Persecución policial a extranjeros en Cuba

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Dos jóvenes españoles relataron al diario miamense El Nuevo Herald, su experiencia en Cuba, cuando visitaron al líder del Movimiento Cristiano Liberación (MLC) Oswaldo Payá y fueron perseguidos por autos de la Seguridad del Estado a alta velocidad, por maltrechas carreteras en el Oriente de Cuba.

Las circunstancias de la historia de Pablo Vives y Jose Antonio De La Rosa, militantes del Partido Popular (PP) viajaron a Cuba en el verano del 2007, son similares a las que llevaron al fallecimiento de Oswaldo Payá y Harold Cepero el 22 de julio del 2012.

Los dos españoles que viajaron a la Isla, deseaban conocer la realidad política de la isla, más allá de los artículos de Granma, el optimismo de los noticieros de televisión y las consignas de las marchas y concentraciones por la Plaza José Martí. También llevaban pequeñas cantidades de dinero, libros y medicamentos, que entregaban a las mujeres de disidentes presos.

En La Habana, relatan al periodista Danielle Grasso, alquilaron en una agencia de turismo un auto Hyndai y partieron hacia Santiago de Cuba, acompañados de Oswaldo Payá. Al entrar en la zona oriental, un vehículo que ellos identifican como de la Seguridad del Estado cubana, inició la persecución, que ellos lograron evadir aumentando la velocidad por una maltrecha carretera, hasta que llegaron al poblado de Las Tunas.

Además de ese incidente, donde el propio Payá, quien viajaba en el asiento trasero del Hyndai, los españoles dijeron “haber sufrido la presión y la vigilancia de la Seguridad del Estado cubano, incluyendo seguimientos, persecuciones o amenazas a personas que se habían acercado a opositores como Payá,”

Pablo Vives es concejal de Movilidad, municipio próximo a la capital española, donde es concejal de Movilidad y De La Rosa es diputado de un distrito madrileño. Ambos afirmaron a El Nuevo Herald que “lo que hacíamos con Oswaldo era muy parecido a lo que hizo Angel”, explica Vives. “Le llevábamos de un sitio a otro para que se reuniera con varios opositores, a menudo gente humilde y poco conocida”.
Tenían que sensación de ser vigilados constantemente por la Seguridad del Estado y aseguran que Payá, tomaba precauciones al respecto.

En el trayecto hacia el Oriente de Cuba, reconocieron la persecución policial pues los autos de la Seguridad del Estado, eran “Ladas con matrícula oficial y más antenas que los vehículos normales”, y ellos aumentaron la velocidad para evadirlos en varias ocasiones para intentar despistarlos.

En Camagüey tuvieron que salir con urgencia de una residencia alquilada, pues ya la policía había sido avisada de la presencia de ellos, y tuvieron que encontrar refugio en la casa de otro familiar.

De La Rosa dice haber descubierto la “dos caras del pueblo cubano: apoyo a la revolución puertas afuera; pero rechazo puertas adentro y, en su caso, después de unas cuantas partidas de dominó que ayudaron a limar la desconfianza inicial”.
Tambien Lombardero, de la Asociación Cuba en Transición, dice que vivio con sosobra sus cuatro viajes a Cuba. Asegura que a Oswaldo Payá “le seguían a todas horas. Le permitían estar tranquilo mientras no molestara. El mismo estaba seguro de que Fidel, antes de morir, habría dado la orden de asesinarlo”.

Los tres entrevistados aseguran que “cuando recibieron la noticia de su muerte, no lo creyeron”.

Otro entrevistado fue José Antonio Serrano, quien estuvo en Cuba en el 2005 y conoció a Payá. Serrano afirma que “en el coche alquilado no habló, tenía miedo de que hubiera micrófonos. Tenía precauciones de todo tipo”.

También en esa ocasión, con un auto alquilado constataron que al salir de La Habana vieron que eran seguidos por un auto oficial y asegura que con la tensión y el miedo les llevó a conducir a 140 kilómetros por hora para despistar a la Seguridad del Estado.

Además de esos relatos de los españoles que viajaban a la Isla para solidarizarse y conocer a los opositores cubanos, la nota del diario miamense recuerda el caso donde la líder de las Damas Blanco, Laura Pollan resultó herida al chocar un auto contra el carro donde ella viajaba y darse a la fuga, en febrero del 2011.
Pollán viajaba junto al director de cine italiano Pierantonio Maria Micciarelli, que grababa precisamente el documental “Soy la otra Cuba”,. En la cita se observa el impacto y como el auto donde viajaba el italiano y la activista cubana se salió de la vía.

El periodista Bertrand Lagrange, colaborador en Madrid para el diario francés Le Monde, constató  la persecución de la Seguridad del Estado cubana en varias ocasiones. En una ocasión que iba a visitar a Oswaldo Paya, era seguido por autos policiales, tambien le seguían cuando visitaba al opositor Vladimiro Roca.

En otra ocasión fue agredido por cuatro individuos que alertaron al chofer del taxi que “era una cuestión entre “ellos” y el periodista”. Solo le hurtaron “el bolso con la cámara con una parte de sus grabaciones”, como intentó explicar a la Policía oficial al denunciar el atraco. Supo Lagrage años después, que en la estación policial un oficial de la seguridad amonestó a una agente del orden, ahora residente en Madrid, por poner en el acta la versión del agredido. 

Cuba: [Video] Detencion violenta de extranjeros por tomar fotos

Roberto Guerra

The way we left Cuba

By Brin-Jonathan Butler, The Rumpus

I came to Havana to film a documentary about a local boxer -- and found a country trapped in an Orwellian nightmar.

This piece originally appeared on The Rumpus.

The plane began its descent over the last 90 haunting miles of sea that divides Cuba from the United States, a sea that might be the largest graveyard in the world. Out my window the sunset glazed over the surface of the ocean and glinted off the slits and nicks of wave-creases like fresh wounds. Up and down the plane I heard the slap of blinders yanked down over the windows while the rest of us eagerly took in the view. It’s this last homestretch that always fleshes out the tourists from the locals on flights to the island.

There are plenty of tragic and inspiring choices, but the most obvious legacy Castro will leave behind is the broken family.

As the plane touched down at Jose Marti Airport I still wasn’t sure I would be allowed to enter Cuba in the first place. I had spent my last trip a few months earlier conducting illegal interviews with the country’s most famous boxing champions, men who had turned down millions and were only willing to discuss it if I paid them under the table. Of course there was no official way to have these interviews given the sensitivity of the topic. The state security had started following me after the first interview. All the Cubans I was working with couldn’t understand why we weren’t being arrested. But we kept going until we landed every interview on my wish list. Then it was just a matter of getting that material out.

While I probably should have quit while I was ahead, my purpose this time around was to knock on the door of one of the most politically radioactive residences in the country—the wife of Guillermo Rigondeux, a 30-year-old two-time Olympic boxing champion, branded by Fidel Castro as a Judas and traitor to the Cuban people. I was there to track down the family of one of the most notorious defectors in Cuban history.

Since Rigondeaux had escaped on a smuggler’s boat (venture humanitarianism between Cuba and Cancun has thrived enormously the last few years) and become a permanent exile, his family had been living under 24-hour surveillance and nearly house arrest. Cuban state security doesn’t fuck around. As attractive an analogy it might be for any foreigner to view Rigondeaux as a kind of Orpheus, a highly charged defector forever abandoning his life, nobody is in any hurry to have a camera and a microphone placed in the face of Eurydice to discuss the matter. The official state version of events is quite sufficient, muchas gracias. Bienvenido a Cuba!

Everyone on the island knows that at Castro’s first trial, when he was asked to confess who was intellectually responsible for his attack against Batista, he proclaimed it was none other than “a poet.” But whether Cuba’s Comandante likes it or not, his country is poetry of a different order, something like 1984 penned by Charles Dickens.

The first African slaves were brought to the island as far back as 1520, a measure taken after the Spanish were in need of replenishing the native Indian population (300,000 at the time Columbus first encountered them) they had wiped out through a combination of genocide, disease and brutal labor. Many Indians were so desperate to escape the calamity of their lives under Spanish rule that they attempted suicide by trying to choke on dirt. This concern ceased after the Spanish warned of severe punitive measures on the family members of suicides.

One of the most famously brave Indian chiefs, Hatuey, captured, tied to a stake and about to be set ablaze, was offered conversion by the Spanish if he accepted Jesus. Hatuey asked the religious man holding the flame if indeed any Christians were in heaven. He was assured there were. Hatuey replied that he would rather burn and be sent to hell than ever again encounter people as cruel as the Spanish.

When Columbus first saw Cuba in 1492 he described it as “the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen.” He asked the first local he could find if he had arrived on an island, and was assured that he had, but that it was infinite.

I’ve never been able to get the wrapping paper off trying to imagine the expression on the face of the man who told Columbus that.

“Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?” -J.M.W. Turner

Almost 300 years later, on November 29, 1782, the events depicted in Joseph M. W. Turner’s famous painting, The Slave Ship, unfolded. First known as the Zong Affair, and decades later as The Zong Massacre, the story goes something like this: With a business disaster looming—slaves were dying at more than the usual rate—Captain Collingwood ordered some of the Zong’s human cargo—122 shackled African men, women and children—thrown overboard into the shark infested waters of the Caribbean. Another 10 slaves threw themselves overboard in a display of defiance at the inhumanity.

These 132 deaths left the captain with high hopes of filing his insurance claim: lost-at-sea slaves would be insured, dead-on-arrival slaves would not.

At the trial for insurance fraud, England’s Solicitor General stated:

“What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honorable men of murder… The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”

In 2009, 228 years after the Zong disposed of its cargo in the Caribbean, another boat carrying human beings—who’d also been bought and sold on the market place—sped under cover of night across the same Caribbean waters. This time the boat was headed for Mexico, where a ransom masquerading as a fee was to be paid for the lives of the men, women and children being transported. Three of the occupants on the smuggler’s boat were elite Cuban boxers. One of those boxers was Guillermo Rigondeaux. Despite over 400 fights inside a ring against the greatest boxers in the world, Rigondeaux would describe this journey, with immense reluctance, as the most traumatic event of his life.

“There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban athletes.”

-Michael Lewis

Estudiante francesa fue expulsada de Cuba

micubalibre1

Kaohsiung mayor to return home after Cuba denies entry

The China Post/

Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu

The mayor cut short her 11-day visit — originally slated for Feb. 15-26 — in the wake of the Cuban entry denial, said Zeno Lai, director of the Kaohsiung Information Bureau, adding that she is scheduled to arrive in Kaohsiung the following day.
Lai attributed Chen's denied entry to the fact that news of her itinerary was leaked to the press in advance.
Chen and a group of Kaohsiung city government officials flew to Cuba Feb. 20 to look at organic agriculture in the Caribbean country. All of the delegation members were allowed entry except for Chen.
Local media reported yesterday that the Kaohsiung mayor was stopped by Cuban Customs, which did not give a reason for denying her entry.
Also that day, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that officials from the Republic of China Embassy in the Dominican Republic and Taiwan's representative office in Mexico helped Chen's delegation transit from Cuba to Los Angeles.
Chen, a bigwig of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and one of the party's founders, was chosen as acting DPP chairwoman Wednesday, temporarily succeeding Tsai Ing-wen, who will step down Feb. 29.
Chen will hold the reins of the DPP until a new leader and local chapter chiefs are elected May 27.
It was not immediately clear whether Chen — who was elected Kaohsiung mayor in 2006, becoming the country's first female mayor of a special municipality, and who was re-elected in 2010 — will seek to become the party's formal leader.
Born in Yilan County in eastern Taiwan in 1950, Chen began devoting herself to Taiwan's democracy movement in the 1970s when the country was a one-party state. She spent six years in jail during Taiwan's martial law period (which lasted until 1987) for participating in a pro-democracy demonstration in Kaohsiung in 1979. More >>

French man sentenced to 15 years in prison

Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Samuel Rubenfeld

A Cuban court sentenced a French man to 15 years in prison for money laundering connected to drug trafficking and tax evasion, AFP reported, citing sources close to the defendant.
Jean-Louis Autret, who has lived in Cuba since 1993, has 10 days to appeal. His wife was sentenced to five years in prison and four years of “correctional labor,” while seven Cubans have yet to be sentenced in the case, the defense source told AFP.
Autret was arrested in April 2009 after he sold a yacht to two French citizens in October 2004 that was stopped a year later by French and Spanish authorities, who discovered 2.8 tons of cocaine on board.
He cleared his name in the French courts, but Cuban authorities took him to court there, and prosecutors said at trial that Autret’s money laundering was part of “a cyclical movement of money between bank accounts in Cuba and abroad, aimed at hiding and legalizing” profits from “the illicit trade in narcotics.”
Autret’s lawyer said his client is innocent and called for his release.