February 28, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
New water charges for hydrometric control in the productive or service sector will begin to be applied as of April 1, officials from the Higher Organization of Business Management (OSDE) Water and Sanitation, of the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources, reported in Havana.
According to the Cuban News Agency, the new prices should contribute to saving the vital liquid in hotels, industries and other centers of production and services, many of which have become large consumers, said Marcia Almeida Llanes, director of State Commissioning of the aforementioned OSDE.
She clarified that, in addition to the companies in this group, there are also self-employed workers and cooperatives, especially when some of their activities or businesses require the important natural resource for commercial purposes.
Likewise, she explained that the water supply service will maintain up to the established standard of a cost of 1.55 pesos per cubic meter (m3) for hotels and other tourism entities.
Industries or other productive sectors and commercial facilities of service and offices will have as rates an amount of 4.20 pesos/m3 until its established standard and an increase to 15 pesos/m3 if they exceed 25 percent of the same. However, there are also discount bonuses of up to 35 percent for entities that save below 25 percent of the established standard, said Almeida Llanes.
Published: Friday 28 February 2020 | 12:33:22 am.
By Juventud Rebelde
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
New water charges for hydrometric control in the productive or service sector will start to be applied from April 1, informed in Havana executives of the Higher Organization of Business Management (OSDE) Water and Sanitation, of the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources.
According to the Cuban News Agency, the new prices should contribute to saving the vital liquid in hotels, industries and other centers of production and services, many of which have become large consumers, said Marcia Almeida Llanes, director of State Commissioning of the aforementioned OSDE.
She clarified that, in addition to the companies in this group, there are also self-employed workers and cooperatives, especially when some of their activities or businesses require the important natural resource for commercial purposes.
Likewise, she explained that the water supply service will maintain up to the established standard of a cost of 1.55 pesos per cubic meter (m3) for hotels and other tourism entities.
The industries or other productive sectors and commercial facilities of service and offices will have as rates an amount of 4.20 pesos/m3 until its established standard and an increase to 15 pesos/m3 if they exceed 25 percent of the same. However, there are also discount bonuses of up to 35 percent for entities that save below 25 percent of the established standard, said Almeida Llanes.
Published: Thursday 27 February 2020 | 11:48:01 pm. Updated: Friday 28 February 2020 | 12:16:12 am.
By Yoerky Sánchez Cuéllar
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The pressure valve resonates and they keep adding fuel to the fire. Let the pot explode. This is what the American circles of power want every time they announce a perverse measure against this small archipelago which, at the cost of sacrifice and resistance, pays the price of being independent.
My generation was born under the effects of the blockade. Perhaps at that time its economic impact was not so visible, thanks to the mutually advantageous relations and agreements established with the socialist camp. Until I was seven years old I fully enjoyed my childhood, playing bowling or watching dolls and adventures in an old Krim 218 at the house of my friends in the neighbourhood. But then the 1990s came and the scene took a traumatic turn.
The fall of Soviet socialism cracked our economy and left it without 80 percent of its foreign trade. Transportation collapsed, factories were shut down, “gossip” lamps replaced incandescent bulbs during long hours of scheduled blackouts.
In the face of the irresistible heat, people slept on the rooftops, with their mattresses uncovered. Publications disappeared. Juventud Rebelde, for example, changed its daily frequency to a weekly newspaper. Faced with a shortage of soap, I remember my mother washing with maguey fibres. Chinese bicycles became fashionable… At that age I couldn’t really understand what was going on around me.
In the book No hay que llorar (Let’s not cry), Santa Clara writer Aristides Vega Chapú compiled testimonies from 34 Cuban authors about this period. About the difficulties of that time and how we overcame the onslaught, each Cuban can tell his own story of ingenuity and resistance. The work would be a book of many volumes.
During all this time, what was the “help” of the American rulers? Was their intention to extend their hand so that the people would overcome the crisis?
In July 1991, months before the “de-escalation,” the U.S. Senate passed several amendments imposing a number of conditions on the Soviet Union to be eligible for U.S. foreign aid. These requirements included the cessation of military and economic assistance to Cuba.
And in 1992 the US government, led by Bush senior, signed the Torricelli Act, after the Democratic candidate, William Clinton, publicly endorsed it as a result of an agreement with Jorge Más Canosa, president of the Cuban American National Foundation. The objective: to asphyxiate us economically in order to provoke social chaos and, consequently, to overthrow the political order established on the island. Illusioned by a supposed domino effect, they openly proclaimed “the end of history” for the “Castro regime”.
In that same year, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) prohibited third-country nationals from introducing tobacco and rum from Cuba into the United States, even when these were for personal consumption. They had not yet approved the unfortunate Helms-Burton Act of 1996.
In their speech on humanitarian aid to the Cuban people, they always put one condition in advance: “If Cuba holds totally free and fair elections under international supervision, respects human rights and stops subverting its neighbors, we can hope that relations between our two countries will improve significantly,” are the words of the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, in March 1990.
Thirty years later, the goals remain the same. We are asked to make political concessions as a condition for taking the pressure off the pot. In the face of Cuba’s dignified and unchanging stance, they resort to arrogance and overkill. These incluse the 85 aggressive measures of various kinds that they applied only in 2019 and which have been rejected by our people and by many in the world, who also suffer the consequences of imperial arrogance.
The writer Eduardo Galeano illustrated this act of genocide with an emphatic and sentimental style: “The blockade against Cuba has multiplied over the years. A bilateral affair? So they say; but nobody ignores that the US blockade implies, today, the universal blockade. Cuba is denied bread and salt and everything else. And it also implies, although many people ignore it, the denial of the right to self-determination. The asphyxiating siege around Cuba is a form of intervention, the most ferocious, the most effective, in its internal affairs.
In the face of this policy of permanent aggression, made worse by the Trump administration and his perverse advisors, aim9ing to make the pot explode, the best response from every Cuban is to do things right. And that the result of daily work neutralizes every plan that the enemy cooks up. In short, “emancipate ourselves by ourselves and with our own efforts,” as Fidel explained it to us in his concept of Revolution.
Published: Saturday 22 February 2020 | 09:03:07 pm.
By Graziella Pogolotti
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Grounded in the Industrial Revolution, with the invention of the steam engine, mass production and the resulting competitive drive to ensure the dominance of the world market had its effects, at an accelerating pace, on the life of society. The soot was invading everything. Cities began to grow rapidly. The proletariat was constituted as a social class. The dizzying change had repercussions on the rise of the social sciences. History changed its perspective, the economy became an indispensable reference point, psychology, anthropology and sociology acquired autonomy. The latter permeated other disciplines with its influence.
With the cost of paper now down, the press has a new reading public. It introduced the soap opera into its pages. It was the antecedent of the current soap opera [telenovela]. With the emergence of creative literary giants, narrative reached an unprecedented peak. First, social romanticism and later the proliferation of “costumbrismo” (local color), the latter spread through the novel, sharpened the sociological outlook. The characters moved in a specific context.
The historical perspective left the past behind to shape the approach of the present. The contradictions in everyday life and the exacerbation of individualism in the struggle to survive, to accumulate power and fortune and to move up the social ladder came to the fore. Little read today, Dickens became a bestseller of that time by showing the drama of helpless childhood in the city environment, captured by crime and victim of the debtors’ prison that punished them along with their parents. Balzac warned about the domination of the financial world, enriched by usury and the consequent disappearance of the small merchant. Emile Zola, A French writer preferred by the cigar factory lectors [workers who read live to cigar workers] wanted to systematize the analysis. He articulated the sequence of his novels to a family genealogy that allowed him to focus each of them on a specific sector of reality.
In one of his novels, Zola examines the seduction exerted on women by the emergence of the first department stores. In accordance with the traditional division of labor, women are responsible for taking care of domestic chores, but they also take on the responsibility of buying what is necessary for the home. Pressed by a concrete need, they turn to the dazzling display case that offers all sorts of temptations. To the purchase of the indispensable, they add the dispensable, with the apparent advantage of having a credit card. Not having to take money out of their purse, they lose track of what they have spent. They fall into debt that, in the end, will be unpayable. It was the original cell of the policy of encouraging consumerism, unleashed more than half a century later, a way of avoiding the overproduction crises characteristic of capitalism through the constant increase in demand, with its depredatory effects on the planet’s goods.
Like history and psychology, sociology became a science. It opened up perspectives that went beyond the field of specialists,. It influenced so-called investigative journalism and can help shape the outlook of better-informed citizens. This approach to reality rethought the complex nature of the link between the individual and society. Considered as a subject of history, human beings build their life expectations from a set of determining factors, among which are class roots, family environment and the education system.
Other factors act on the consciousness of each one, among which the media, entertainment, the use of free time and the formation of paradigms stand out. Some time ago, in the miserable favelas, where the essential was lacking, the television antennas were pointed out. Now, in a similar context, cell phones are everywhere. They offer escape routes, projected towards an illusory world that is not their own. The proposal of models of careers towards individual success replaces the image of a virtuous life in the struggle to transform reality for the benefit of all.
It is often forgotten that among the founders of historical science were Marx and Engels, who put knowledge at the service of the emancipatory revolution. The hegemonic power understood the scope of this way of exploring reality and finding the formulas to intervene in it by operating on human subjectivity. Politics has to strengthen the essential revolutionary condition of the sciences devoted to the study of society, a living and therefore changing phenomenon. It is an urgent demand to calibrate in its right measure the concreteness of the facts, without diluting them in vague generalizations. In the demands of the “wretched of the earth” lies the preservation of the future of humanity. Because once the reserves of the tiny Earth are exhausted, it will have no other planet to inhabit.
Published February 22, 2020 | 12:46:47 pm.
By Juventud Rebelde digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Addiction to social networks, cell phones or video games is often underestimated Author: Twitter Posted: 22/02/2020 | 12:43 pm
BRUSSELS, February 22. – A group of European physiologists have detected negative changes in the volume and activity of the brains of people diagnosed with cell phone addiction.
The researchers scanned the skulls of 22 addicted patients and observed a decrease in gray matter in two regions of their cerebral cortex and less activity in a third region compared to 26 other healthy people.
The observation of this transformation, similar to that which occurs in drug addicts, offers the first material evidence of the relationship between the overuse of so-called smartphones and the physical deterioration of the human brain.
The conclusions of the study will be included in an article that will appear in the journal Addictive Behaviors next June, reports Russia Today. In addition, it was revealed that blue light from digital device screens can accelerate blindness.
The authors stress that the growing use of smart phones in recent years makes it necessary to raise the issue of the harmful effect of their use on physical and mental health.
They are particularly concerned about the health of children, who are spending more and more time with digital devices from younger and younger ages.
In their study, the scientists comparatively analyzed structural and functional magnetic resonance images and used a morphometry based on a voxel, a three-dimensional matrix that served to model brain processes.
This revealed that, compared to the control group, the addicted individuals had a lower volume of grey substance in the left anterior insula of the brain and in two sections of the temporal cortex.
They also recorded lower intrinsic brain activity in the part of the brain that transmits the neural signals between the two hemispheres, the cortex of the right anterior cingulate.
February 19, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
TECSA reiterates to users that they must protect their services from different types of fraud Author: Twitter Published: 19/02/2020 | 09:44 pm
Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S. A. (ETECSA) reiterates to users that they must protect their services from those actions, which in different modalities of fraud, can manifest themselves in telecommunications.
The Company warns users that in the event of calls of unknown origin, which are identified mainly by 00, which appear to be from abroad, they will not be answered or returned in order to avoid affecting the balance of the service.
Likewise, passwords or codes are personal information and are not shared. The company will never ask for these data by phone, text or e-mail, so any action of this type will be a deceptive maneuver supplanting the identity of the company.
Likewise, any request for transactions, transfers or advertisements that are excessively attractive, coming from unknown sources, or that are dubious or unreliable, should not be made and thus avoid unwanted damage to your economic interests.
With regard to the computerization of the company, ETECSA systematically disseminates this useful advice in order to guarantee a more secure enjoyment of its services.
Institutional Communication Department
By Mileyda Menéndez Dávila
February 18, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
06 león trotski 25-febrero-2015 (1) Walter Lippmann, a journalist and activist from Los Angeles, California, has been working with the Cuban press for many years. About our page, he writes: “In my opinion, Cuba is trying to build a society with ass and for the good of all. The island does not live in a bubble. The weight of tradition and the way we are so connected through the Internet, reaches us all. Sexo Sentido tries to address the problems, concerns and issues of young people and all people. That’s why I look forward to each week’s edition.
“It seems to me that this section’s positive and inclusive attitude towards sex, and its open approach to the many forms of love, is something that we in the English-speaking world could learn from. My Spanish, along with modern technology, has allowed me to voluntarily translate your column into English. It’s something that gives me a lot of pleasure and a way to help the rest of the world know about your reality.
By Mileyda Menéndez Dávila
February 18, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Parents’ rights will be the topic of discussion Author: Abel Rojas Barallobre Published: 06/15/2019 | 09:56 pm
Can a father seek communication with his children if he separates from the mother without formalizing a marriage? Who is entitled to receive alimony from the former spouse? Is there a way to divide the property without getting a divorce? These and other questions will be cleared up next Tuesday 25th in an online conversation with representatives of the National Organization of Collective Law Firms and professors of the Department of Law of the University of Havana
By Mileyda Menéndez Dávila
February 18.2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
An age for thinking together. Author: Abel Rojas Barallobre Published: 27/10/2017 | 11:28 pm
Conversando íntimamente con el adolescente varón (Conversing intimately with the adolescent male), and its continuation (Conversando íntimamente con la adolescente mujer), are two texts by Cuban pediatrician Laura Elena Alvaré, which marked a milestone in sex education for young people in the first decade of this century and are still valid as an enjoyable tool for dialogue in families.
A valuable proposal from the Scientific-Technical Publishing House, both dialogues stand out for their excellent combination of conversational tone with clear scientific information, diaphanous illustrations and, for more benefit, letters and petitions from the adolescent’s point of view, in an effort to build a balance with their overprotective families.
As they came out in 2003 and 2004 it is difficult to find them in bookstores, but they are in many libraries in the country, and if you contact their author through our section, she will surely provide you with a digital version for your enjoyment.
From the web we recommend you to download materials from the official site of Sexur, a Uruguayan institute with a magnificent work of popular education for adolescents and young people, which has visited Cuba to share its experience.
By Mileyda Menéndez Dávila
February 18, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Cart for Life Author: Mileyda Menéndez Dávila Published: 18/02/2020 | 10:20 pm
There are crazy things that are like arms of the sea:
/ surprise you, drag you, lose you and that’s it.
Silvio Rodriguez
I’m counting on you.
The National Center for the Prevention of STIs/HIV/AIDS (CNP) was established in 1999, and thanks to the support of several international agencies has been able to finance educational projects throughout the country that help contain the HIV epidemic and control the spread of other STIs.
In 2014, it joined other public health departments to give life to the National Center for Health Promotion, Prosalud, in order to promote research and community work adjusted to the socio-cultural characteristics of each territory. According to its current director, Dr. Pablo Feal Cañizares, the message reaches some people better with science and others with humor and creativity.
The educational and counseling work of this center falls mainly on activists who are linked to its lines of work. The oldest one is Support for People Living with HIV (PLHIV), then came Lineayuda (telephone and face-to-face counseling) and little by little they added MSM (men who have sex with men), Condom Marketing with its creative Team Vigor, the dynamic Youth for Life, Women and HIV, 50 and over, and PPST (people who practice transactional sex).
If you are motivated to join this family of volunteers or are looking for a receptive ear for your sexuality questions, call 78303156, visit the national headquarters of Prosalud (27th and A streets, Vedado) or inquire at the provincial and municipal centers of prevention and health promotion.
You must be logged in to post a comment.