CONTRA EL PINGALISMO CASTRISTA/
"Se que no existe el consuelo
que no existe
la anhelada tierrra de mis suenos
ni la desgarrada vision de nuestros heroes.
Pero
te seguimos buscando, patria,..." - Reinaldo Arenas
Rubio Comments On Obama Administration’s Latest Concession To Castro Regime
Washington, D.C.–
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, issued the
following video statement (click here
to watch) regarding the Obama Administration’s latest concession to the
Castro regime by de-listing Cuba from the United States’ State Sponsors
of Terrorism List:
“President Obama and his administration
continue to give the Cuban regime concession after concession, in
exchange for nothing that even remotely resembles progress towards
freedom and democracy for the Cuban people, or assurances that the
regime will discontinue working against America’s national security
interests. I simply don’t understand how the President can, in good
conscience, continue these giveaways to the Castro regime and how he can
be thinking of sending an ambassador to Cuba when there are still many
unanswered questions and security gaps that will affect their safety and
their ability to do the job that our ambassadors all over the world are
being asked to do.”
Governor Bush's Statement on the Removal of Cuba From U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism List
Right
to Rise PAC Honorary Chairman Governor Jeb Bush issued the following
statement today in response to Secretary of State John Kerry signing an
order removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism:
“Neither
continued repression at home nor Cuba’s destabilizing activities abroad
appear sufficient to stop President Obama from making further
concessions to the Communist regime in Havana. Today’s news is further
evidence that President Obama seems more interested in capitulating to
our adversaries than in confronting them. Iran’s leaders are surely
taking note. The removal of Cuba from the State
Sponsors of Terrorism List and the unilateral concessions to Havana,
before it changes its authoritarian ways and stops denying the Cuban
people their basic human rights, is a mistake. I call on Congress to
keep pressure on Cuba and hold the Administration accountable.”
Speaker Boehner: The White House Has Handed the Castro Regime a Significant Political Win in Return for Nothing
Washington, D.C.
– House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement in
response to the Obama administration’s decision to remove Cuba from the
State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror:
“The
Obama administration has handed the Castro regime a significant
political win in return for nothing. The communist dictatorship has
offered no assurances it will address its long record of repression and
human rights abuses at home. Nor has it offered any indication it will
cease its support for violence throughout the region, including the
brutal attacks on Cuban democracy protestors in Panama City during the
Summit for the Americas earlier this year. As
I’ve said before, relations with the Castro regime should not be
revisited, let alone normalized, until the Cuban people enjoy freedom –
and not one second sooner. Removing the regime from the State
Department’s list of state sponsors of terror is just the latest example
of this administration focusing more on befriending our enemies than
helping our allies, but fortunately it will have little practical
effect. Most U.S. sanctions on the Cuban regime are contained in
other laws – laws the U.S. House will ensure remain in place as we work
to protect those fighting for freedom, and in many cases, simply their
own survival.”
During a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, Roberta
Jacobson, acknowledged that Cuba's claim it has "never" supported terrorism was untrue.
Yet, in its "Rescission Memo to Congress" on Cuba's removal from the state-sponsors of terrorism list, the Obama Administration accepted the Castro regime's "assurances"
that it will not support terrorism in the future -- a legal requirement
for de-listing -- in the same breath as it's claim that it has "never" supported terrorism.
As such, the Obama Administration has accepted a lie, in order to further another lie.
The Obama Administration also certified that Cuba has not supported terrorism "in the last six months" -- the other legal requirement for de-listing. Meanwhile, a scandal is brewing in Colombia over a ship that was intercepted on February 28, 2015 -- just three months ago -- with over 100 tons of heavy weapons being smuggled by a shadow company of the Cuban military ("Tecnoimport"), seemingly for FARC terrorists.
Cuba's removal from the terrorism list, while questions linger about this illegal weapons shipment is highly irresponsible.
It
is evidently clear that the Obama Administration's removal from the
terrorism list has little do with the facts, but was instead compelled
to meet a key demand of the Castro regime for the establishment of
diplomatic relations.
The hasty removal of Libya (2006) and North
Korea (2008) from the terrorism list has proven -- time and again --
that such concessions do not dissuade rogue regimes to change their
behavior. To the contrary.
Thus, Congress must keep the important
U.S. leverage the Obama Administration seeks to give-away without
merit. It must maintain -- and strengthen -- the underlying sanctions associated with the terrorism legislation, which remain codified in law.
With Congress now poised to renew,
not renew, or revise the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata program, it’s worth
thinking about where we would be now if a twenty-nine-year-old
contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton hadn’t left Hawaii for Hong Kong, and
a new life as an outlaw ombudsman.
Were it not
for Edward Snowden or someone like him, the N.S.A. would likely still be
collecting the records of almost every phone call made in the United
States, and no one outside of government would know it. A handful of
civil-liberties-minded representatives and senators might drop hints in
hearings and ask more pointed questions in classified settings. Members
of the public would continue making phone calls, unaware that they were
contributing to a massive government database that was supposedly
intended to make their lives safer but had not prevented a single
terrorist attack. And, on Monday, the government’s Section 215 powers,
used to acquire records from hundred of billions of phone calls, among
other “tangible things,” would be quietly renewed.
Snowden shouldn’t have been necessary. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISA
Court), which evaluates Section 215 requests, is supposed to be
interpreting the law to make sure that government surveillance doesn’t
go outside of it. Congressional intelligence committees, which review
the activities of the N.S.A., are supposed to be providing some
oversight. The N.S.A. itself reports to the Department of Defense, which
reports to the White House, all of which have dozens of lawyers, who
are all supposed to apply the law. The government, in other words, is
supposed to be watching itself, especially in matters of national
security, which are, by necessity, shielded from daylight. The fact that
it took thirteen years, and one whistle-blower, to expose a program
that is conclusively ineffective and, according to one federal appeals court,
illegal, points to a problem much larger than any one program. It
suggests that claims about what is necessary to prevent the next
terrorist attack are too sacrosanct to require evidence. As the debate
over Section 215 has played out over the past two years, it has become
clear that the punishments for exaggerating the efficacy of surveillance
programs and downplaying their privacy implications are just about
nonexistent.
The government enshrouds the
details of its surveillance programs in a technical vocabulary
(“reasonable articulable suspicion,” “seeds,” “queries,” “identifiers”)
that renders them too dull and opaque for substantive discussion by
civilians. As one Pentagon handbook put it, “one can be led astray by
relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular
word.” There is a kind of legal subversion at work here. Broad and
clearly worded laws, including the Fourth Amendment, are being
undermined by a raft of quasi-legal documents, most of them too long,
narrow, and boring to read—that is, if anyone were allowed to read them
in full. Instead of being named for what they actually do, programs are
named for the subsections of the laws that are supposed to authorize
them, whether or not that authority is actually present in the language
of the law. With all the attention being paid to Section 215, named for a
part of the Patriot Act, which does not contain the words “bulk,”
“phone,” or “metadata,” it’s easy to forget that the program is just one
piece of the intelligence community’s legal armory. Little is known
about how other authorities, including Executive Order 12333, which some
consider the intelligence community’s most essential charter, are being
interpreted to permit spying on Americans. And a redacted report, released last week by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General,
hints at how much we still don’t know about Section 215. Nearly two
years into the congressional debate over the use and legality of Section
215, the report provides the first official confirmation that the
“tangible things” obtained by the F.B.I. through Section 215 include not
just phone metadata but “email transactional records” and two full
lines of other uses, all of which the F.B.I. saw fit to redact.
Some
have argued that the current surveillance regime isn’t as bad as the
activities of Henry Kissinger, who ordered wiretaps on his rivals during
the Vietnam era, or of J. Edgar Hoover, who used the F.B.I. to
authorize the covert infiltration of left-wing groups and terrorized
Martin Luther King, Jr., with anonymous threats. Those abuses led to the
lengthy investigations of the Church Committee, and the current system
of judicial and congressional oversight. It’s true that the modern
surveillance regime is less about the passions of individuals and more
about the tendencies of institutions. But those tendencies—especially
the belief that national security can trump the plain English of the
law—will likely make it hard for this generation to achieve meaningful
surveillance reform. This week’s debate over Section 215 should be the
beginning of a much larger conversation.
Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, que falleció esta semana y que
durante 17 años fue escolta del líder cubano, realizó en secreto un
análisis sobre la personalidad de Castro que entregó a La Tercera antes
de morir.
Juan Reinaldo Sánchez fue durante 17 años la “sombra” de Fidel
Castro. En su función de guardaespaldas del “Comandante en Jefe”,
Sánchez tomó nota de todas las actividades, públicas y privadas, del
entonces líder cubano e incluso llegó al extremo de probar sus alimentos
por temor a un envenenamiento. También compartió uno de los pasatiempos
favoritos de Castro en su residencia de descanso en Cayo Piedra: el
buceo.
Durante el escaso tiempo libre que le daban sus funciones, Sánchez
-que falleció el lunes en Miami a los 66 años y que el año pasado
publicó el libro “La vida oculta de Fidel Castro”- comenzó a indagar en
el perfil psicológico del entonces líder cubano.
Sin que nadie supiera, a partir de 1985 Sánchez elaboró un retrato
completo de Castro, que hasta ahora se mantenía inédito. En diciembre
del año pasado, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez entregó esta información a La
Tercera en el marco de varios proyectos sobre los que trabajaba, dado el
acceso privilegiado que tuvo a Fidel y a su círculo de hierro. Eso,
hasta que se fugó de Cuba en 2008.
Este ex teniente coronel no sólo fue un especialista en seguridad,
sino que también fue abogado y estudió psicología. “Al terminar mis
estudios universitarios en 1985 y dado los conocimientos adquiridos en
psicología operativa de la contrainteligencia y sin divulgar mis
propósitos a nadie, me di la tarea de hacerle un análisis psicológico a
Fidel Castro”, reveló Sánchez.
Para el guardaespaldas, el perfil que realizó la CIA sobre Castro en
diciembre de 1961 y que se conoció en los 90, no era suficiente, por el
escaso tiempo transcurrido luego del triunfo de la Revolución en 1959.
Entonces se puso manos a la obra. “El tener la oportunidad de estar más
de 17 años cerca del dirigente cubano, me permitió tener información
real de la personalidad de Fidel, tanto de su vida pública como su
intimidad”, contó Sánchez.
Lo primero que narra el guardaespaldas es que Castro es “efusivo y
dominante”. Y agrega: “Mientras que públicamente es una persona locuaz,
comunicativo, franco y sociable, en su intimidad se refleja como
riguroso”. En ese sentido, revela una dualidad en el rasgo de la
extroversión.
“Esta dualidad se refleja en el hecho de que necesita el
reconocimiento público de sus acciones y de ahí que se muestre
comunicativo, afable, comprensivo, etc. Pero en su intimidad, donde está
el Fidel Castro real, es dominante, riguroso, controlador y necesitado
de que todos sepan que es la máxima expresión del poder, que no está
dispuesto a perder en ningún momento”.
Juan Reinaldo Sánchez plantea que incluso después de la enfermedad
que en 2006 lo obligó a delegar el poder a su hermano Raúl, Fidel Castro
“no lo hizo del todo. Obligó a Raúl a que propusiera a la Asamblea
Nacional del Poder Popular que aprobara un acuerdo en donde Raúl se
viera obligado a consultarle todo a él”.
El ex escolta desmenuzó también otros rasgos de la personalidad de
Castro, que dividió en “sanguíneos” (activos, optimistas, comunicativos y
sociables) y “colérico” (dominantes, violentos e impulsivos). Sánchez
explica: “Mientras que en su vida pública ha tratado de aparentar una
persona sanguínea, en su vida íntima tiene características de colérico
con temperamento flemático”.
“Un ejemplo de lo anterior lo tenemos en una reunión en los años 80
en la Unidad de la Defensa Civil del Municipio Playa, donde se
analizaron las medidas epidemiológicas en La Habana. Al doctor (Héctor)
Terry, viceministro de Salud de aquella época, se le ocurrió
manifestarle a Fidel que de acuerdo a un estudio realizado por él, se
había detectado un déficit de vitaminas en la dieta alimentaria de la
población. Fidel montó en cólera y lo trató de inepto. A los pocos días
el Dr. Terry fue sustituido. Fidel mandó a realizar un estudio, que dio
como resultado que el Dr. Terry tenía razón. Fidel terminó por orientar
la distribución por la libreta de racionamiento un suplemento
alimentario de polivitaminas, pero Terry jamás fue reingresado a su
puesto ni tuvo excusas de Fidel Castro”, sostiene Sánchez.
El fallecido guardaespaldas de Fidel sostiene que los rasgos
significativos de la personalidad del ex presidente cubano pueden
definirse por “la dependencia, los gustos y las motivaciones”.
¿Vida de lujos?
En cuanto a la dependencia, “Fidel requiere de las adulaciones a sus
discursos. Las medidas que toma le resultan tan reconfortantes que sube
su ego de manera considerable. Y es capaz de recompensar a aquellos que
lo adulan con nuevos cargos”, dice.
A su vez, “Castro, lejos de la imagen que proyecta, sus gustos están
centrados en una vida de lujos y privilegios, como la pesca submarina,
caza de patos y exquisitas comidas”. Sánchez concluye que Fidel posee
una “personalidad híbrida”, pero con características como “egocentrismo,
ambicioso, manipulador, controlador y dado a los placeres de la
sociedad de consumo que tanto critica”. De todos modos, esto corresponde
a la vida que supuestamente Castro llevaba en la época en que Sánchez
era su escolta. Desde entonces, han transcurrido dos décadas.
Vin Diesel, protagonista de la saga “Fast & Furious” se encuentra en
Cuba, para filmar una película de bajo presupuesto, junto al director
de cine de Hollywood, Robert Rodriguez, un verdadero especialista en la
materia.
Leer la excelente resena de la trayectoria artistica de Moraima Secada, de la historiadora musical Rosa Marquetti Torres, en el blog de Tania Quintero >>
Shortstop Alfredo Rodriguez has departed Cuba with the intent of seeking MLB free agency, Ben Badler of Baseball America reports. The 21-year-old took home Rookie of the Year honors in the top division Serie Nacional this year, though as Badler notes that was the subject of some disagreement.
As always, you’ll want to read Badler’s piece for a full breakdown,
but the takeaway seems to be that Rodriguez is a whiz with the glove
with good speed and a suspect bat. Badler labels the youngster as a
polished shortstop whose hand and footwork are outstanding, accompanied
by good range and a solid arm.
Offensively, though, it appears that Gonzalez has much development
ahead of him. He did swipe 12 bags in 16 tries, so there’s a reasonable
expectation that he will add value on the bases. But he slashed only
.265/.301/.284 in his 304 plate appearances last year, striking out a
reasonable 38 times but taking a free pass in only 11 turns at the dish.
Badler goes on to explain how Gonzalez fits within the evolving rules
regarding players from Cuba. Teams will have to use their international
spending allocation to sign him, though he will not be subject to the
league’s registration policy — which can cause a delay, as Badler explained
recently — due to his relatively advanced age for an international
prospect. All said, Gonzalez should be able to sign as part of this
coming summer’s July 2 period, though he will first have to go through
the process of establishing residency in a third country.
Mi hermano me manda una foto de Antonio Chao Flores, para mi serie 1959.
Es un muchacho rubio como ven que aún no tiene veinte años y que nos
mira con una sonrisa algo triste me parece y los ojos verdes. Chao
Flores combatió contra el ejército de Batista a favor de los llamados
revolucionarios y hasta alcanzó la portada de las revistas al triunfo de
los Castro por su juventud y por su carácter aguerrido.
Acusado de traición, por declararse anticomunista y alzarse en armas
contra los fidelistas, fue fusilado en la fortaleza de La Cabaña. Pocos
meses antes, herido en combate, le habían amputado una pierna. A la
hora de llevarlo a matar, los milicianos le quitaron las muletas con las
que se mantenía en pie y fue obligado a arrastrarse hasta el lugar de
la ejecución, según testigos. Al llegar al muro, Chao Flores, con
grandes esfuerzos, se puso en pie y enfrentó a los fusileros. Dicen que
sereno.
El oficial al mando del pelotón de fusilamiento consideró necesario darle tres tiros de gracia.
Jorge
Fausto Espinosa (izq.), identificado como cabecilla de la red, y Manuel
López, encausados por estafar a seguros de viviendas.
Por Daniel Benítez
Dos recientes casos de estafas millonarias a seguros de casas y salud
tuvieron entre sus protagonistas principales a varios cubanos
residentes en el sur de la Florida, quienes encontraron la vía para
llenarse los bolsillos de dólares y comprar autos, casas y obras de
arte.
La Fiscalía de Miami, junto a varias agencias de la ley revelaron al
unísono esta semana dos complicados esquemas de fraude y anunciaron la
detención de 36 personas en total, la mayoría nacidos en la isla.
Las estafas suman superan los $13 millones de dólares.
En el primero de los casos se trataba de una red dedicada a incendiar
o inundar casas con el objetivo de cobrar el seguro correspondiente. Su
máximo cabecilla fue identificado como Jorge Fausto Espinosa, de 60
años, quien era el dueño de una compañía encargada de tasar propiedades
dañadas por diversos motivos para luego hace el reclamo a las
aseguradoras.
Especialista en fuegos e inundaciones
Espinosa fue identificado como la pieza fundamental de esta cadena y
era el enlace entre el propietario que efectúa un reclamo y las
aseguradoras. Las autoridades también determinaron que el acusado
trabajaba con varios reclutadores y personas encargadas de buscar
interesados en quemar sus casas o inundarlas con el objetivo de hacer
reclamos falsos.
Un vez identificados los “clientes potenciales” en esta red de crimen
organizado, Espinosa visitaba las casas, las inspeccionaba y leía sus
pólizas para determinar lo que resultaba más factible: si un incendio o
una inundación. Tras este paso se concretaban los detalles y cumplía lo
acordado con la ayuda de una o más personas.
La supuesta “víctima” contrataba entonces sus servicios y la compañía
Nationwide Adjusters. proppiedad de Espinosa, se encargaba de realizar
el reclamo. En caso de que la aseguradora disputara en corte o comenzara
a hacer preguntas Espinosa contaba con la ayuda de uno o dos abogados
del bufete Montesano&Perez, PL, quienes estaban enterados de todo el
esquema fraudulento, según las autoridades.
Las autoridades contaron con un informante clave para obtener gran
parte de la información necesaria para proceder con la acusación ante
los tribunales.
Viviendas afectadas
En un documento de 52 páginas, la fiscalía estatal explicó que entre
el 7 de julio de 2007 y el 20 de marzo de 2013 en total se incendiaron
20 casas y se inundaron cinco en los condados de Miami Dade, Lee,
Collier, entre otros. En uno de los fuegos provocados en la ciudad de
Naples resultó herido un bombero.
Entre las viviendas supuestamente afectadas estuvo la del propio
Espinosa, quien reclamó daños por inundación superiores a los reales.
Recibió un pago en esa ocasión de $69,739 dólares.
Según la Fiscalía, las aseguradoras pagaron en total más de $7
millones de dólares. Espinosa le cobraba a sus “clientes” el 20 por
ciento de lo que recibieran por parte del seguro.
Sin embargo, esta no era la primera vez que el acusado se encuentra
en problemas con la ley, de hecho enfrenta cargos similares por un
operativo realizado el año anterior, por lo cual se mantiene en arresto
domiciliario.
Los otros acusados son: Erlis Chercoles, de 43 años; Seth Horton, de
26; Yaima Sanchez, de 27; Ileana Sanchez, de 47; Marianela Hernandez,
de 33; Joel Macineiras, de 42; Argelio Menendez, de 56; Jose Menendez,
de 50; Manuel Lopez, de 39; Roberto Leon, de 41; Jose Pinero, de
49; Francisco Pineiro Gonzalez, de 39; Raudel Garcia, de 49; Lourdes
Sarmiento, de 50; Maray Lopez, de 41; Yaniel Alvarez, de 33; Guenther
Beer, de 67; Barbara Diana Beer Rivero, de 50; Alba Lucia Vargas, de
37; Daniel Lopez Acevedo, de 34; Nelson Fernandez, de 39; Angel Lopez,
de 41; Fausto Marimon, de 37; Yanelis Gil, de 31; Jorge Antonio Pous, de
43; Lisvan Say, de 38; Camilo Avila, de 46; Janet Alamo, de 31; Roberto
Suarez Medina, de 47; y Servito Amado Morales, de 43.
De ser hallados culpables, los acusados podrían encarar penas de hasta 30 años de cárcel.
Robando medicinas
En la segunda estafa
están implicados un doctor y cuatro personas que supuestamente
orquestaron un lucrativo negocio de tráfico de medicamentos para
agenciarse más de $6 millones de dólares.
Los arrestados en este caso fueron el ginecólogo Rafael Prats, de 61
años, Dax Osle, de 41; Jose Capote, de 38; y Yulia Martinez, de 31 y una
quinta persona de la que no se ofreció su identidad, pero que pudiera
ser el líder de todo el esquema.
Según la policía de Miami Dade, durante el operativo se decomisaron
$3.5 millones de dólares en efectivo y más de un millón en obras de arte
y autos, entre ellos un Rolls Royce.
El fraude radicaba en
que estas personas le compraban a pecientes los medicamentos recetados y
luego los revendían a las farmacias. El problema es que muchos de esos
medicamentos eran pagados por los contribuyentes a través de programas
como el Medicare y el Medicaid, además de seguros de salud privados.
Los sospechosos
operaban desde una farmacia ubicada en el 7175 del suroeste y la 47
calle, en Miami. Entre las medicinas que entraron en el negocio ilícito
estaban algunas destinadas para el tratamiento del cáncer y el VIH.
Como parte del operativo las autoridades entraron a una propiedad
valorada en $700 mil dólares, ubicada en el 10755 del suroeste y la 34
calle, la cual según récord públicos pertenece al doctor Rafael Prats.
Ola de estafas
En este caso las autoridades aun buscan a otro sospechoso identificado como Cándido Polo.
Los casos de estafas a seguros de propiedad, fraudes a programas
médicos y robos de identidad de tarjetas de créditos han experimentado
una espiral el área de Miami, en su mayoría protyagonizado por cubanos
de las recientes olas migratorias.
El pasado abril, en el vecino condado de Palm Beach, cuatro cubanos
fueron encausados y comparecerán a juicio en los próximos días por
formar parte de una red de robo de identidad y tarjetas de crédito en el
sur de la Florida.
El próximo mes también será sentenciado en un tribunal de
Connecticut, Amed Villa, el quinto de los cubanos residentes de Miami
que protagonizaron el mayor robo de medicinas y equipos médicos en la
historia de Estados Unidos en el 2010.
Los cubanos hallados culpables por delitos graves -residentes legales
en Estados Unidos- son posteriormente considerados deportables. La
orden de deportación no se ejecuta regularmente debido a que no existe
un acuerdo de extradición vigente entre ambos países.
Unos 35 mil cubanos tienen orden final de deportación en Estados Unidos.
Las autoridades policiales anunciaron el arresto de cinco jóvenes
vinculados al asesinato del rockero Pedro Armando Junco Torres, quien
fue apuñañalado en plena vía pública en la ciudad de Camagüey, el pasado
16 de mayo.
Un comunicado del Ministerio del Interior
(MININT) en Camagüey, divulgado este lunes, indicó que en el término de
las 24 horas siguientes al crimen fueron detenidos Carlos Eugenio
Álvarez Germán, Dairon Mora Reyes, Yelko Martin Batista Williams, Melson
Sergio Varona Oduardo y Raciel Antonio Vázquez Morales, todos con
edades comprendidas entre los 17 y 23 años.
Aunque la nota policial no lo consigna, se trata al parecer de una
pandilla local con antecedentes de agresiones y violencia callejera.
Como medida cautelar, los cinco implicados se encuentran en prisión
provisional en espera de ser encausados por su participación en el hecho
criminal.
Confesión de los agresores
“Demostrada la participación de cada uno de los comisores a partir de
su confesión, fueron asegurados con la medida cautelar de prisión
provisional, y sobre ellos caerá el peso de la justicia revolucionaria”,
señaló la información policial.
De acuerdo con el reporte, los agresores transitaban por la vía
pública bajo la ingestión de bebidas alcohólicas, dos de ellos el
posesión de armas blancas, y antes de apuñalar mortalmente al músico,
Yelko Martin Batista Williams había lesionado ya a tres personas en el
trayecto.
Fueron Batista Williams y Carlos Eugenio Álvarez Germán quienes
agredieron brutalmente a Pedro Armando Junco Torres, causándole la
muerte, en presencia del resto de los implicados, señaló el reporte del
MININT.
Quedó establecido que ninguno de los involucrados mantenía relación con la víctima.
La investigación policial confirma que el hecho ocurrió en horas de
la madrugada del 16 de mayo, cuando Junco Torres, de 28 años, recibió
heridas por arma blanca por parte de los agresores en la calle San
Pablo, en la capital camagueyana.
Conmoción en la ciudad
Su cuerpo sin vida fue trasladado al hospital provincial Manuel
Ascunce Domenech, donde fue certificado el deceso a causa de las heridas
y los golpes recibidos.
El esclarecimiento oficial del hecho delictivo se produce luego de
que el padre de la víctima, el escritor Pedro Junco López, denunció el
asesinato de su hijo y fustigó el silencio de la prensa y las
autoridades gubernamentales en una carta pública, difundida ampliamente
en las redes sociales.
El asesinato del músico, guitarrista de la banda de rock Strike Back, conmocionó a la capital camagüeyana.
Junco López dijo que su hijo fue acribillado a golpes y puñaladas. y que el examen forense confirmó 46 contusiones en su cuerpo.
“He sido un fervoroso defensor del derecho a la vida. Pero
si es necesaria la aplicación de la pena máxima para salvar a personas
inocentes, pues sea aplicada”, escribió el padre en su misiva de
denuncia.
Los profesionales cubanos Yandra Alayo Reyes y Leonardo Sánchez
Ortiz, de 32 y 43 años, respectivamente, abandonaron el programa Más
Médicos de Brasil para ir a residir a la ciudad de Miami.
Según el Diario de Pernambuco
los galenos vivían desde 2013 en una casa de Serra Talhada, municipio
del interior del estado de Pernambuco, junto a otro miembro de la misión
médica cubana, que no fue identificado.
El diario indicó que los médicos fueron especialmente discretos en su
fuga. Su compañero de residencia desconocía el plan, así como los
conocidos de la comunidad, de unos 80.000 habitantes.
Paula Duarte, responsable médica del municipio, declaró que los médicos "eran muy atentos con los pacientes".
La razón de la huida podría estar en el encabezado que se encuentra en el sitio de Yandra Alayo en Facebook.
La joven doctora ha estampado la frase: "Cansa… Dar o máximo de nos e
não receber nem a metade" (Cansa… dar el máximo de nosotros y no recibir
ni la mitad).
El texto aludiría a lo que ha sido el reverso escandaloso de la
política médica cubana: el lucro exagerado que obtiene el castrismo al
apoderarse de la mayor parte de los salarios que ganan los médicos
enviados al exterior.
Yandra Alayo y Leonardo Sánchez integraban contingente de más de
11.000 médicos cubanos que sostiene el programa Más Médicos, con el que
el Gobierno de Dilma Rousseff ha mejorado el acceso a la salud de
millones de brasileños.
Mientras son desconocidos los beneficios que obtiene el Estado cubano
de sus misiones médicas en Venezuela, Bolivia o Angola, los que
consigue de Brasil son públicos.
Por cada médico, el Gobierno brasileño entrega a La Habana un total
de 10.000 reales, de los cuales el Estado cubano da al médico contratado
2.400, menos del 25%. Mientras los hospitales de Cuba sufren un
profundo deterioro y los ingresos medios del país no superan los 25
dólares, es desconocido el destino de la cuantiosa cifra ingresada por
el castrismo.
El diario español El país denunció días atrás el trasfondo oneroso que para los médicos tiene la estrategia del Gobierno cubano. En "Verdades de la diplomacia médica cubana",el
autor, Alejandro Tarre, señaló el desnivel entre el salario mensual del
médico y los ingresos que por ese profesional recibe el Estado.
En Venezuela el pago a Cuba por cada médico ronda los 10.000 dólares
mensuales en tanto los ingresos del profesional no llegan a 400 dólares.
Los servicios son pagados por Caracas principalmente con petróleo.
Pero no solo padecen los médicos cubanos un hondo saqueo de sus
salarios, en muchas ocasiones son además albergados en condiciones
penosas que pueden llegar a ser peligrosas para la salud y la vida.
Menos de un mes atrás se conoció que tres médicos cubanos murieron en
Argelia, supuestamente asfixiados por el gas de un calentador de agua
en malas condiciones.
Mientras la prensa oficial cubana difundía noticias sobre la visita
de Raúl Castro al país africano, el trágico incidente fue silenciado sin
ningún pudor.
Los grupos favorecidos de las misiones médicas cubanas exaltan los
beneficios que produce un profesional de la Isla, mientras silencian la
condición material que los lleva a sitios apartados del mundo, en
pésimas condiciones de vida y seguridad, todo ello por un salario
irrisorio que representa no obstante, cuando menos, seis veces el que
perciben en la Isla.
El salario en Cuba de un médico con doble especialización es del equivalente a 66 dólares al mes, según los datos oficiales.
Los médicos Yandra Alayo y Leonardo Sánchez son la expresión visible
de una trata humana organizada por un gobierno en su beneficio y
aprovechada por otros gobiernos que, con su silencio, se convierten en
cómplices despreciables.
La culminación de la zafra 2014-2015 ya es un hecho. Un informe
elaborado por funcionarios del Grupo Azucarero Azcuba precisa que este
año el plan se quedó en un 4 % por debajo de lo esperado. A pesar de
ello, la producción de azúcar continuó aumentando y experimentó un 18 %
de crecimiento respecto a la molienda anterior, equivalente al mayor
volumen alcanzado en los últimos 11 años, según destacaron.
Aunque los resultados distan todavía de lo que se espera, tampoco es
desestimable el hecho de que durante cinco años consecutivos se ha
logrado crecer. En ello ha incidido favorablemente la incorporación
paulatina, a lo largo de este quinquenio, de los centrales que muelen en
cada campaña.
La etapa que recién concluye no estuvo exenta de “grandes carreras
contra el tiempo para terminar las reparaciones e inversiones, motivados
por la llegada tardía de algunos recursos —fundamentalmente metales y
piezas de la mecanización y el transporte—, debido al incumplimiento en
la entrega por parte de las empresas importadoras”, destacó a Granma Liobel Pérez Hernández, especialista de Comunicación Institucional del grupo.
Razón por la cual se dejaron de realizar un grupo de trabajos que
conllevaron a que 11 centrales no pudieran arrancar en tiempo o lo
hicieran sin probar con anterioridad su maquinaria, lo cual incrementó
las roturas durante la molienda.
Como bien se estuvo señalando durante todo el periodo, el principal
problema presentado en esta zafra fue el bajo aprovechamiento de la
capacidad potencial de molida de los centrales, que se quedaron a un 65
%, cifra que, aun cuando fue algo superior a la de la contienda pasada
(60 %), todavía se queda por debajo del plan previsto (72 %) y de su
nivel óptimo que debe superar al 80 %. Especialistas de Azcuba
indicaron que ello se debió al tiempo perdido y al incumplimiento de la
tarea de corte y tiro de la caña.
Pérez Hernández refirió a Granma que la extracción
del azúcar y miel de los centrales, también creó fuertes tensiones
durante la zafra, a pesar del esfuerzo realizado por las empresas
transportistas.
La eficiencia agroindustrial, la mayor dificultad durante la pasada
campaña, mostró resultados más favorables desde los inicios de la
contienda. Funcionarios de Azcuba resaltaron que más de la mitad del
crecimiento en la producción de azúcar se debió a la eficiencia lograda.
Mientras que por cada 100 toneladas de caña molidas en la etapa
anterior se obtuvieron 9,50 toneladas de azúcar (rendimiento
industrial), este año se lograron 10,27 toneladas.
Son también superiores en relación con el pasado año la producción de
alcohol, alimento animal, la entrega de energía eléctrica a la red
nacional y la calidad del azúcar, que sigue mejorando en sus parámetros
físico-químicos y en su inocuidad.
Vladimir Kara-Murza presents a 2014 report in Washington, D.C., on corruption at Russia’s Sochi Olympics.Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WONG/GETTY
Last
Saturday, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, a friend and I were in
Moscow discussing precautions. I confessed to a fear of
apartment-building entryways because two people I knew, the parliament
member Galina Starovoitova and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, had
been shot dead on their way up to their apartments. “Ever since Nemtsov
was killed,” my friend said, referring to the February shooting of a Putin opponent, “I don’t know anything about precautions anymore. What are you supposed not to do now—walk the streets?”
It
would also be prudent now to stop eating and drinking. On Wednesday,
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a thirty-three-year-old opposition journalist, was
hospitalized in critical condition after he collapsed at his office in
Moscow. He was diagnosed with renal failure that had resulted from acute
intoxication. Put more simply, the problem was poison.
It
is not clear when and how Kara-Murza may have been poisoned, but
Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take
them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful
about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov
quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team
of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also
carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in
public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about
foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year
after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.
Attacks
by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than
assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a
secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006.
Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who
dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by
a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness
in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the
Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009,
in a Russian jail.
Two years before Politkovskaya
was shot, she suffered multiple-organ failure after ingesting a poison,
still unidentified, with tea served to her on a Russian plane. Yuri
Shchekochikhin, her colleague at the investigative weekly Novaya Gazeta,
died in a Moscow hospital, in 2003, as the result of an apparent
poisoning. In 2008, a lawyer who specializes in bringing Russian cases
to the European Court of Human Rights, Karinna Moskalenko, fell ill in
Strasbourg; her husband and two small children were also unwell. The
cause of their illness was identified as mercury that had somehow found
its way into their car.
Moskalenko was one of the lead lawyers in the defense of Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
an oil tycoon who had become Putin’s most famous political prisoner. He
spent ten years behind bars before Putin granted him clemency before
the Sochi Olympics; he is now living in Zurich and running an anti-Putin
N.G.O., Open Russia, with offices in London, Prague, and Moscow. Last
month, the Moscow office was raided by law enforcement, which seized
many of the computers. (Some have since been returned.) Kara-Murza runs
Open Russia’s multi-city public-lecture program—a difficult job, because
most cities in Russia try to shut down his events. The organization
itself has so far escaped being shut down because, on paper, it doesn’t
exist: using a loophole in the law, it has simply not registered—and
hence cannot be liquidated the way many other Russian N.G.O.s have been
in the past three years.
Like the Soviet regime before it, the Putin government spreads fear by destroying the illusion that one can protect oneself. So Open Russia’s leaders think that they can use a loophole in the law to keep themselves safe? the message seems to be. Let’s see how safe they feel after one of them is poisoned.
Indeed,
the larger message of the Nemtsov assassination and the apparent
attempted assassination of Kara-Murza is that no one is safe. Both men
are sufficiently well-known to attract the attention of Russia’s
dwindling oppositional minority, but neither has the superstar status
that would preclude identifying with him. If Litvinenko’s murder made
one think, “Well, but who’d be interested in me?,” these attacks put
many more people on notice. Don’t walk the streets. Don’t eat the food.
Don’t talk.
Speaking of talking, in the past few
months, people who work at two Moscow restaurants have warned me,
separately, about the precise locations of listening devices at the
eateries. The warnings came unbidden. The food at both places was,
incidentally, not only very good but also apparently safe. That, along
with the springtime sun, helps maintain the bizarre sense of normalcy
that has a way of going hand in hand with the mortal danger that has
become a fact of everyday life.
A melon can cost a hundred dollars; most Angolans make less than two dollars a day.Credit Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi
Earlier
this year, I was invited to a barbecue at the home of a Texas oilman,
Steve Espinosa, and his wife, Norma. Their two-story house sat on an
unnamed road, nestled in a community called the Condominio Riviera
Atlantico, about ten miles from Luanda, the rapidly expanding capital of
Angola. There were no sidewalks or footpaths in the area, and there
wasn’t much movement on the street. But there were plenty of cars:
Porsche Cayennes, Audis, and BMWs, all tucked neatly into identical
carports adjacent to identical houses. Espinosa, a burly man in cargo
shorts and a Brooklyn Industries T-shirt, answered the door and held out
a beer. He steered me through a sparsely furnished living room, past a
humidor filled with Cuban cigars, and onto the patio, where several of
his friends and colleagues were snacking amiably on ostrich meat. There
was a second kitchen beside the pool in the back yard, with a sink, a
large refrigerator, and a Weber grill.
For the
past two years, Luanda—not Tokyo, Moscow, or Hong Kong—has been named,
by the global consulting firm Mercer, as the world’s most expensive city
for expatriates. Luanda’s lure, and its treasure, is oil. José Eduardo
dos Santos, who has presided over Angola for more than thirty-five
years, long ago realized that foreign oil companies were the key to
power, and he has worked diligently to accommodate them. In the past
decade, tens of thousands of American and European employees of
international oil conglomerates, fortified by generous cost-of-living
allowances, have descended on Luanda. (Multinational companies base
their overseas salaries on the comparative costs of housing, clothes,
food, and other commodities.)
The
country now produces 1.8 million barrels of oil a day; in Africa, only
Nigeria produces and exports more. The boom has transformed a failed
state into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Exxon-Mobil,
Chevron, the French company Total, and BP all have significant
operations in Angola, along with firms—Schlumberger and Halliburton
among them—that provide the complicated logistical support required to
drill and maintain deep offshore wells. Most of the foreign workers live
with their families in well-guarded suburban communities with names
such as Bella Vista and Paraíso Riviera.
At the
height of the British Empire, colonial rulers lived by a credo: “Make
the world England.’’ The oil expatriates of Luanda have taken that
message to heart. Few would work there if they couldn’t live as they do
at home, but their comforts have been hard to come by. Almost nothing is
made in Angola, so nearly every car, computer, crate of oranges, tin of
caviar, jar of peanut butter, pair of bluejeans, and bottle of wine
arrives by boat. Every day, a trail of container ships backs up from the
port through the Bay of Luanda and out into the sea.
Grotesque
inequality long ago became a principal characteristic of the world’s
biggest and most crowded cities. But there is no place quite like
Luanda, where the Espinosas’ rent is sixteen thousand dollars a month, a
bottle of Coke can sell for ten dollars, and Range Rovers cost twice
their sticker price. Per-capita income in Angola has nearly tripled in
the past dozen years, and the country’s assets grew from three billion
dollars to sixty-two billion dollars. Nonetheless, by nearly every
accepted measure, Angola remains one of the world’s least-developed
nations. Half of Angolans live on less than two dollars a day, infant
mortality rates are among the highest in the world, and the average life
expectancy—fifty-two—is among the lowest. Obtaining water is a burden
even for the rich, and only forty per cent of the population has regular
access to electricity. (For those who do, a generator is essential, as
power fails constantly.) Nearly half the population is undernourished,
rural sanitation facilities are rare, malaria accounts for more than a
quarter of all childhood deaths, and easily preventable diarrheal
diseases such as rotavirus are common.
Because
the oil companies routinely pay most large expenses for their foreign
workers in Angola, a dollar bill can quickly begin to feel like Monopoly
money. Before I visited the Espinosas, I asked at my hotel if it could
provide a car and driver for the ten-mile journey from the center of the
city to the suburb of Talatona. The clerk at the front desk told me it
would cost a hundred and fifty dollars. There weren’t many alternatives,
so I agreed. Later, I saw him waving frantically at me in the lobby. He
explained that he had been wrong about the taxi: it would actually cost
four hundred and fifty dollars, each way. I found another ride.
The
trip took two hours. It was a Friday afternoon, and the single rutted
road that runs south toward Luanda Sul was jammed with commuters,
trucks, tractors, and a stream of the unregulated Toyota minivans—candongueiros—that
pass for public transportation. Children worked the roadway, selling
soccer balls, popcorn, phone cards, toilet seats, and multicolored
polyester brooms. I stopped at the Casa dos Frescos, a grocery store
favored by expatriates, to buy some Scotch for my hosts, but a fifth of
the Balvenie cost three hundred dollars, so I settled for a mediocre
bottle of wine, for sixty-five. The woman in front of me, juggling an
infant and a cell phone, unloaded her groceries on the checkout counter.
She had a couple of steaks, a few pantry items, and two
seventeen-dollar pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, along with juice and
vegetables. The bill was eleven hundred and fifty dollars. She didn’t
seem fazed, and I later learned that the store was famous for its
prices. A few years ago, the Casa dos Frescos had been the site of what
locals refer to as “the incident of the golden melon.’’ An enraged
French customer, having paid a hundred and five dollars for a single
melon, sued the store for profiteering. The case was thrown out of
court, in part because the man not only bought the melon but also ate
the evidence.
For
dinner, Espinosa grilled steak and part of a thirty-five-pound tuna
that he’d caught the previous week on the Kwanza River. When oil people
leave Angola, he told me, they often sell their freezers, packed with
American beef, to their successors. “People can charge ten thousand
dollars for a well-stocked freezer,’’ he said. He mentioned that a
friend once tried to sell him a roll of aluminum foil for a hundred and
forty dollars. Espinosa grinned and rolled his eyes. “That crazy
Randy,’’ he said. “In the end, I think I paid thirty dollars.’’
“T.I.A., man,’’ he said, shrugging his shoulders and using a favorite acronym: “This is Angola.”
Angola
endured four centuries of servitude and slavery before gaining
independence, in 1975, and Luanda was once the world’s busiest slave
port. The National Museum of Slavery, about an hour from the city, is
housed in a spare colonial structure that sits on a promontory
overlooking the Kwanza River. There isn’t much to see—drawings of slaves
crammed into steerage for the trip across the Atlantic, a display of
shackles, and some brief historical notes—but the simplicity is powerful
and disturbing. The building is the last place that slaves came before
they were blessed by a priest, put on a boat, and shipped to the markets
of Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, and the Dominican Republic. Millions
passed through the region, many of whom died before they reached their
destination.
The Portuguese arrived in 1575,
took control soon afterward, and remained in power until 1974, when a
military coup finally toppled the government in Lisbon. Nationalists had
been fighting in Angola for more than a decade, and when the colonists
pulled out of the country the fleeing citizens took everything that
could be moved. Ryszard Kapuscinski, in “Another Day of Life,’’ his
memoir of that time, described the efforts to cram the entire city into a
series of wooden crates and ship most of it to Lisbon. “I don’t know if
there had ever been an instance of a whole city sailing across the
ocean, but that is exactly what happened,’’ he wrote. “On the streets
now there were only thousands of cars, rusting and covered with dust.
The walls also remained, the roofs, the asphalt on the roads, and the
iron benches along the boulevards.”
Angola has
millions of acres of rich, arable land and an unusual abundance of
mineral wealth, particularly diamonds. One Brazilian businessman told me
that turning Angola into a farming nation and lowering its dependence
on oil revenues should not be that difficult. “My country sells many
thousands of tons of crops to China each year,” he said. “Angola is
closer to China, and the countries have a strong relationship. The land
is tremendously fertile. Why not grow those crops here and steal the
Brazilian market?” With spectacular waterfalls, some of the world’s most
elusive bird species, miles of untouched beaches, and what surfers
regard as nearly perfect conditions, there are also promising
opportunities for tourism.
But Angola lacks the
infrastructure for any of those industries; the roads are so poor that
the biggest farms often burn crops, because they cannot get them to
market before they rot. Chevron began drilling during the
nineteen-fifties; before independence, and even after oil became the
nation’s most valuable commodity, exports of sisal, maize, coffee, and
cotton as well as diamonds and iron ore contributed significantly to the
country’s economy. That ended with the exodus of the Portuguese; few
Angolans had been trained to manage factories or farms. Trade vanished,
the communications systems fell apart, and the economy collapsed.
For
the next twenty-five years, Angola fell into one of the most
destructive civil wars in modern history. At least a million people
died. By most estimates, roughly ten million land mines were buried—many
of them remain active—scarring a territory twice the size of Texas and
making large-scale agricultural planning nearly impossible. The war was
fought as much for oil and diamonds as for ideological reasons, but it
also served as the last major proxy battle of the Cold War. The United
States, still struggling to accept the loss in Vietnam, refused to cede
the territory to the Russians, who were equally committed to retaining a
foothold in southern Africa. The UNITA rebels, backed by
the C.I.A. and South African mercenaries, were led by Jonas Savimbi, a
murderous despot who embraced Maoist principles. The Marxists—the
Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.)—with support
from the Russians and led by Agostinho Neto, who later became the
country’s first President, relied on an unusual mixture of Eastern
European economic advisers and Cuban soldiers. Both sides often
condemned the influence and the power of Western oil companies, but Neto
understood that his regime and the country probably wouldn’t survive
without them. He made sure that American oil companies were protected
and, in turn, won financial backing from companies such as Chevron.
“It
was a true witches’ cauldron,” one foreign official who spent years in
Angola told me. The hostilities ended only in 2002, when assassins shot
Savimbi in the head. (“The best use of bullets in the history of
munitions,’’ another longtime resident of Luanda said.) President dos
Santos, who is seventy-two, became the head of the M.P.L.A. in 1979,
after Neto died. The Party still uses that acronym, although it
officially abandoned Marxism more than twenty years ago.
After
hundreds of years of strife, Angola has been a peaceful country for
little more than a decade. No society forged in that kind of conflict
can quickly find its footing. “I spent my first two years here hunting
for water,’’ Nicholas Staines, who until recently served as local
director of the International Monetary Fund, told me one afternoon, as
we sat in the garden outside the I.M.F. office. “And I mean hunting. I
would walk out of my house with a fistful of cash, and my wife would
say, ‘Don’t come back till you find some water.’ So I would hunt for the
nearest water truck and say, ‘Where are you going? How much is that
person paying you? I will double it.’ That is how you got water in
Angola just a few years ago.’’
Then, suddenly,
there were hundreds of people with unimaginable wealth and few
restraints. Tales of excess became commonplace, and often they are told
with pride. One businessman famously distributed Rolexes to guests as
party favors at a wedding. Each member of parliament recently received a
new hundred-thousand-dollar Lexus. Isabel dos Santos, the President’s
forty-two-year-old daughter, is typically described as the richest woman
in Africa; Forbes puts her net worth at more than three
billion dollars. She was educated in London, at King’s College, and owns
the biggest building, with the most expensive apartments, in Luanda. In
2011, as president of the Red Cross, dos Santos paid Mariah Carey a
million dollars to perform for two hours at the organization’s annual
gala. The show was sponsored by Unitel, Angola’s principal mobile-phone
company, which she also owns.
Dos Santos is one
of the city’s most ambitious restaurateurs. One day, I had lunch at
Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center, another of her
properties; the house specialty, the Wagyu Beef Hamburger, sells for
about sixty dollars, and a half pound of tenderloin goes for twice that.
A bottle of Cristal champagne costs twelve hundred dollars. Displaying
such wealth in a country as impoverished as Angola can be a challenge.
One member of the President’s inner circle owns a Rolls-Royce, but there
are few good roads in Luanda. So every Sunday he loads the car into a
trailer, takes it to the Marginal—a recently renovated two-mile-long
promenade along the South Atlantic—drives it for a while on the
capital’s only smooth road, loads it back into its trailer, and has it
hauled away.
Angola is widely regarded as one of
the world’s most egregious kleptocracies. The bulk of the country’s
wealth is controlled by a few hundred oligarchs—Presidential cronies,
generals, and their families. “The default position of Angolan
businessmen is above the law,’’ Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an associate
professor of politics at Oxford University, writes in “Magnificent and
Beggar Land,’’ his comprehensive new account of Angola’s recent history.
“Whether it is a matter of capital flight, money laundering, the
unilateral abandonment of partnerships with foreigners, the non-payment
of loans and import duties, conflict of interest between public and
private roles . . . These are not occasional whims, but the very stuff
of Angolan private sector life.’’
Last
year, the nation ranked a hundred and sixty-first out of a hundred and
seventy-five countries on Transparency International’s corruption scale
and a hundred and eighty-first on the World Bank’s most recent Ease of
Doing Business index. In one category, resolving bankruptcies, Angola
came in last. Twice in a week, my driver was hustled for money by
traffic cops. The officers were patient and polite, but they lingered in
a way that made it clear that it would be wise to hand over a hundred
kwanzas, the equivalent of about a dollar. One night, as I pulled into
the parking lot of a popular restaurant, a man suddenly appeared at the
door. “We pay him,’’ my companion said. “This way, we will probably get
the car back when we leave.” We then paid another man to seat us in a
nearly empty restaurant, and another to bring us a fifteen-dollar bottle
of Evian. That was before we ever saw our waiter.
The
next afternoon, I needed batteries for my tape recorder. The only store
I could find that carried them charged sixteen dollars (and gave me a
handwritten receipt). Then the salesman punched the official figure, six
dollars, into the cash register; the extra ten dollars was for him.
Angola has several dozen universities, more even than South Africa. But
few have functioning libraries, and degrees are bought as often as they
are earned. More than one person told me that in order to graduate from
Agostinho Neto University, the largest academic institution in Angola,
even some of the most talented students are forced to pay bribes.
Antonio, an official of a major oil company who was educated at several
of Luanda’s best international schools, said that he had entered the
university but quickly dropped out. “It was a giant step backward,” he
said. “A complete waste of my time.” (Few Angolans were willing to be
identified by more than a first or middle name. The constitution
protects freedom of speech and assembly, but the government has grown
increasingly intolerant of criticism.)
“I’m weighing the risk of brain damage against a life of celibacy.”Buy the print »
Antonio
is a thin, contemplative man with an oval face and a head of loose,
springy curls. He and two of his friends, Pedro and Marisa, joined me
one night for dinner at La Vigia, a popular restaurant where diners can
select fish from a tank near the cash register. “It is really hard to
find honest people here,’’ Pedro said. “Everywhere you go, even every
small business, somebody is trying to cheat you.” Like Antonio, Pedro
had graduated from premier schools, and, despite his comments, he
expressed optimism about the country’s long-term future. Marisa, who
attended college and business school in Europe, said that when she is
stopped by the traffic police she simply refuses to pay—“and eventually
they go away.’’ The three, all in their thirties, agreed that although
they might prefer to live abroad, there has never been a better time to
be a well-educated Angolan. The government requires foreign oil
companies to hire local residents, and, for those who are qualified, the
prospects for lucrative jobs are excellent.
“We
can function effectively in a foreign environment,’’ Pedro said. “That
makes us unusual.’’ His English, which he said he learned from watching
American police shows on TV, was letter-perfect. He told me that he and
his colleagues often see job applicants who, despite having graduated
from the country’s best tech programs, “barely know how to turn on a
computer.” The three friends stressed more than once that, owing to
their education and relative prosperity, they were far from typical. Yet
they represent the vibrant and promising new Angola that is struggling
to emerge. None of them have known any leader other than dos Santos.
International human-rights groups regularly denounce him, but his power
remains absolute. “A lot of people see him as the King of Angola,’’
Pedro said. “He kind of owns the country. People almost can’t look him
in the eyes—he’s that powerful.’’
Marisa added,
“It’s like your father who is very mean to you. You go to dinner every
day, and he shows up, and you smile and say, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ You say
nothing instead of saying, ‘What have you done to me, you are
horrible.’ ’’ Marisa, who is single, runs the procurement operation at
an oil-services firm. Just that day, she had interviewed a
twenty-five-year-old prospective employee who was the father of seven
children. “That’s pretty normal,” she said. “Not necessarily seven kids,
but having children by the time you’re in your early twenties.” Marisa
lives in the center of town and commutes through heavy traffic to an
office on the outskirts of the city. She rises at five, a driver arrives
by six, and she is at the office shortly after seven. “There is
tremendous pressure to have at least one child before you hit thirty,’’
she said. “But things are changing.’’ She said that she recently heard a
woman explain on a radio show why lesbians exist: they weren’t loved by
men, and therefore looked to their mothers—or perhaps a sister or a
cousin—for a model of what love should look like.
“The
same principle applied to homosexuals or violent people,’’ Marisa said.
“You become violent because your parents are violent—that is the view.
You become a lesbian because you didn’t have a father figure. This is
ridiculous and offensive. But it’s also a great step forward, because we
are speaking in broad daylight, on the radio, about lesbians and
homosexuals. They are not accepted, but they are not going to be killed.
This is an advance.”
Luanda
aspires to become the Dubai of Africa, but it has a long way to go. In
1975, the city had half a million residents; today there are almost six
million. Hotels, luxury apartment buildings, shopping arcades, and
modern office complexes compete for space in the city center with
shantytowns made from corrugated tin and heavy cardboard and with tens
of thousands of people who live on mounds of dirt, in the scrapped
remains of rusted and abandoned vehicles, or out in the open, next to
fetid, unused water tanks. To make room for development, President dos
Santos has cleared many slums in the past decade, usually without
warning or compensation. He has promised to provide displaced occupants
with housing farther away from the city center, but the government has
struggled with the furious pace of population growth.
Construction
cranes are visible everywhere. (It pays to look up as you walk the
streets: there are no scaffoldings to protect pedestrians from falling
debris, and workmen occasionally toss empty water bottles from the
skyscrapers.) The city often smells of sewage and stagnant water, but it
has grand ambitions. After almost a decade of delays, the nearly
completed Intercontinental Hotel and Casino, a ziggurat of glass, steel,
and reinforced concrete, hovers over the harbor. An eight-lane
highway—Luanda’s first genuinely modern road—runs along the city’s
horseshoe-shaped port. Between the highway and the water, pedestrians
amble along the Marginal, enjoying spectacular sunset views. Across the
bay, connected to the city by a causeway, ostentatious night clubs with
names like Chill Out and Miami Beach line the shores of the neighborhood
known as the Ilha, which for many years was an abandoned strip of sand
used mainly by local fishermen.
Most expatriates
leave Luanda after a few years, but some choose to stay. One afternoon,
I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the
seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda with his
wife, Henriette, an energetic and engaging English teacher. Koning is
sixty-five, with a thick mustache, heavy-lidded blue eyes, and slightly
shaggy hair. He worked for Texaco for thirty years, first in Canada and
then in Indonesia and Nigeria; in 1995, he and Henriette moved to
Luanda. Koning retired from Texaco when it merged with Chevron, in 2001,
and now works as a consultant. The couple’s apartment is comfortable
but not luxurious. (Because power failures are so common, Henriette
refuses to enter the elevator, preferring to climb the seven flights. “I
don’t do African elevators,’’ she told me.) The rent—six thousand
dollars a month—is reasonable for a place in the center of the city with
excellent views.
From
their terrace, the city looks like an archeological cutaway. Henriette
pointed to a building across the street. “You can see they are not well
off, because during power outages the building is dark,” she
said—meaning that they lacked a backup generator. In another nearby
building, occupied by diplomats and oil executives, a three-bedroom
apartment rents for as much as twenty thousand dollars a month. I could
see the new BP headquarters, a twenty-five-story building called Torres
do Carmo, and the massive glass headquarters of Sonangol, the state oil
company. “That’s the French Embassy,” Henriette said, pointing to a
stolid town house. “And now look straight down.” Below us, rows of tin
roofs were wedged tightly between apartment buildings. “They were
displaced during the civil war,” she said. “Now they live on the street
right next to the diplomats and millionaires.”
The
Konings often entertain young Angolans, including the three I had
recently met. The couple has supported students, and Tako, who was born
in the Netherlands but lived mostly in Canada, contributes his time to a
variety of schools and engineering societies. “You quickly realize that
you can make a bigger difference here than in a place like Toronto,’’
he said. “It can be very satisfying.’’ I asked what he thought of
expatriates who seemed to avoid interacting with Angolans. He shrugged.
“The thing about Americans that I always loved is that you jumped in and
got things done,’’ he said. “You rolled into Europe after World War II
with the Marshall Plan. The countries were destroyed, but you put them
back together. I understand that the U.S. wanted to hold off the
Russians—there are always geopolitical reasons. But what matters is what
you did.”
In Angola, he added, “you can’t
simply hit a switch and say everything is normal just because the war
has ended and the country has oil.” China essentially provided its own
Marshall Plan: as the world’s biggest oil consumer, it buys nearly two
million barrels a day from Angola, more than from any other country, and
Chinese firms are building schools, roads, bridges, ports, and one of
the largest housing developments in Africa, in nearby Kilamba. The
buildings, designed for middle-income residents, are still mostly
unoccupied, but they take up thousands of acres—pastel high-rises, just a
few miles beyond the city limits, that look like a sub-Saharan Co-op
City.
“We never planned to stay here forever,’’
Koning said. “We have two children and a grandchild in Toronto. But the
longer you stay the deeper your roots go down. And we know people.’’ I
went to a local place for a beer with him one night. Many of the street
people waved, and several approached, eagerly but pleasantly. Koning
says he doesn’t think it makes sense to hand out money, but he pays a
man to watch his car, more as charity than for security. When people
need medicine and clothing, he and Henriette often chip in.
The
political landscape is troubling, though. In Luanda, security forces
regularly stop protests and arrest those who try to attend them. In
2012, two activists disappeared after an anti-government protest. For
more than a year, Angolan officials denied any knowledge of their fate.
Late in 2013, after sustained protests by human-rights workers, the
attorney general admitted that the two men had been kidnapped and
probably murdered. Residents of Luanda are understandably afraid to test
their freedom. When Koning and I got to the bar, we were joined at a
table in the garden by a Russian diamond dealer. “We produce more
diamonds than anyone else on earth, my dear,’’ he said in a very slight
Russian accent. “But keep it to yourself.” There was also a dance
teacher, a couple of other journalists, and an American woman who did
not give her name or discuss her profession. The weather was dry and
clear, and at night the air became softer, more fragrant and inviting.
The others were relaxed, but the woman, who I later learned worked for
an international N.G.O., looked anxious. “You can’t write about me,’’
she said, when I told her that I was a journalist. “It’s not safe. I
will get death threats.’’ After a few moments of awkward silence, she
stood up, said she couldn’t trust me, and walked out.
Foreign
embassies routinely warn their citizens about crime in the capital.
“Avoid walking around Luanda, especially after dark,’’ the British
Foreign Office advises. One should also avoid “wearing jewelry or
watches in public places” and “walking between bars and restaurants on
the Ilha do Cabo,” as well as “crowded places like markets.’’ The U.S.
State Department is even more blunt: “The capital city, Luanda,
continues to maintain a well deserved reputation as a haven for armed
robberies, assaults, carjackings, and overall crimes of opportunity.
However, reliable statistical crime data is unavailable in Angola.’’
Many foreign workers are forbidden by their employers to drive cars
there; those who want to spend a weekend in the countryside need to get
permission well in advance. One afternoon, about an hour before I
planned to meet some people near my hotel, one of them called. “What
time should we pick you up?’’ she asked. I told her that I would walk
the five hundred yards to our meeting spot. She tried to dissuade me,
but when I insisted she urged me to lock my bag, passport, and wallet in
the safe in my hotel room. “Bring a Xerox of the passport page and some
money,’’ she said. “And do not show your phone on the street.” I made
it to the meeting and back without incident.
Most
expatriates said that their concern about crime was the main reason
they avoided the city. At times, though, the fears seemed exaggerated.
Not long after I arrived, I had dinner in the suburbs with a French
journalist and some Americans. My colleague told one of the guests that
she lived in the center of Luanda, a block or so from the Skyna Hotel,
which is on the Avenue de Portugal, the city’s version of Fifth Avenue.
The Skyna is enormous, extremely well known, and readily picked out of
the skyline. “Where is that?” the guest, who had lived in Angola for
more than a year, asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”
Americans
can earn twice their usual salary in Angola, but there are few easily
accessible cultural institutions or opportunities for entertainment.
There’s the Slavery Museum and the Portuguese fortress of São Miguel,
which overlooks the port, but in Luanda there’s not a single commercial
movie theatre. “It’s all Netflix here,” Steve Espinosa told me. “If your
Internet connection is good enough—otherwise you are out of luck.”
There are more significant challenges. Exxon-Mobil, among other
companies, carries out random urine tests on its workers, and those who
fail are sent home. The company isn’t really looking for drugs such as
cocaine, heroin, or marijuana; rather, it wants to make sure that
employees are taking their malaria medicine. (The concern is
understandable, but long-term use of malaria preventives can cause
serious liver damage.)
Foreigners typically stay
for two or three years; the Espinosas have been there for six. Two of
their children attended the Luanda International School, which is only a
couple of miles from where they live. The campus is beautiful and
modern, with computer systems and well-kept playing fields. The staff is
made up largely of foreign teachers, who tend to move every few years
among the world’s élite international schools. Fees, which are almost
always paid by oil companies, come to about fifty thousand dollars a
year. Some companies even pay when they don’t have a student who needs
the seat. “If Chevron or BP wants to transfer somebody in the middle of a
year,’’ one teacher said, “these companies have to be certain that
children can attend a good school.”
Students are
typically driven to school, waved through a security gate, collected
after class, and then driven back to the safety of their housing
cluster. Nobody takes a bus, rides a bike, or walks. There are also many
local students at the international school—mostly children of Angola’s
élite, which can be a problem in civics classes, given the government’s
deplorable human-rights record. A few weeks earlier, the mother of an
important minister spoke at the school. “It’s hard for people like that
to admit the truth about issues like free speech and hard for us to
ignore it,” one teacher told me. “So we try to walk a line.” (One
report, released in March by the International Federation for Human
Rights, which represents more than a hundred and seventy human-rights
groups throughout the world, found that journalists and human-rights
workers in Angola are subject to “judicial and administrative
harassment, acts of intimidation, threats and other forms of
restrictions to their freedom of association and expression.”)
For
those who prefer the protected life, the cocoon can extend all the way
to Houston. The Houston Express, operated by Atlas Air, flies three
times a week between George Bush International Airport and Luanda’s
Quatro de Fevereiro Airport. Tickets are usually available only through
the oil companies. Most seats, which sell for about ten thousand
dollars, are in business class. People who fly on a commercial airliner
from the U.S. typically change planes in Paris or London. On my flight,
there were about two hundred and seventy-five passengers, all but a few
of them men. It felt like a military transport.
Nobody
is sure how long Angola’s expat exceptionalism can last. The plummeting
price of oil has already forced Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and
Schlumberger to cut thousands of jobs throughout the world. So far,
Angola has mostly been spared. (No official from any oil company would
agree to talk to me about its presence in Angola.) But if the United
States stops buying Angola’s oil, and if China’s rate of economic growth
continues to slow, major foreign companies would be unable to sustain
their current staffing levels and expenditures.
Oil
revenue accounts for more than ninety per cent of Angola’s
foreign-exchange earnings, and there are many risks for a country that
relies too heavily on one commodity. Economists call it the resource
curse. For years, oil experts predicted that by 2020 Nigeria and Angola
would account for twenty-five per cent of America’s crude imports; the
shale revolution in Texas and North Dakota put an end to such
speculation. Within a few years, the United States might not need any
Angolan oil. The current price of a barrel of oil is about fifty
dollars, but just a few months ago the Angolan government, for the
purposes of its 2015 budget, assumed that the average price would be
eighty-one dollars. That gap will prove hard to close. The dos Santos
government announced earlier this year that it would cut the budget by a
quarter, and it has said that it will work harder to diversify the
economy. Few economists who study Africa believe that it will be easy.
“They
say that they will diversify the economy all the time,’’ Gustavo Costa,
the Luanda correspondent for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso,
told me. “There has always been that opportunity. And in theory, at
least, it’s still there. But the government has built a certain kind of
society—for themselves. You can call it prosperity if you want, but it
is incredibly fragile. It all could end tomorrow.”
