Cuban Colada

Church bells to honor pope's beatification

From Agence France-Presse:

Church bells will ring out across Havana on Sunday to honor the beatification of John Paul II.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega, leader of Cuba's Catholic Church, has asked Havana's parish priests to ring the church bells at 4 p.m. to honor the popular Polish-born pope, according to a statement Friday by the Archdiocese of Havana.

Pope John Paul II visited this predominantly Catholic island in January, 1998, the first visit by any pope.

(PHOTO SHOWS the pontiff and the cardinal during that visit.)

The trip led to a relaxing of tensions between the Catholic hierarchy and Cuba's communist government. Those ties have grown stronger since Raúl Castro succeeded his brother Fidel as president.

The Cuban cardinal, who will be in Rome, invited Catholics to attend a Sunday mass in Havana's cathedral. The service will be led by the papal nuncio to Cuba, Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu.

Read more in El Nuevo Herald.

Nuncio to Cuba due for Vatican promotion

The Roman Catholic nuncio to Cuba, Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, is in line to become the Vatican's Deputy Secretary of State, the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported Friday.

The appointment would be made official in May, the newspaper said, without stating who will replace Becciu in Havana.

The Deputy Secretary of State "is crucial to the running of any papacy," says the Catholic News Agency. "His role includes filling the posting of nuncios around the world, making curial appointments in Rome, as well as advising and traveling with the Pope.

"In effect, he is the 'transmission belt of papal will,' says [La Stampa]. In the 20th Century, two occupants of the post went on to become Pope."

The Sicilian-born Becciu, who will be 63 in June, has been in the Vatican's diplomatic service since 1984 and in Cuba since July 2009.

A quotable quote: Fidel on indiscipline

'Today, more than ever, discipline is indispensable. All those who promote or incur in social indiscipline are flag bearers for the enemy, they are conscious or unconscious agents of the enemy.

'That is why all those manifestations of indiscipline, every incorrect thing, every badly done thing, every immoral thing, every illegal thing has to be forcefully combated everywhere, because [...] they are the fifth column, the agents, servants of the ideology of the Empire, of the ideology of capitalism, of the ideology of the counterrevolution.'

–Fidel Castro in a speech on Dec. 5, 1988,
quoted on Page One of Granma on Friday.

Afro-Cuban jazz: a legacy and a passport

From The New York Times:

If there is such a thing as a first family of Afro-Cuban jazz, the O’Farrill clan has a right to claim that distinction. Its members helped invent the hybrid genre back in the 1940s, when Chico O’Farrill came to New York from Havana, and in recent years they have worked to reinvigorate the music despite barriers in both Cuba and the United States.

O’Farrills will be participating in two very different events during the current three-month ¡Si Cuba! arts festival in New York.

On Saturday, the O’Farrill Family Band, featuring [Chico's son] Arturo and his two sons, will play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music café, and on May 14 Arturo [in photo] will lead the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra at Symphony Space as part of a Wall to Wall Sonidos event that will include the premiere of a new 35-minute piece, "A Still Small Voice," that he wrote, inspired in part by recent trips to Cuba.

To read the entire story, click here.

Top trader in cigars is reportedly in prison, along with 10 aides, for engaging in graft

Manuel García Morejón, commercial vice president of the Cuban cigar company Habanos S.A, has been in prison since August 2010, "accused of masterminding graft on a grand scale," The Economist reported Thursday.

According to the British publication, "García and ten of his staff, who also face trial, sold genuine cigars at a fraction of their normal price to black-market distributors in the Caribbean in return for bribes."

"Up to 45 million cigars may have been sold this way. Since handmade habanos fetch up to £40 ($65) each in shops in [...] London, the loss was considerable."

Habanos is a joint venture between the government-owned Cubatabaco and Altadis, a Spanish company owned by Imperial Tobacco, a British company.

According to the magazine Cigar Aficionado, García, 53, "was born and raised in Havana. With a degree in foreign trade from Berlin University, he started his career working in Germany for Cubatabaco in 1989 before coming back to the main office in Havana in 1996."

Reporter Juan O. Tamayo writes in The Miami Herald that Garcia "often acted as the host of mayor cigar events such as the annual cigar festival held in the Cuban capital." The most recent one was held Feb. 21-25. García was not there and rumors began to spread about his whereabouts.

The report of García's arrest "could not be independently confirmed late Thursday," Tamayo writes. "Calls to the Habanos S.A. offices in the Cuban capital were not answered."

U.S., Cuba views are equally outmoded

An editorial Wednesday in The Boston Globe:

The image of Cuba conveyed by the recent Communist Party congress is of a country that history left behind.

There was Fidel Castro’s younger brother, 79-year-old President Raúl Castro, invoking the need to rejuvenate the party’s leadership — and then announcing that his second-in-command will be an 80-year-old comandante from the revolutionary epoch, José Ramón Machado, and that the number three position in the hierarchy will be taken by Ramiro Valdés, the ruling group’s boy wonder at 77.

Worse yet, the economic reforms that Raúl Castro presented as a way of facing up to the fact that 2 plus 2 must equal 4 are anything but. Instead, they promise a measure of austerity braided into a scheme to declare various black-market sales and services legal so that they can be regulated and taxed by the one-party state.

Rather than gloating over the hopeless stasis in Cuba, policymakers in Washington ought to recognize their own need to catch up with history. Now that the Cold War has been over for two decades, what Raúl Castro himself called the “self-delusion’’ of Cuba’s ruling gerontocracy threatens only the Cuban people.

Vestigial travel bans, diplomatic snubbing, and economic boycotts only make American leaders look as impervious to reality as the aging Cuban revolutionaries.

The best thing Washington could do for the people of Cuba and for U.S. interests would be to let American diplomats, tourists, goods, and services go to the island. That would only show that the supposed threat of U.S. imperialism is as outmoded as Cuban communism.

Farrar goes from Havana to Managua

Will be replaced by the U.S. chargé in Venezuela

Jonathan Farrar, chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba for the past three years, has been named U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, reporter Juan Tamayo writes in Tuesday's Miami Herald, citing unidentified U.S. officials.

Farrar will be replaced by John Caulfield, currently chargé d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas.

Farrar's departure from Havana was predicted one month ago by the Nicaraguan newspaper El Nuevo Diario. (See Cuban Colada's March 26 posting "Unconfirmed: Farrar is shifted to Managua.")

Farrar's tenure in Havana was "marked by complaints from some Cuban dissidents that he did not meet with them often enough and criticized them too harshly," Tamayo writes. For the entire story, click here.

Top 3's longevity is tribute to survival skills

The CIA couldn't kill us all, Assembly leader jests

Raúl Castro will be 80 on June 3; José Ramón Machado Ventura will be 81 on Oct. 26; Ramiro Valdés Menéndez will be 79 this week, on April 28.

Yes, Cuba's ruling circle needs rejuvenating, Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada acknowledges, "but, well, what can we do?"

"The revolution is already 52 years old," the 74-year-old president of the National Assembly tells Progreso Semanal in an interview published Tuesday. "From the beginning, an essential part of the policy promoted by the United States was the physical liquidation of the Cuban leaders, but [the Americans] failed.

"Because they failed, there's a lot of us left. So, what are we going to do? Self-destruct? In other words, do what the CIA couldn't do?" That makes no sense, Alarcón says. "There is no need to remove an octogenarian from the Central Committee just because the Empire couldn't kill him before."

Screw the Empire, Alarcón scoffs, in slightly more polite words.

"Why don't they talk about those who are under 40, or those under 50? Why don't they say that most of the members of the Central Committee were born after the triumph of the Revolution?"

In the interview, Alarcón also touches on the proposed changes in the economy, the recent Communist Party Congress, and religious activism. Click here for the Spanish text, here for the English translation.

A blogger's notes: Perestroika revisited

Ex-Soviet envoy sees a Chinese-style reform

Scanning the Russian media in recent days, I have repeatedly read the word perestroika (reconstruction) in connection with the changes going on in Cuba.

The word surfaced again Monday in an interview in the website Newsland with Aleksandr Semyonovich Kapto, former Soviet Ambassador to Cuba (1985-88), former chief of the Soviet Central Committee's Ideology Department, and currently a politologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the interview, Kapto, 78, describes the ongoing process as "the construction of 'socialism with a human face' similar to the Brezhnev era and a Cuban perestroika similar to the Gorbachev era. If we carry out historical parallels with the Soviet Union, then Cuba today is characterized by both of these processes."

Kapto indirectly criticizes Fidel Castro for focusing too much in his first 30 years in power "on the moral incentives for building socialism – the role of ideas, the role of morality and so on. Unlike in the USSR, [that focus] did not address the economy, the financial incentives," until the late 1980s.

But by then, it was too late. When the Soviet Union folded, "all of Cuba's economy collapsed. [The Cubans] did not have their own source of economic growth. They did not get assistance and

Washington Post: Nothing has changed

Last week's Communist Party Congress is the subject of an editorial Monday in The Washington Post ("Raúl Castro's same old Cuba") that points to the contradictions between Castro's promises and Cuba's realities.

"The truth is," The Post concludes, "that Cuba's problems are mostly of the Castro brothers' own making. They may never end until the Castros' regime does." Click here to access.

[RELATED STORY: The London-based socialist website Workers' Liberty has a similar view in an article titled "Cuban 'reforms' – a step backwards for workers." Read here.]