists with us.
In Cuba, almost all the people who suffer the consequences of the regime are happy (with Trump’s victory).
Women have suffered a lot during these two years of the reestablishment of relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Obama, you are finally leaving.
It was very frustrating to see how the Obama administration was allowing the regime to gain space and leave the Cuban people and their demands aside.
We cannot do it alone (decide Cuba’s fate).
President Obama’s legacy regarding Cuba is not positive.
With the election of Trump, hopes are reborn in those who had lost them.
(With) the arrival of Trump to the White House we can rescue that ally we always had in the struggle for freedom in Cuba.
There is a magnificent juncture for all democratic actors in the region to have a unique triumph, which is to finally and totally overthrow the military dictatorship of the Castro brothers.
Now we have to work with those political actors who are thinking about a real democratization of Cuba.
Mario Díaz Balart, Carlos Curbelo, Marco Rubio, Ileana Ros, kisses, I love you all, gentlemen.
Congratulations from the bottom of my heart, and I say it with total joy, to the Cuban-American congressmen who are doing so much for the freedom of the Cuban people, I love you, I love you all so that you know and continue as you are going.
Such a background of the media, represented by one who wielded a cell phone in the face of the head of the Cuban Ministry of Culture, is a thing of no importance. Together with the correspondent, is shouting in his support someone who, against what he calls “pacification”. He has published in his social networks the need for a more economic blockade and a military intervention against Cuba. This is something that should not fail to be taken into account, because, more important is the way in which the Minister prevented the one paid by the NED from fulfilling his task: to weaken the Cuban position in any process of changing U.S. policy towards Havana, something Diario de Cuba has not ceased to advocate.
Those who say that a minister does not act like that in other countries are right. True: it is the police who “dialogues” -with clubs and water jets- against anyone who protests. Ultimately, it would be an escort who would undiplomatically put an end to any object unexpectedly placed in front of authority.
What would happen if the provocateur is paid by an agency historically associated with the efforts of a foreign government to change the current order in that country? One does not have to be very imaginative to imagine it, especially when every year journalists are murdered in double digits in the “democracies” around us.
That the libertarian correspondent insults, with all the repertoire of foul words in the Spanish language, the Minister that the private media system financed from abroad against Cuba has tried to lynch in the media, is not important either, much less if we take into account that, for this type of behavior, more than one rapper was sentenced to jail where Diario de Cuba has its headquarters: democratic Spain.
It is not very original either. The authorship of the insults belongs to another person who, in the 2016 video we mentioned before, was happy about the triumph of Trump and the anti-Cuban congressmen in Florida, exhibiting the emblem of the mercenary brigade 2506, defeated in Playa Girón, and requesting a tough hand with Cuba, precisely the one who expressed the tolerant phrase “We dragged all the communists”.
The correspondent of another media paid from the United States (ADN Cuba) acknowledges having received between $150 and $200 dollars for reporting from the Ministry of Culture on January 27, another unimportant thing.
This is who defends the model of free, democratic and independent press that Cuba must implement, nothing more: the yellow journalism that puts the superfluous in the foreground and hides the essential. Why be its unwitting victims, or worse, its accomplices, when what is really being demanded is not freedom of expression, but freedom for insults and lies turned into a business with foreign money?
Leni Riefenstahl and a final adjustment
Leni Riefenstahl and a final adjustment
Filmmaker Nina Gladitz did not rest in tracking down what she called the sinister side of what was once called “the eye of Hitler”
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The Riefenstahl, pampered by Hitler. Photo: Taken from the Internet
“The search for beauty in the image, above all and of all”, was the pretext used by the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl every time she was reproached for having put her talent at the service of Nazism, and especially of Hitler, of whom she said in her memoirs (1987) that, after meeting him in a rally held in Berlin, 1932, “it was as if the earth opened up before me”.
Riefenstahl lived 101 years (1902-2003) and her actions have fueled a debate that involves art and ideology with the social and ethical responsibility of the artist.
Many did not forgive her fabricated naiveté to shake off a stigma that linked her to the crimes of Nazism, but there were those who extended a mantle of benevolence over her by arguing for the transcendence of her documentary, perfectionist and avant-garde work in German cinema.
Today, films such as The Triumph of the Will and Olympia are considered masterpieces of propaganda, based on a renovating formal aesthetic, taking into account the years in which they were conceived, and their capacity to transform reality into “ideological art”, if that is the concept for an ideology of extermination.
The first of these films turns the National Socialist [Nazi Party] Congress, held in Nuremberg in 1934, into an epic event of multitudes and leaders feverish with the word of a Hitler deified in images.
Olympia (1938) takes up again the fervor of the Führer for ancient Greece to link the 1936 Berlin Olympics with a symbolism of the Nazi racial myth, claiming that the proclaimed German civilization, superior in all respects, was the heir to an Aryan culture from classical antiquity.
“She is the only one of the stars who truly understands us”, Goebbels had said of the filmmaker in 1933, shortly after Hitler, a hardened film buff, signed her as the quintessential film diffuser of his party’s ideology.
The same Leni Riefenstahl, beautiful, willing, with a past that linked her to sports and snowy mountain climbing; also a dancer and actress who came to rival Greta Garbo in roles, was considered by Hitler an ideal of classic perfection. He put a lot of resources at her disposal and made her a pampered member of the group formed by the flower and cream of Berlin’s Nazism, who applauded her “neat and moving” style. And while there were those who spoke of a romance, she always denied it: “It wasn’t sexy, if it had been sexy, we would have naturally been lovers”. This did not prevent her from affirming, years later, that the triumph of Nazism had not been a political reaction, but the unusual adoration “of a unique leader”.
Riefenstahl managed to get Hitler to extend a high budget in 1940 to bring Tiefland (Lowland) to the screen, inspired by an opera (1903) by Eugen d’Albert that took place in Spain. The film would not be released until 1954 because, in addition to the author’s pedigree, there was something murky about it that had not been fully unraveled: Where had the gypsies from a concentration camp gone, since extras with a Mediterranean look were needed?
A murmur spread then: after the filming of Tiefland, those extras had been deported to Auschwitz.
Leni Riefenstahl, who after the war was investigated several times, subjected to four denazification processes, and finally exonerated under the ruling that she was only a “sympathizer” of the Nazis, protested against what she called slander and swore that she still had news, and even correspondence, with those gypsies.
In later years she would condemn the barbarism of which, she assured, she had witnessed nothing and used to reply to those who accused her: “my thing was art, to capture an era, a perception of ideology and not unrestricted support. Tell me, where is my fault, I did not throw atomic bombs, I have not denied anyone, where is my fault?”
In 1982, the gypsy nebula was brought to light in a television documentary by German filmmaker Nina Gladitz. The young filmmaker had located the descendants and they claimed that the director of Tiefland treated the extras like servants and then returned them to their origin, the Maxglan concentration camp in Austria, from where they were transferred, and killed, in the gas chamber of Auschwitz.
Leni complained to Gladitz, and although most of her allegations did not come to fruition, she came out saying that she had won the lawsuit. Her work had received by then a kind of rehabilitation, after the documentary Olympia had been shown, in 1972. When the filmmaker turned one hundred years old, she was, for many, more a legend admired for her technical and artistic contributions to cinema than a “circumstantial suspect” of having taken the symbols of Nazism to starry planes.
But the filmmaker Nina Gladitz did not rest in tracing what she called the sinister side of the woman who, at the time, had been called “the eye of Hitler”. A few days ago she published a book in which she exposes the complicity of Riefenstahl, and not only in “the artistic”. Documents show that 40 of the 53 gypsies were killed without the director doing anything to stop it, after having recruited them herself. Also, supported by archival materials, she reveals that the names of important collaborating filmmakers, such as Willy Zielke, who filmed the initial takes of Olympia (and ended up sterilized and mentally ill), were erased from her films, in addition to Leni interceding with Hitler’s top brass to prevent other filmmakers from filming; a behavior of which not a word had ever been said and in which she highlights -among other examples- the elimination of the credits, as co-director in Blue Light, of the Hungarian Béla Balázs.
According to Nina Gladitz’s book, the talented Willy Zielke was taken out of the asylum by Leni Riefenstahl with the aim of turning him into a prisoner-assistant. Shortly before the end of the war, she burned almost all the files she owned in the gardens of her villa. Judging by classified French intelligence materials reviewed by Gladitz, that fire included scenes of the destruction of a Jewish ghetto shot on Hitler’s orders, although no one knows if the film ever materialized.
A definitive adjustment then for the filmmaker who ran to film the Nazi invasion of Poland, where she was photographed in uniform, together with German soldiers and carrying a gun around her waist, and for whom, after the occupation of Paris, she wrote the following telegram to Hitler: “With indescribable joy, deeply moved and full of ardent gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your greatest victory and that of Germany, the entry of German troops into Paris. You surpass all that the human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving facts without parallel in the history of humanity. How can we ever thank you? Congratulating you is too little to express the feelings that move me.”
How was that cable possible, Leni Riefenstahl was once asked, and she, with the unheard of “naivety” that some people still use at times to alternate with their inexplicable ravings, replied: “Everyone thought the war was over, and in that spirit, I sent the cable.”
Family violence: new views
A MATTER OF LAW
Family violence: new views from the legal system
The new Family Code is one of the norms that should be born in line with the constitutional precepts regarding the approach to violence in this area
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Photo: Internet
Myths about family violence are as old as each of its manifestations. And they are absolutely false.
That only physical assaults are expressions of violence, and that nothing else occurs in low-income households in marginal places, are some of the most common beliefs.
The reality, however, confirms daily, with sufficient eloquence, that violence can also be psychological, economic, patrimonial and can occur in all types of families, regardless of their economic or cultural level.
“She (or he) asked for it”, “jealousy is a manifestation of love”, “what happens in the family, good or bad, stays in the family”, “the letter with blood enters”, are also phrases that swell the bulky list of myths that, in the opinion of specialists, make the victim responsible, harm her perception of the abuse and neutralize her reaction and denunciation.
For Dr. Yamila González Ferrer, Vice President of the National Union of Jurists of Cuba (UNJC) and of the Cuban Society of Civil and Family Law, “the Cuban Constitution gives the highest rank to the prevention and attention to violence in the family space”.
Both in this area (Art. 85), adds the also titular professor of the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana, and in what refers to gender violence (Art. 43) and against children and adolescents (Art. 84 and 86), the 2019 Magna Carta is located in a remarkable place on a planetary scale in the constitutional approach to this issue.
The Law on Laws, specifically in Article 85, states that: “family violence, in any of its manifestations, is considered destructive of the persons involved, of families and of society, and is sanctioned by law”.
Such projection, González Ferrer considers, is comprehensive of the three scopes in which the violence in the familiar space affects negatively, and that cannot be lost sight of: the individual, the familiar one and the social one. In that same sense, the precept opens its protective fan to all the manifestations in which it can appear.
Nevertheless, the expert clarifies, “except in cases where its scope requires treatment in criminal proceedings, family violence does not usually generate any palpable legal consequence in Cuba today.
“Hence the need to promote the improvement of legal mechanisms and public policies, so that there is no impunity and the highest protection is provided to the victims”.
According to González Ferrer, it is necessary to elaborate new legal provisions and to modify or perfect other existing ones, not only in substantive family matters, but also in contractual, succession, procedural and criminal matters, so that it is possible to develop the constitutional postulates.
The new Family Code, therefore, is one of the norms that should be born tempered to the precepts of the Magna Carta as to the treatment of family violence, as well as to the protection against any of its manifestations.
THE ROOTS OF PAIN
Yamila González, who also coordinates the UNJC’s Gender Justice Project, insists on defining what family violence is, and what its causes and types are, because one must always know the phenomenon in order to face it and avoid it.
According to the professor, violence in family contexts is part of the network of violence that exists in society. It is, in turn, a universal phenomenon, with its concrete historical characteristics and the peculiarities of each family group; it is a social problem that has different causes and dimensions and encompasses all types of existing families.
The very patriarchal structure of the family, recognizes González Ferrer, “makes it one of the most violent social institutions, since it develops asymmetrical power relations through gender and generation, which are the guarantors of the legitimization and reproduction of the patriarchy as a system of domination”.
Based on its interdependence with the environment, “family violence must be understood as a process. It is not casual or established overnight, but has a painful path of formation, which is established in the family climate through an endless cycle of very harmful behaviors for human beings.”
In the opinion of the Vice President of the UNJC, violence is a cultural problem, not entirely legal, so it must act on the social, educational, cultural resources that make it possible, without disregarding the use of law as and when appropriate.
In conceptual terms, she emphasizes, “family or intra-family violence is that which occurs within the family. It refers to any form of abuse that occurs among its members, and implies an imbalance of power that is exercised from the strongest to the weakest”.
The expressions of family violence are the physical, psychic, moral, sexual, economic or patrimonial abuse, either by action or omission, direct or indirect, in which aggressors and victims maintain or have maintained couple relationships, as well as the one that takes place between relatives. The same treatment must be given to acts of this nature committed between people in cohabiting relationships.
In the words of the expert, there are three significant ways in which family violence is expressed, since in the patriarchal, hierarchical family, power is exercised along two fundamental lines: gender and generation.
GENDER VIOLENCE
It is a very particular type of violence, based on a patriarchal culture, rooted in the inequality of power between men and women. It is based on sexist stereotypes, which generate prejudice and lead to expressions of discrimination based on sex, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity.
It can be physical, psychological, sexual, moral, symbolic, economic, or patrimonial, and has a negative impact on the enjoyment of rights, freedoms, and the integral well-being of people.
It occurs in family, work, school, political, cultural, and any other environment in society. Its most generalized, frequent and significant expression is that which occurs against women.
Nevertheless, gender violence against men exists, such as homophobia, for example, when they are attacked for having transgressed gender norms from the canons of hegemonic masculinity; or the mocking and questioning that those who assume co-responsibility for domestic tasks and the care of their children may receive and are then criticized by their relatives, co-workers, or friends.
VIOLENCE AGAINST THE ELDERLY AND THOSE WITH DISABILITIES
It is one that manifests itself against people because of aging, given the decrease in their physical and intellectual capacities, economic and social participation.
Its most common expressions are physical and emotional abandonment, hygienic, medical and food neglect, underestimation, financial and patrimonial manipulation, physical and verbal abuse.
VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
This is what happens with respect to children and adolescents because of their condition as developing persons. Even if it is not directly about them, it is considered direct violence because it affects the adequate development of their personality and the feeling of security and trust in those around them, with transcendence to their social life.
On this sensitive subject, some think that, in situations of violence within the family, if it is not about the person of the son or daughter, there is no significant level of affectation, when the damage derived from living in violent environments is severe for the integral development of their personality and with very negative consequences towards the future.
Whatever the nature of the conflicts, Gonzalez Ferrer says, “their solution should not be managed in a violent way but through communication and negotiation. There is an urgent need for education and a culture of peace, of respect for human rights, based on the need to learn to live and relate in harmony.
The containment of the “popular wall”
The containment of the “popular wall”
Holguin authorities take action to combat price violations
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The population feels protected every time their rights as consumers are taken care of. Photo: Ariel Cecilio Lemus
Holguín: With the COVID-19 on the prowl, a large group of rogue traders, whom Mercury himself would classify as a bunch of profiteers, have raised the prices of agricultural products and various items. In the face of this, the population is crying out to stop the mistakes of those who only think of their own pockets.
Solicitous, as it should be in times where half-baked positions are not admitted, the authorities of this province deploy actions to curtail the excesses that hurt, above all, the lowest income compatriots.
To the hard and without pause
Among the abusers sanctioned in recent days is a worker at a point of sale of agricultural products in the ccs Manuel Angulo. He was operating in the area of El Coco, near the provincial capital, and did not have the Commercial Authorization. It had been withdrawn a month ago for breaking the prices, which he ignored once again. This time, the outcome was the confiscation, among other products, of about 240 pounds of pork, valued at 5,470 pesos. Thus, what was intended for profit ended up in the 8 de Marzo maternity home.
In this effort, the agents of the National Revolutionary Police acted legally and with no ostentation. Access to reports on their work reveals that recently, in only 48 hours, they faced 111 cases related to the excessive increase in prices. These people had in their possession 4.5 tons of agricultural products and other merchandise, including coffee and animal feed. As expected, some of the violators could not justify the origin of what they were offering.
Dionisia Milagros Portelles, who heads the province’s Integral Direction of Supervision, points out that the body of supervisors works intensely in all the municipalities, which is why, in December and the first week of January, upon finding severe alterations in prices, they levied more than 1,700 fines amounting to more than 719,000 pesos.
As we proceed with absolute respect for the law, in several cases the confiscation of the goods was the result. Thus, for example, several people in the municipality of Calixto Garcia failed in their attempt to continue spoliation of the fellow citizens through the high prices at which they sold children’s shoes, socks, women’s sandals, razors and other items.
The abusive vendors frown and even blaspheme, but the people go out to stock up appreciate and applaud this action. They have had the opportunity to access, without excessive expenses, food, fruit, vegetables, ham, and sheep and pig meat, among other foods.
Ramiro Andrés Hampton agrees with this way of stopping the rampages of the abusers and speculators.
The “harassment” of the good
Abnalie Rondón says that the work of the authorities facing the price changers will not be efficient without the collaboration of those affected. “We have to let them know that we are not willing to put up with them. And since they have reached such a point of arrogance, one cannot be afraid to denounce them. We have allowed them too much until now”.
And it is true that denouncing unscrupulous procedures that affect the community is a civic attitude that needs all the support of those responsible for putting things in order. Addressing this issue at a recent working meeting attended by the media, the first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party in Holguín, Ernesto Santiesteban Velázquez, said that it would be unforgivable not to act in a hurry when the population brings to the attention of the authorities acts that hurt it.
Not believing in the power of collective vigilance was the mistake of an individual who, these days, transported in the vehicle driving packages of razor blades and blister packs of various types of medicines, among them diclofenac sodium plus paracetamol, ibuprofen, amoxicillin, tadalafil, vitamins and metronidazole and nystatin eggs. It was intended to be profitable and will now be processed by their recipients.
The same thing happened to a citizen residing in a rural area of Banes. Along with salt packs, he was taken care of by five plastic fumigation backpacks with all the attachments.
Similarly, acts of speculation and hoarding that lead to outrages continue to find a retaining wall. A resident of the Miraflores neighborhood in Moa knows this well, who was engaged in the illegal sale of a wide range of clothing for children and adults, jewelry, perfumes, wipes, USB cables, hearing aids and even nasobucos.
Staff at the Citizen’s Portal, a digital site of the Provincial Government, assures us that through this communication channel, notifications about price violations by cart drivers and other self-employed workers are constantly arriving.
It is not to prohibit, but to control and order
In view of the irregularities found in points of sale belonging to cooperatives, the ANAP in Holguín has undertaken a thorough review of the matter. This is aimed, above all, at identifying the productive forms that have fallen into the harmful game of lending their legal personality to the profiteers. “It is not a question of erasing these points from the commercial scene, but of controlling them, so that they can fulfill their true function. We must take into account that they will play an important role in the food offers in the context created by the new policy of commercialization of agricultural products”, says Amaury Velázquez Zaldívar, president of ANAP in the province.
Along with the actions of the inspectorates, dialogue with self-employed workers is also expanding, a sector in which, unfortunately, the greatest number of violations have been reported. An example of this effort to walk the right path are the meetings held by officials from the Provincial Directorate of Labor and Social Security with those who sell in bazaars in the city of Holguín to explain, once again, the regulations to be taken into account.
In the provincial capital, most of the points of sale of agricultural products operated by self-employed people show a total lack of supply, since those in charge know about the verifications in progress. But when a potential customer approaches, an attentive “public servant” appears from the vicinity with the product offers he keeps hidden.
Intelligence and perseverance are required to maintain this confrontation. It cannot be overlooked that many ask themselves if this attack against opportunism will be something specific, when avoiding inflation has to be a constant in order to achieve order in the economic environment.
Indications from the President
We can no longer postpone what the people ordered at the last Party congresses. We need to implement everything that is pending without delay, shake up the business system, ensure order, and intelligently deal with rising prices.
We also called on the necessary private and cooperative sectors. We must banish the selfishness and exclusive pursuit of personal gain that drives some to fish in the troubled river of the needs of the majority, abusively raising prices.
This people, noble and hard-working, has survived all the imperial fences and abuses with an extraordinary dose of solidarity and generosity that is now an inseparable part of the national being. Selfishness is an attitude that will not prosper in our Homeland.
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UNEDITED TRANSLATION OF COMMENTS AT GRANMA WEB PAGE:
Very well by the authorities and Holguinero police but WHAT ABOUT HERE IN HAVANA? It seems that there are only exhortations from the bosses to the rogues to behave well, and if not, why don’t they publish the cases like in this article of what they do in Holguin?
lesther veloso santos said:
2
January 7, 2021
08:15:34
everyone looks at the prices of these people and the mistake that the Cuban government has made with the rise in food prices essentially and the urban transport that even if you earn your salary does not give you the bill you have to criticize yourself and correct yourself because the bill does not give and there we will see …..
josé julio said:
3
January 7, 2021
08:55:35
I think that we really have to take the necessary measures to stop this kind of actions, that far from helping our society what they do is to destroy & attempt against the implemented laws. Everything that is exposed in this journalistic work is very well. Yes, because for many years we have been burdened with this great problem & the evil really continues. Sometimes they even call the telephone number assigned to make any complaint of this nature & many times it is “eternally” busy or nobody attends to it.
Olaida said:
4
January 7, 2021
10:03:38
I think it is very good that prices are within the reach of citizens, but the quality of bread has not been resolved, pork does not appear, fruit is not on the market, food is very scarce and of poor quality, beans and rice are very scarce and of poor quality, medicines are still lacking and the pension that we receive the people who no longer work is not enough for us with the prices that are hit and reduced. We need products to feed ourselves, medicines. Water, electricity and other essential elements to live decently the few years we have left. What is published in the press is not a reflection of the reality we are living. People need to solve their needs for food, medicine, housing, water and light in order to be able to talk about and deal with politics and what is happening in other countries. There are many organizations and officials dedicated to solving the problems but the results are only partially and sporadically appreciated, there is no stability and guarantees for a normal and decent life for the elderly and life is running out.
Lachy1989 said:
5
January 7, 2021
10:15:44
Hopefully, they will be able to control the prices in all Cuba. The task is hard because all the barrow drivers are slowing down the change since in the end they want to continue making the most of it. In the end I hope that someday the pyramid will be really ordered because if everyone raises prices in the end it will be the same. The barber or handyman will continue to earn more than an engineer working for the state. The biggest problem that the order will have, apart from inflation, is the widespread corruption that exists today in our country.
Aimara Perez Rodriguez said:
6
January 7, 2021
10:36:44
In Holguín alone, I deployed those actions throughout Cuba, all the money that they increased for us is being taken by those people, the individuals.
Deisy said:
7
January 7, 2021
10:44:38
Good article, many of these things not only happen in the provincial capital in the municipalities but also mainly in the “public servants” merchandise It would be good to check also the ice cream, the Coppelia ice cream ball, the most delicious, most popular ice cream is at 5.00 CUP and the own account raised to 8.00, how do you understand this?
habanera said:
8
January 7, 2021
11:27:33
The same thing happens in Havana, in the park Fe del Valle in Boulevard de San Rafael there are the sellers with their tables depending everything that is sold in the stores of all x 1. But they these products increased the value how 5 times. An example a pqte of Sponge to scrub (Which there is nowhere) in all x 1 cuc, cost 1cuc or 25 mn; they have them each individual sponge costs 30.00 MN. Like other products you don’t see in the stores. It is an abuse that these merchants have to the people buy and resell. Be careful with them. Greetings
MAYRA PINAR said:
9
January 7, 2021
12:30:48
Hello, this price increase is very diabolical because here in Pinar del Rio, the sellers of household goods that are really resellers and do not count propistas because they acquire the goods from one hand to another the prices are hot, hot please who revises that nobody sees it the responsible authorities this where this, on the other hand the cafeterias neither to speak, the pizerias by the same style and I join to the commentary better they had not raised the salaries, anyway neither we have left to pay a ball of ice cream in the coopelia that neither quality has to five pesos.
angel said:
10
January 7, 2021
13:23:11
Here in Santiago de Cuba, also the rogue sellers and abusers are for the free, and the inspectors know where it is sold expensive
Protecting Family Caregivers
The Other Side of Dependency:
Protecting Family Caregivers
Demographic aging is a phenomenon that poses multiple challenges at all levels, which are common to all societies
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Coronavirus, Ayestaran Street
Three-quarters of the elderly population in Cuba, who are in care, receive informal support, and it is the family that contributes most to this, and of these three quarters, 85% of the informal care is provided at home Photo: Ariel Cecilio Lemus
Demographic aging is a phenomenon that poses multiple challenges at all levels, which are common to all societies.
According to an article by the Center for Demographic Studies at the University of Havana, Cuba has been ranked, after Uruguay, as the country with the second-highest number of elderly people in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2015.
The statistics also reflect that in much of Europe, North America and in some Latin American countries, there is a considerable increase in the number of older people, even those over 85.
Added to this, is the number of people in a situation of disability, as well as the increase in the chronicity of illnesses, particularly neurodegenerative ones, factors that lead to an increase in the number of people dependent on care.
However, the analyses of the phenomenon of population aging have always weighed, more or less correctly, the approaches from the vantage point of those who receive care, and never, or almost never, “which is not the same, but it is the same”, from that of the caregivers.
The current legislation, according to Dr. Leonardo Pérez Gallardo, president of the Cuban Society of Civil and Family Law, of the National Union of Jurists of Cuba, does not contain any reference to the subject. Hence, this is probably one of the novel aspects to be incorporated in the new Family Code, which could be presented to the National Assembly of the People’s Power this year.
Afterward, there will be the popular consultation, discussion with the deputies and final approval, in a referendum, of the resulting text, as dictated by the Eleventh Transitory Provision of the Constitution.
OF CARE AND CAREGIVERS
Although dependency is not a new phenomenon, says Perez Gallardo, “the convergence of different factors such as demographic aging, increased life expectancy and changes in family structure, have led to it becoming a phenomenon that requires urgent and appropriate responses from political, technological, social, health, psychological, family, economic and, of course, legal.
The dependent person, he explains, requires assistance from others for a prolonged period, that is to say, it is not a question of attention for a passing illness, but it implies the need of assistance for those activities of the daily life. This care, constant and lasting, over a long period of time, has been called long-term care, and it involves the provision of assistance with progressive intensity.
Nor can it be lost sight of, in Pérez Gallardo’s opinion, that chronic illnesses and disabilities can be accompanied by functional and cognitive limitations that end up preventing people from enjoying an independent life.
In situations of this nature, family care generally takes on a more prominent role. The key, warns the professor at the University of Havana Law School, lies in the physical and emotional availability of a person to devote himself or herself regularly to the care of that family member, even to the point of giving up or reducing his or her productive or working capacity in order to satisfy the demands of the recipient of his or her services.
In Cuba, according to Dr. Leonardo Pérez, three-quarters of the elderly population in care receive informal support, and it is the family that contributes most to this. And of those three-quarters, 85% of informal care is provided at home.
INFORMAL CAREGIVERS PROTECTED?
Family caregivers, says the President of the Cuban Society of Civil and Family Law, are also called informal caregivers because, unlike professional caregivers, the former are engaged in care for a circumstantial reason, without specialized knowledge and without compensation.
Professional caregivers, on the other hand, are hired and receive financial compensation for their service. Informal caregivers, on the other hand, do so out of altruism, based on the moral duty they owe to their family members, who in many cases are their own parents.
Moral duty which, by the way, and as a lag in a patriarchal and androcentric society, is usually attributed to women, either as daughters, wives or sisters. It has even been assumed as “logical” that it is the children’s wives who take care of their in-laws, especially when they did not have female descendants.
Without a doubt, summarizes Pérez Gallardo, there are many and varied risks that the caregivers assume, because this activity implies, in the personal order, resignation to an adequate life. In the social order, it implies isolation and, in the professional order, loss of their productive capacity and even abandonment, total or partial, of their life project.
For this reason, he emphasizes, “it is necessary to regulate the rights of family caregivers so that the legal system can make them visible, based on the recognition of their autonomy and dignity, as well as the condemnation of any form of manifestation of family or gender violence against them.
“There is an urgent need for legislation that recognizes the right to their own care, to dedicate time to personal activities, to be treated with respect and to receive the due support of the rest of the family members. It is about protecting, from the Law, the other side of the care”.
The protection of caregivers, acknowledges the professor, “should not only be transversal in the field of public law, but also from the private law, capable of providing useful tools to compensate the asset imbalance associated with the performance of the work of caregiving.”
In the words of Pérez Gallardo, “it is necessary to focus on those people who, as caregivers, have been left socially and economically unprotected after the death of the care recipient. To this end, the rules of both family law and inheritance law can be important instruments.
“It would be worthwhile to think of alternatives that, without diminishing altruism, affection, solidarity, dedication and love, encourage care, compensate for silence, emotional and physical overload and facilitate an equitable and fair redistribution of the inheritance”.
In that sense, he points out, “the freedom to bequeath can be a useful alternative and within everyone’s reach. Nobody better than the one leaving [material resources] to compensate the efforts of the caregiver. And, in the absence of the exercise of the power to bequeath, it will be up to the legislator, as they see fit, to establish the best correlation between participation in the inheritance and care for that person in the twilight of life”.
The Chinese model, he suggests, “could be a mirror for the succession rules, from the establishment of more and more flexible rules in the legal succession, suitable to give an answer to the dissimilar social equations that this 21st century has been establishing, in pursuit of a distributive justice in favor of the caretakers”.
IN CONTEXT
The constitutional text, proclaimed on April 10, 2019, establishes in Chapter III Families, of Title v Rights, Duties and Guarantees that
The State, society and families, as far as each one is concerned, have the obligation to protect, assist and facilitate the conditions to satisfy the needs and raise the quality of life of the elderly. Likewise, to respect their self-determination, guarantee the full exercise of their rights, and promote their social integration and participation.
The State, society and families have the obligation to protect, promote and ensure the full exercise of the rights of persons in a situation of disability. The State creates the conditions required for their rehabilitation or the improvement of their quality of life, their personal autonomy, and their social inclusion and participation.
Why No Social Outbursts in Cuba?
FROM THE LEFT
Why are There No Social Outbursts in Cuba?
Despite the intense propaganda to which the US allocates tens of millions of dollars each year, the results are overwhelmingly favorable to the revolutionary leadership that Washington has been trying to overthrow for six decades
Author: Iroel Sánchez | internet@granma.cu
November 2, 2020 02:11:30
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Young people
Photo: Taken from Karla Santana’s Facebook profile
A Brazilian friend who, as a journalist, was in Cuba for a few days, told me of her amazement at how all the Cubans she spoke to know who Bolsonaro is, who Dilma is and who Lula is, which was not the case in other Latin American countries she had visited recently.
The exceptional interest with which Cubans follow international events is something very particular that often goes unnoticed by those of us who live on the island. The social upheavals in Haiti, Chile, Panama and Ecuador, the conflict of powers in Peru, the endless repressions and assassinations of social leaders in Honduras and Colombia, the inherited ungovernability that forced the Mexican government to release a drug trafficker, the unjust imprisonment suffered by the leader of the Brazilian left to prevent his safe electoral victory and the elections in Bolivia and the United States, or Washington’s constant aggressions against Venezuela, can be topics of conversation anywhere in Cuba, from a corner where dominoes are played to a university classroom.
Of course, these conversations do not avoid the serious difficulties that the Cuban economy is going through, against which every week new US government sanctions are announced, nor any of the deficiencies in services with which the citizenry clashes. In these, the impact of the economic blockade can be mixed with bureaucratic laziness and cause discomfort and dissatisfaction.
However, this mixture of economic warfare with internal shortcomings does not cause social upheavals, and when the system – single-party socialism – has been put to the test at the ballot box, as in the recent constitutional referendum. This is so, despite the intense propaganda to which the US spends tens of millions of dollars each year and a well-funded “Cuba Internet Task Force”. The results have been overwhelmingly favorable to the revolutionary leadership that Washington has been trying to overthrow for six decades.
The explanation for the dominant media machine is that the mix of “intense regime repression” and “Cuban relaxation” prevents an outbreak. But in the history of Cuba –from Weyler’s reconcentration to Machado’s dictatorship to Batista’s– no regime based on repression has ever managed to remain in charge of the country for a long time, despite a “relaxation” in which corruption was the dynamic of the functioning of politics and the economy at all levels.
On the contrary, if instead of February 2019, the electoral consultation were to take place now, in the midst of an intensified blockade, the percentage of approval would probably exceed that obtained then, and that would be the result, without a doubt, of the combination of three conjunctural and two structural factors.
Conjunctural factors:
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The intensification of the U.S. government’s aggressiveness strengthens patriotic sentiment and national unity.
The political effectiveness of the Cuban government, convincingly explaining the relationship of shortages with the increase in aggression, and the way in which the strategy to confront the US sanctions seeks to lessen their impact on the daily life of the people.
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The international situation with visible failure of neo-liberal policies and discrediting of the formulas of bourgeois democracy
Structural:
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The massive political culture among Cubans, established for 60 years by Fidel Castro’s teaching, about the nature of imperialism and the project of social justice and national sovereignty of the Revolution.
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The link between the revolutionary leadership and the people, continued by the leadership of Raúl and supported by Díaz-Canel, which has reinforced the perception that the government listens to the people and works for them.
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No Latin American country, of those who right now repress social protest with gunshots and gases and/or openly violate the rules of formal democracy that they themselves defend, has been subjected to economic warfare, to multi-million dollar financing to create an artificial opposition and, much less, to permanent global media and academic lynching of their leaders and their political and social project.
But in spite of all that, it must be recognized that there are dissatisfied people in Cuba, and many of those dissatisfied people are going to Miami. The accumulation of almost six decades of migratory privileges, together with the development of educational capabilities and the state of health brought about by Cuban socialism, make them very competitive with respect to the rest of the non-native communities, but they do not make them freer. More than one million Cubans in the US suffer serious limitations in their relations with their families in Cuba thanks to Trump’s measures; however, there is no news that this causes significant protests there.
Nor do we read anywhere that this public absence of disagreement is attributed to corruption and the repressive practices, not at all democratic, that the ruling class on the island until 1959 seems to have implanted in Miami during its already long stay in that city. This is not to disregard the uplifting example offered by a system that today puts Donald Trump and Joe Biden in competition, in corruption and insults.
The most dangerous professions
The most dangerous professions in the world in 2020
None of the murdered, disappeared, assaulted, or imprisoned communicators without cause, despite what the barometer of Reporters without Borders indicates, is Cuban
Author: Raúl Antonio Capote | internacionales@granma.cu
January 4, 2021 23:01:57
Julian Assange resists the oppression of journalism professionals committed to the truth Photo: reuters
According to the barometer of press freedom violations, website of the NGO, Reporters without Borders (RSF), 51 journalists were killed in 2020 and 400 were imprisoned. The source itself stops to list arbitrary detentions, disappearances, torture, mistreatment and other methods, country by country.
The subject of the moment draws attention, that of the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who suffers a marked deterioration of his health in the prison where he is held, in Great Britain, for which the judge in the case, Vanessa Baraitser, accepted the diagnosis of the psychiatrists and ruled to prohibit the transfer to the U.S., due to the high risk of suicide.
The same judge described the judicial process as defective and punitive, but did not grant him bail, since the Australian journalist faces charges in the U.S. country for the leaking of thousands of classified documents in 2010 and 2011.
The other side of the story is the proposal by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who asked for Assange’s freedom and offered his country to grant him political asylum.
However, RWB does not refer to the case, but marks Cuba in black along with other countries, symbolized as the worst violators of that freedom, although none of its figures include the Cuban archipelago.
The explicit contradiction in the information on the RSF website demonstrates the double standards and political intent with which this data is measured and the information is manipulated with the aim of demonizing the Cuban Revolution.
On the other hand, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported, on December 23, that 59 journalists were killed in 2020, four of them women. There is a difference of eight between the two reports.
According to UNESCO data, during the last ten years, 888 journalists and media workers, that is, one every four days, were killed.
These crimes continue to be committed with total impunity, according to the report on the safety of journalists, published in November by the UN agency, which shows that in 2020 there were no consequences in 87% of the cases.
The agency reflected the increase in harassment and attacks on information professionals, for example, in the attacks they suffered during the coverage of protest demonstrations in Chile, where 90 attacks were reported, and the case of the Black Lives Matter mobilizations, where up to 500 different attacks against the press occurred.
The document of the multilateral organization detailed that, in the first half of the year, press workers were attacked in 125 protests held in 65 countries.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations recently asked all the governments of the world to release, immediately, the journalists who have been arrested for carrying out their professional work. “Many have been subjected to harassment, acts of intimidation, sanctions, killings and also arbitrary arrests. We know that prisoners, detainees and prisoners, in general, are very vulnerable to the rapid spread of the virus,” said António Guterres.
It should be noted that none of these murdered, disappeared, assaulted or imprisoned communicators without cause, despite what the barometer of Reporters without Borders indicates, is Cuban. The last journalist murdered in the Greater Antilles fell victim to Fulgencio Batista’s police in 1958.
Health workers, the most dangerous job in 2020
Although practicing journalism remains an extremely dangerous profession, in the year that ended, health workers contributed, through their dedication and courageous stand in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the greatest number of victims.
At least 7,000 of them have died from COVID-19 in the world, with Mexico being the hardest-hit country, according to a recently released study by Amnesty International.
Behind Mexico, the study places the United States (1,077 deaths), United Kingdom (649), Brazil (634), Russia (631), India (573), South Africa (240), Italy (188), Peru (183), Iran (164) and Egypt (159). Cubans did not add to this last statistic either.
It is not a matter of informative curiosity, a simple coincidence or mere chauvinism on our part, it is a reality marked by results, it has to do with the culture of socialism that places human being in first place, in the center of all priorities.
Sources: RT, RSF Barometer and reports from the UN.
The Theory of Induced Demoralization
DESDE LA IZQUIERDA
The Theory of Induced Demoralization
Combating induced demoralization in no way means suspending criticism. Quite the contrary. It implies the exercise of responsible and well-founded criticism, which safeguards unity and does not make it easy for the enemy to destroy us. Demoralized we are nothing
Author: Fernando Buen Abad | internet@granma.cu
December 20, 2020 20:12:21
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.