Miami New Times
The Deadly Road Through Mexico
When Cubans leave their homeland, things can get lots worse.
By Francisco Alvarado , Russell Cobb , and Paul Knight
Published: January 10, 2008
Early in the day this past July 19, Luis Lázaro Lara Morejón left his sunny oceanside room at the Solymar hotel in Cancún to buy groceries at a small market nearby. The tall, heavy-set 30-year-old Cuban exile from Miami was accompanied by his pretty, young Mexican girlfriend, María Elena Carrillo Sáenz.
The lovers passed the two huge pools and a beachfront clubhouse and bar, then walked down a stone-paved path to the Solymar's main building before exiting the imposing, Aztec-style front entrance onto Kukulcán Boulevard.
Morejón's two kids, ages six and nine, stayed behind with a nanny. By nightfall, the couple hadn't returned. The alarmed caretaker called police.
Authorities began investigating and soon contacted the children's mother, Alely Acosta, who lived in a one-bedroom apartment at 6525 W. 24th Ave. in Hialeah. Forty-eight hours later, she arrived in Cancún, picked up the kids, and returned to South Florida.
The cops suspected the pair had been kidnapped. Eleven days after Morejón disappeared, following an anonymous tip, about a dozen Mexican police officers walked down a narrow dirt road surrounded by thick brush near the Cancún-Mérida highway. It was about two kilometers from the Solymar's front steps.
Soon they came upon an abandoned stone building near a site where law enforcers once incinerated confiscated drugs.
An officer stopped near the front door. Before him was a handcuffed, shirtless corpse in dirty white Bermuda shorts lying face down. The dead man's left index finger had been mutilated, and the body was covered in welts. When police turned him over, they found his eyes and mouth shut with duct tape. His face had been obliterated by bullets.
An autopsy revealed Morejón had been shot 12 times, six in the head and six in the torso, with a 9mm pistol.
Three days later, at 3:30 p.m., police received a second anonymous tip. Some 600 meters from the Morejón crime scene, in a natural sinkhole 10 meters deep, they found Sáenz's decomposing body. Her murder drew particular attention. After all, she was the child of prominent Yucatán hoteliers.
Also buried in the sinkhole were two young Mexicans, Jesús Aguilar and Edwin Park.
The victims were covered in lime, and, like Morejón, had been blindfolded, gagged with duct tape, and handcuffed. Forensic analysts determined they had been shot six to eight times with 9mm bullets similar to the ones that had killed Morejón.
Police believe Morejón and the Mexican men were human traffickers and that their brutal murders were part of the latest dustup in a turf war between groups of Cuban-Americans. The girlfriend was collateral damage in the bloody conflict that claimed the lives of seven people in August, including Morejón's alleged boss, Manuel Duarte Díaz.
The carnage is just one indication of the booming market in smuggling Cubans through Mexico by land to Texas and Miami or elsewhere. Some 9,296 Cubans crossed the border into the Lone Star State between October 1, 2006, and July 22, 2007, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That's more than double the 4,589 who crossed or were picked up by the Coast Guard in the Florida Straits during the same period.
Stakes are high. Traffickers charge at least $10,000 per person to ferry Cubans off the island to the Yucatán.
Smugglers provide undocumented Cubans with shelter in Cancún and the neighboring city of Mérida, a place Mexican prosecutor Bello Melchor Rodríguez calls "the financial base of operations for these bands of Cuban-American mafia."
Rodríguez explains that smugglers in speed boats sometimes haul 25 to 30 passengers from Cuba to Mexico via the treacherous 135-mile-long Yucatán Channel. During a typical run, a speed boat transfers the human cargo onto a chartered yacht, which then docks at Cancún, Cozumel, or Isla Mujeres. The smuggled Cubans are given new clothes, usually beach apparel, to blend in with the tourists. "They are all over Quintana Roo and Yucatán," Rodríguez says.
Deadly violence is not the only obstacle these Cubans face. Those intercepted at sea by the Mexican navy face the possibility of immediate deportation. Those who make it to land and seek political asylum are jailed for 90 days or more while awaiting a hearing. Detentions of undocumented Cubans in Mexico skyrocketed from 254 in 2002 to 2,205 in 2006, according to the National Immigration Institute of Mexico. About a third of those were sent back to the island, where they likely face serious prison time for escaping Cuba.
And even if they make it to Texas, Cubans risk appearing before an unsympathetic federal judge who has denied political asylum to every Cuban who has gone through his courtroom, tacking on at least another 90 days of incarceration in exchange for American liberty.
In effect, the Mexico route is an end-around on the U.S. "wet foot/dry foot" policy in which Cubans caught at sea are taxied back to the island, but those who make it to U.S. soil can stay. The phenomenon has given rise to a new term: dusty foot.
"I am not happy with the [U.S.] policy," says Jorge Ferragut, a Cuban who settled in Houston in 1980 and later started Casa Cuba, an organization aimed at helping Cubans who arrive in Texas. "The people that try to leave, they are putting their lives in danger."
Sometime after 3:30 p.m. this past December 6, Alexander Pedraza Martínez made his way to an isolated corner in the dusty courtyard of a Mexican immigration detention center where he is sequestered. The thin 44-year-old Cuban physician with gray and white stubble on his face looked around to make sure none of the guards was watching. Then he pulled out a cell phone from the pocket of his green Bermuda shorts and dialed his sister-in-law's number in west Miami.
Within seconds, the cordless phone in Ivette Chung's kitchen blared. A thin 36-year-old dressed in aqua hospital scrubs, Chung got up from the dining room table, where she had been sipping Cuban coffee with Martínez's elderly aunt, Olga González, and answered the call.
"Hello?" Chung said anxiously. "It's him! It's Alexander!"
Martínez has been stuck in Tapachula, on the Guatemalan border, since June, wondering if he will ever make it to Miami. His predicament offers a glimpse into Mexico's haphazard immigration policy, which allows Cubans who enter by land to stay after paying a fine of 1,000 pesos ($92.07), but deports those intercepted at sea if the Communist government wants them back. The only way to avoid deportation is to claim political asylum and spend 90 days in detention until a Mexican immigration judge hears the case. Yet Martínez has been waiting more than 180 days for his hearing.
Back on the island, Martínez was a respected physician. He was vocal about his desire to leave, so vocal that he feared arrest. Twice in the past two years, he had been detained and interrogated by Cuban police. "I had no other way out, because Cuba always rejected my applications to go on medical missions," he says. "I had to be very careful in everything I did, so I had to find a way out."
More than six months ago, Martínez and 29 other Cubans, including a woman with a 15-month-old daughter, climbed aboard two rickety, tin-hulled boats powered by old car engines at a beach between Havana and Pinar del Río. Fifty-five-year-old Aquiles Cosme tagged along because he had nothing left in Cuba. A tall, heavyset fellow with probing brown eyes and thick gray hair, he had dreamed of reuniting with his only daughter, Yamila, and his wife, Maritza Gómez, who live in Westchester. Cosme had lived through three surgeries on his colon, but had no one to help him in Cuba.
So for four days, the novice seafarers navigated the Gulf of Mexico. "Our intention was to head north," Martínez says during a half-hour telephone conversation with his relatives and a reporter. "We wanted to get to Miami."
But then one of the boats' motors conked out about 50 nautical miles from the Yucatán coastline. "We were not going to leave anyone behind," Martínez adds.
As they drifted in the gulf, the Cubans observed another boat nearby. "We waved at them and got their attention," Martínez says. The unknown vessel was manned by a couple of Mexicans, who tied a rope to the Cubans' disabled boat and began towing them to shore.
Some 37 miles off the Mexican coast, and still in international waters, a Mexican naval ship picked them up. Soon they were delivered to Cancún International Airport, where they were placed in a detention cell, Martínez says. One day later, the doctor was granted permission to contact his sister-in-law in west Miami. "I wanted to let her know I was in Mexico but that I wanted to go to the United States," he says.
They were detained in Cancún for approximately one week and then transferred to the detention facility in Tapachula. Martínez describes the place: "There is a big cement wall with barbed wire that surrounds the complex," he says. "Guards with rifles man watchtowers along the perimeter. There are bars on the doors to our sleeping quarters. There is a closed security camera system in the hallways. This is a jail, no doubt."
He sleeps in a cell with 10 other people under a 500-watt light bulb that is never turned off. "It stays on all night long," he says. "It's psychological torture." His diet consists of white rice, red beans, shredded chicken meat, and bread.
He stays in contact with his Miami relatives via cell phones that other detainees have smuggled into the facility.
"Our [immigration] situation is unknown," Martínez laments. "We have tried everything to get out of this place, but no one will do anything."
Eighteen members of his group, including the 15-month-old baby and her mother, have been returned to Cuba. Six others were released, including four family members of an elderly man who died of natural causes shortly after the group arrived in Cancún. "I guess to shut them up they let them go," Martínez complains. "I know they made it to Miami."
From his group, only six remain. But he says there are about 67 Cubans being held in the facility. The detainees have received assistance from the Mexican chapter of Médicos sin Fronteras, a humanitarian aid group. Representatives of the group have met with seven high-ranking officials at the National Immigration Institute of Mexico, including Secretary Pablo Enríquez Rodríguez.
"Regrettably no one wants to respond," Martínez says.
The situation is even grimmer for Martínez's boat mate, Aquiles Cosme, who has lost more than 20 pounds since arriving in Tapachula. Back in Westchester, in the entertainment room of her four-bedroom residence, Aquiles's daughter Yamila dabs away tears. The pretty, fair-skinned 32-year-old with doll-like brown eyes is concerned her father won't make it out alive. "He has to eat a very basic diet so he doesn't bleed," she says. "He is under a lot of stress and tension."
During Cosme's incarceration in Mexico, Yamila has been frantically sending documentation of her father's illness to immigration officials. In addition, her father has undergone a colonoscopy in Mexico to prove he is sick. "The tests showed that he needs a complete reconstructive surgery of his colon," she says. "Yet two weeks have gone by and the immigration officials won't answer his questions about allowing his release. Are they waiting for him to die? It's just so frustrating."
Yamila believes Mexican authorities should release her father for humanitarian reasons. "They released the family members of the man who died in their custody," she argues. "They should do the same for my father." In recent weeks, Yamila, Martínez's family members, and the relatives of at least a dozen Cubans detained in Mexico have been appearing on Spanish-language radio and television programs to drum up public awareness and put pressure on the Mexican government to release the Cubans. U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla) wrote a letter to the Mexican ambassador in the United States to intervene on their behalf. But so far it doesn't seem to be working. "I need my father alive," says Yamila. "He is not going to make it over there."
In Cuba, Rey Rodríguez was a professional photographer in a provincial town. He considered entering the priesthood, but there was little support for seminarians on the island, so in 2003 he secured a visa to Mexico to further his studies. Then Rodríguez fell in love with a Mexican girl during a religious retreat and got her pregnant. He abandoned the seminary, and the couple decided to marry and start a family in Morelia, a colonial city in central Mexico.
In 2004, Rodríguez applied for Mexican residency. He received an unexpected answer. Authorities told him to leave the country in 72 hours or risk deportation. Instead of departing, Rodríguez purchased false documents that identified him as a Mexican citizen. He destroyed all belongings that mentioned his Cuban nationality.
He also worked to change his accent, mannerisms, and word choice to appear more Mexican. It wasn't easy.
His scheme worked for a while. Rodríguez married his girlfriend, their child was born, and he found part-time work at a Ford dealership. With his brown skin and straight black hair, Rodríguez passed three years without trouble.
Finally, last spring, Mexican immigration officials caught and detained him. They released him after issuing him a document stating his real name and nationality. (According to the National Immigration Institute of Mexico, authorities have detained 876 Cubans this year and deported 271.) "It was just a plain piece of paper with a stamp, but it was the only identification I had left," Rodríguez says. "The paper said that I had 30 days of parole in Mexico before I would be ordered out of the country."
Rodríguez decided to bolt for the Texas border. He had heard he could pass legally into the United States there. After a day on a bus from Morelia to Matamoros, he arrived at the border crossing. Fearing he would be caught and sent back to Cuba, he trembled as he approached the gate to the international bridge.
At the turnstile, he fumbled for change in his pockets. He had only a 10-peso piece, the wrong coin. He tried to stuff the peso into the slot, but it wouldn't fit. A Mexican guard approached, armed with an automatic rifle.
"Mexico is so corrupt," Rodríguez says. "You're constantly having to pay bribes to get anything done. I thought I would have to pay another bribe to get across."
But the guard offered the correct change. Rodríguez strolled across the bridge and came to a line of people curling out of the U.S. customs office. He began talking to others, telling his story.
The Mexicans were surprised a Cuban would wait in such a long line. They told him he could simply walk up to a window inside the office, declare his nationality, and claim political asylum. Rodríguez did, and hours later he walked into Texas.
Rodríguez recently moved to Houston, where he resides in a one-bedroom apartment with another Cuban, Silvino, whom he met while living near the border. He's optimistic about job prospects but misses his wife and two children, who are still living in Mexico. He has thought about trying to persuade his family to sneak across the border, but says he's going to wait until he has the money to bring them here legally.
Enveloped by darkness, a tractor rumbled down the hills of Cuba's western coast. It pulled a cart loaded with a makeshift boat constructed from aluminum tubing and an old car motor.
Fourteen Cubans crammed onto the boat, destined for a twisting river that leads to the Yucatán Channel. To Harry Reinier, who had been waiting with the others in a safe house for weeks, the vessel felt like a kitchen sink.
Reinier didn't know what to expect at sea. He had never set foot on a boat before this moment. Food and water were scarce. He brought a backpack full of canned food and two jugs of water for each member of the group. He knew only that their goal was the east coast of Mexico — a trip he believed would take four days. Reinier had little money, few resources, and no guarantee the boat would ever reach land.
But the risk would be worth it. Before he left Cuba this spring, Reinier worked in a bakery, kneading dough for 10 hours a day and $12 a week. His mother had fled Cuba years earlier for Peru. When a friend told Reinier about a planned escape to Mexico, he emptied his savings account and paid $500 to reserve a seat on the boat. It was blind faith; he had never met the men in charge of the trip. "Everyone wants to leave Cuba," Reinier says. "When there is money, and there is a chance, that's when they leave."
The boat sputtered east for two days before the motor died. For more than a week, it drifted on the open sea. Food and water ran out. There were only raw fish and rainwater.
Then they finally reached shore. After suffering dehydration, sunburn, and exhaustion; after battling sleep-deprived, crazed boat mates; after spending five months in a Mexican prison; and after enduring marathon bus rides to Mexico City and Matamoros, Reinier crossed the Texas border.
Following his release from prison, Reinier walked to a small park across the street from the customs office in Brownsville, Texas. Large trees shaded concrete benches, and recently arrived immigrants rested in the park or waited for companions. Reinier began asking strangers for advice.
He eventually found his way to a Catholic church in the heart of Brownsville. The church contacted Sister Margaret Merkens, an ex-Catholic schoolteacher from Missouri who runs a small shelter for refugees about 30 miles north of the border. After a few weeks at the shelter, Reinier felt stuck. Five months ago, when he stepped aboard the homemade boat and set out for Mexico, he knew it would be the last time he would see Cuba. His sister is still there, along with his wife and child. He misses the place.
Reinier rarely leaves the shelter grounds, which are surrounded by acres of dirt and sugar cane fields, miles from any businesses that might provide work. He sometimes hitches a ride into town to go to the bank and cash the $500 in government assistance checks he receives monthly.
Most days Reinier either studies English or cooks dinner for other refugees. He has applied for several jobs in surrounding towns but thinks whites and Mexican-Americans are suspicious of a black man with a funny Spanish accent.
He's waiting for an immigration hearing to get his green card. "You could put a paper in front of me that says, 'This black guy will be your slave,' and I would sign it," he says, "because I have no idea what I'm signing."
But Reinier has some hope. He figures he can venture out on his own as soon as he learns enough English. He doesn't know much about the Texas away from the border and wants to leave the state so he can find work. He has heard of a place called Kentucky; he dreams of settling down there.
"I have no idea what it's like there," he says, "but it sounds calm and peaceful, with plenty of jobs for Cubans. I think that it's a place where I could raise a family."
Stories like these have some anti-immigration groups fuming. The Federation for American Immigration Reform supports ending all preferential treatment of Cubans, who were first given a path to residency in the United States in 1966, when the government passed the Cuban Adjustment Act. Ira Mehlman, a representative for the federation, says the policy encourages all kinds of illegal immigrants — including potential terrorists — to seek asylum on American soil.
"It's a vestige of a Cold War-era policy that didn't make sense even during the Cold War. Castro has always been happy to export his political dissidents here to yell and scream," Mehlman says. "Cubans should be treated exactly like everyone else — no better and no worse."
One immigration judge at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, Howard E. Achtsam, regularly denies asylum to Cubans — apparently on principle. This forces them to spend more time in detention, though they're eventually freed. "If you're unfortunate enough to get Judge Achtsam, that means you're probably going to get denied," says attorney Jodie Goodwin. "I think he has got to be the only immigration judge in the country that routinely denies asylum for Cubans." (The U.S. Justice Department acknowledges that every Cuban who has passed through Port Isabel in the past two years has been denied asylum.)
Even some prominent Cuban-Americans question the legitimacy of asylum claims by "dusty foot" Cubans. Grisel Ybarra, an immigration attorney in Miami who fled Cuba in 1962, thinks the Cuban Adjustment Act shouldn't apply in Texas. She thinks most Cubans are seeking a better-paying job, not political freedom.
"These Cubans come here, tell some bullshit story at the border, and they get their green card," Ybarra says. "I came here seeking freedom, not hot dogs. My generation, we are refugees; they are immigrants. If you came to Miami and asked Cubans who came here before Mariel [in 1980], 99 percent of them would agree with me...."
Compounding the problem, Ybarra adds, are Cuban-Americans who support illegal human trafficking by paying tens of thousands of dollars to get their relatives off the island. "Cubans are the richest Hispanic group in the U.S.," she says. "We live in million-dollar homes in Coral Gables. We have the money to pay for boats to get people out of Cuba."
In the Florida Straits, the Coast Guard has become more aggressive toward suspected smugglers, according to Chief Petty Ofcr. Dana Warr of the U.S. Coast Guard. Officers are instructed to shoot at boats that do not respond to warning shots. Gunfire has a 100 percent success rate, Warr says, so it's no surprise that smugglers have changed direction. "We know it's happening, that there is a lot of maritime smuggling between Cuba and Mexico," he says. "We have a vested interest because, indirectly, that is illegal smuggling into the U.S."
If smuggling continues to affect the number of Cubans crossing the Texas border, Warr says, Coast Guard ships could patrol as far south as the Yucatán Channel. "The Caribbean Sea is two million square miles, and we try to patrol every bit of it," he says. "We realize we can't catch them all."
Quintana Roo Attorney General Bello Melchor Rodríguez acknowledges Mexican law enforcement is having a difficult time battling smugglers. Moreover, Rodríguez says, some rings employ assassins known as Los Zetas, or The Zs, former Mexican National Police officers and ex-special armed forces soldiers turned freelance mercenaries. Los Zetas are responsible for the turf war-related murder of reputed human trafficker Francisco Javier Fernández Ramírez this past July and the July 27 shooting of suspected Cuban smuggler Alberto Maya Mendoza, who spent two weeks in a coma in a Mérida hospital.
Jenaro Villamil, a reporter for Yucatán newspaper Periódico AM, says the rings act with impunity. "We are talking about a multimillion-dollar industry involving Mexican cartels, local businessmen, corrupt immigration authorities, and the Cuban-American mafia," Villamil says. "The battle for control is taking place in Quintana Roo, specifically in Cancún."
The roots of Miami resident Luis Lázaro Lara Morejón's bloody execution-style killing in Cancún date back at least five years. He and his then-wife, Alely Acosta, arrived in Miami from Cuba in 2002, when they took up residence in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condominium in west Hialeah, about a three-minute drive from Palmetto General Hospital. Over the next four years, the couple and their two children moved to two different condos within five miles of each other.
Little is known about Morejón's time in Miami-Dade County. Six of his neighbors New Times questioned couldn't remember him or Acosta, whom Morejón apparently split with sometime in 2005 — about a year before he fled to Mexico. New Times was not able to locate Acosta at her last known address, a one-bedroom apartment 10 blocks from the condo at 65th Street and 24th Avenue in west Hialeah. The place was empty during a recent visit, perhaps indicating she and the young children fled after the murder.
Morejón's name appears in the Miami-Dade County Clerk's online database, but no information is available about any charges, indicating he probably has a sealed criminal record. The clerk's website also reveals Morejón's Florida driver's license was suspended March 27, 2006, when he failed to pay a $162 fine for a traffic violation.
The reason is clear. By then, Morejón was in Cancún. He had joined more than 200 Cuban-Americans, many of whom are originally from Miami, in the smuggling business, asserts Quintana Roo prosecutor Melchor Rodríguez.
Shortly after his arrival, Morejón hooked up with Manuel Duarte Díaz, nicknamed "El Maní" ("The Peanut"), the alleged top man of a human trafficking ring operating in Mérida and Cancún, Rodríguez says. Morejón mediated between El Maní and Cuban-Americans in the United States seeking to get their relatives out of Cuba. The exiles would send Morejón the money and he would then pick up their relatives and take them to a safe house in Mérida. There he would provide them with food and new clothes so they wouldn't arouse the attention of law enforcement in the Yucatán province where Mérida is located.
Rodríguez won't say exactly how much Morejón was earning, but contends it was more than $100,000 per year.
According to police officials in Quintana Roo, El Maní and Morejón knew a local named David (authorities declined to provide his full name), who worked for the regional office of the National Immigration Institute of Mexico. The Cubans paid David to help them secure legal immigration status for the undocumented Cubans. The alleged smugglers were also doing business with Francisco Ramírez, the Cuban executed at the hands of Los Zetas. Ramírez owned a fishing charter business with Edwin Park, one of the two Mexicans executed alongside Morejón's girlfriend María Sáenz.
Rodríguez believes a rival Cuban-American ring paid Los Zetas to kill Morejón, his girlfriend, and his business associates. "Where we found the bodies and how they were killed points to Los Zetas," Rodríguez says.
Nearly six months after the murders, Mexican detectives have detained and questioned 20 individuals suspected of human trafficking. But the authorities still don't have any solid leads.
During a press conference this past December 10, Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said the killings and the trafficking are likely to continue as long as Cubans keep receiving automatic asylum in the States. "It has been legally proved," Medina Mora told reporters, "that people of Cuban origin but who are citizens of the United States are involved, financing these people-smuggling operations, obviously with the complicity of Mexicans."
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
Cuban farmers: Let the land be ours
Miami Herald
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Posted on Mon, Jan. 07, 2008
Cuban farmers: Let the land be ours
By MIAMI HERALD STAFF
SANTIAGO de CUBA, Cuba -- Cuban farmers have a suggestion for how the government can put millions of acres of fallow land to work and put more food on everyone's table.
Give state-owned lands to them, and allow a bit of capitalism.
''We are all hoping for some change -- a new system that allows you to have a better life and do some business,'' said Elena, a small farmer from the Santiago de Cuba area. ``Here, you are not even the boss of what's yours.''
Interim president Raúl Castro has made it clear as he grapples with the illness of his brother Fidel that one of the chief troubles the country faces is how to put more food on the dinner table without compromising the 49-year-old revolution's socialist doctrine.
He has declared war on inefficient farming, doubled and tripled some of the prices that the government pays to farmers, and complained that millions of acres are now idle. Offials have said they may even allow in more foreign investments in the food sector.
The result: The government claimed late last month that the agricultural economy had grown by a whopping 24 percent in 2007 -- after three years of steady drops.
But food prices remain high: One pound of tomatoes can cost a day's wage in a country where the average weekly salary is $3.25. Cuba is spending $1.6 billion annually on food imports, including $350 million last year from the United States alone.
While many farmers agree the Raúl Castro government is taking new interest in boosting production, they say that only giving land to private farmers and allowing a little more capitalism in their communist state will overcome the many obstacles in Cuba's largely government-ruled and hugely inefficient agricultural sector.
''They claim they are reviving agriculture,'' said Luis, a toothless farmer from central Cuba who turned to food crops after retiring as a cowhand. ``Reviving what? Look at the conditions I live in. Sometimes I can't sell at all, because if I did, I wouldn't have anything to eat.''
He looked at his property, a squalid collection of shacks with a dilapitated outhouse, where a phone book served as toilet paper.
Cuba's government owns 85 percent of the arable land and controls all supplies like seeds, herbicides, feed and fuel. Private farmers who own the other 15 percent produce 60 percent of the island's food, the government has acknowledged.
Experts estimate there are up to 225,000 private farmers in Cuba, as well as another 350,000 farmers working on cooperatives that own their own land, within a system that has long been dominated by Soviet-style, state-owned collective farms.
The government makes farmers sell a large quota of their products at cheap prices to the government, which then doles them out to Cubans as part of their monthly ration cards. Only after the farmers have met their government quotas can they sell the rest at food markets, where prices are set by supply and demand.
Under Raúl Castro, some farmers have begun to receive plots of neglected state land in the hopes they can turn productivity around, some growers said. It's an effort that began in the 1990s, and has apparently been revived as part of Castro's battle against marabú, the thorny bush that threatens much of the arable land.
''All you see around here is marabú,'' said Nelson, a farmer in central Ciego de Avila. ``The state has all this land, and they're doing nothing with it. They are going to start giving it to the people. We've been struggling with that for years, and it's just now that they are doing something about it.''
Raúl Castro says a lack of land is not the problem.
''It seems to me that there is plenty of land,'' Raúl Castro said in a July speech. ``As I drove in here I could see that everything around is green and pretty, but what drew my attention the most, what I found prettier, was the marabú growing along the road.''
The Cuban government estimates that at least a third of its arable land is covered in marabú, sometimes called ''witch's weed,'' because it's so hard to fight. Some three million acres of farm land is now covered by it, according to the government.
''We face the imperative of making our land produce more, and the land is there to be tilled,'' Raúl Castro said. ``We must offer these producers adequate incentives for the work they carry out in Cuba's suffocating heat.''
But farmers argue there are more problems: Prices the government pays for their crops barely allow them to cover their costs. Profits come only from what they can sell at the far more lucrative farmer's markets.
Supplies controlled by the government like animal feed and fertilizer are scarce and often expensive. If the government wants to increase food production, it needs to provide growers with machinery, fuel, and other necessities, farmers said.
''The problem is that the state pays the farmer very little and sells to the public very high,'' said Pablo, a farmer in central Cuba. ``I would be better off if I could sell directly to the public, because I get more that way. They say they are going to do things to stimulate production, but more or less they don't do anything.''
Orlando Lugo, head of the National Small Growers Association, told Bohemia magazine there were places last year that didn't plant potatoes, because farmers did not have the materials needed to prepare the soil.
With the proper resources, growers in Havana could double or triple output, he added..
''We need more resources,'' Lugo said. ``We lack tractors, and there's barely enough machinery and a shortage of fuel.''
When agriculture first tanked in the mid-90s after the loss of Soviet subsidies, Cuba broke up state farms and put them in the hands of private cooperatives while keeping ownership of the land. University of Florida agricultural economist William A. Messina Jr. said the move was a step in the right direction, but farmers still face too many restrictions.
''I think Cuban agriculture is trudging along,'' Messina said. ``There's a tremendous amount of potential, lots of good lands . . . [But] the whole administrative structure governing food sales and distribution has strained the system.''
Carmelo, a Ciego de Avila farmer who describes himself as a loyal member of the Communist Party, said all that is beginning to change because the government is listening to farmers' ideas.
''Since Raúl took over, there's been a lot of changes and help,'' he said. ``Here is the way I see it: The ... law says the land belongs to who works it. So fine. Let the land be ours and let the price be ours to set. We need a little capitalism -- adapted to socialism.''
The Miami Herald withheld the name of the correspondent who wrote this report and the surnames of the people quoted, because the reporter did not have the journalist visa required by the Cuban government to report from the island.
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Posted on Mon, Jan. 07, 2008
Cuban farmers: Let the land be ours
By MIAMI HERALD STAFF
SANTIAGO de CUBA, Cuba -- Cuban farmers have a suggestion for how the government can put millions of acres of fallow land to work and put more food on everyone's table.
Give state-owned lands to them, and allow a bit of capitalism.
''We are all hoping for some change -- a new system that allows you to have a better life and do some business,'' said Elena, a small farmer from the Santiago de Cuba area. ``Here, you are not even the boss of what's yours.''
Interim president Raúl Castro has made it clear as he grapples with the illness of his brother Fidel that one of the chief troubles the country faces is how to put more food on the dinner table without compromising the 49-year-old revolution's socialist doctrine.
He has declared war on inefficient farming, doubled and tripled some of the prices that the government pays to farmers, and complained that millions of acres are now idle. Offials have said they may even allow in more foreign investments in the food sector.
The result: The government claimed late last month that the agricultural economy had grown by a whopping 24 percent in 2007 -- after three years of steady drops.
But food prices remain high: One pound of tomatoes can cost a day's wage in a country where the average weekly salary is $3.25. Cuba is spending $1.6 billion annually on food imports, including $350 million last year from the United States alone.
While many farmers agree the Raúl Castro government is taking new interest in boosting production, they say that only giving land to private farmers and allowing a little more capitalism in their communist state will overcome the many obstacles in Cuba's largely government-ruled and hugely inefficient agricultural sector.
''They claim they are reviving agriculture,'' said Luis, a toothless farmer from central Cuba who turned to food crops after retiring as a cowhand. ``Reviving what? Look at the conditions I live in. Sometimes I can't sell at all, because if I did, I wouldn't have anything to eat.''
He looked at his property, a squalid collection of shacks with a dilapitated outhouse, where a phone book served as toilet paper.
Cuba's government owns 85 percent of the arable land and controls all supplies like seeds, herbicides, feed and fuel. Private farmers who own the other 15 percent produce 60 percent of the island's food, the government has acknowledged.
Experts estimate there are up to 225,000 private farmers in Cuba, as well as another 350,000 farmers working on cooperatives that own their own land, within a system that has long been dominated by Soviet-style, state-owned collective farms.
The government makes farmers sell a large quota of their products at cheap prices to the government, which then doles them out to Cubans as part of their monthly ration cards. Only after the farmers have met their government quotas can they sell the rest at food markets, where prices are set by supply and demand.
Under Raúl Castro, some farmers have begun to receive plots of neglected state land in the hopes they can turn productivity around, some growers said. It's an effort that began in the 1990s, and has apparently been revived as part of Castro's battle against marabú, the thorny bush that threatens much of the arable land.
''All you see around here is marabú,'' said Nelson, a farmer in central Ciego de Avila. ``The state has all this land, and they're doing nothing with it. They are going to start giving it to the people. We've been struggling with that for years, and it's just now that they are doing something about it.''
Raúl Castro says a lack of land is not the problem.
''It seems to me that there is plenty of land,'' Raúl Castro said in a July speech. ``As I drove in here I could see that everything around is green and pretty, but what drew my attention the most, what I found prettier, was the marabú growing along the road.''
The Cuban government estimates that at least a third of its arable land is covered in marabú, sometimes called ''witch's weed,'' because it's so hard to fight. Some three million acres of farm land is now covered by it, according to the government.
''We face the imperative of making our land produce more, and the land is there to be tilled,'' Raúl Castro said. ``We must offer these producers adequate incentives for the work they carry out in Cuba's suffocating heat.''
But farmers argue there are more problems: Prices the government pays for their crops barely allow them to cover their costs. Profits come only from what they can sell at the far more lucrative farmer's markets.
Supplies controlled by the government like animal feed and fertilizer are scarce and often expensive. If the government wants to increase food production, it needs to provide growers with machinery, fuel, and other necessities, farmers said.
''The problem is that the state pays the farmer very little and sells to the public very high,'' said Pablo, a farmer in central Cuba. ``I would be better off if I could sell directly to the public, because I get more that way. They say they are going to do things to stimulate production, but more or less they don't do anything.''
Orlando Lugo, head of the National Small Growers Association, told Bohemia magazine there were places last year that didn't plant potatoes, because farmers did not have the materials needed to prepare the soil.
With the proper resources, growers in Havana could double or triple output, he added..
''We need more resources,'' Lugo said. ``We lack tractors, and there's barely enough machinery and a shortage of fuel.''
When agriculture first tanked in the mid-90s after the loss of Soviet subsidies, Cuba broke up state farms and put them in the hands of private cooperatives while keeping ownership of the land. University of Florida agricultural economist William A. Messina Jr. said the move was a step in the right direction, but farmers still face too many restrictions.
''I think Cuban agriculture is trudging along,'' Messina said. ``There's a tremendous amount of potential, lots of good lands . . . [But] the whole administrative structure governing food sales and distribution has strained the system.''
Carmelo, a Ciego de Avila farmer who describes himself as a loyal member of the Communist Party, said all that is beginning to change because the government is listening to farmers' ideas.
''Since Raúl took over, there's been a lot of changes and help,'' he said. ``Here is the way I see it: The ... law says the land belongs to who works it. So fine. Let the land be ours and let the price be ours to set. We need a little capitalism -- adapted to socialism.''
The Miami Herald withheld the name of the correspondent who wrote this report and the surnames of the people quoted, because the reporter did not have the journalist visa required by the Cuban government to report from the island.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Cuban divorce is easy, housing is harder
AP
Cuban divorce is easy, housing is harder
By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press WriterSun Dec 30, 2:02 PM ET
After 21 years of marriage, Pedro Llera and his wife Maura decided to call it quits.
Their divorce took 20 minutes, but Llera compares what came next to "more than a year of open war in the house."
Sleeping in the same bed and sharing a single room with their 14-year-old daughter, they battled in Cuba's courts over who should stay in their second-floor, two-bedroom apartment in Havana's spiffy Vedado district.
Estranged Cuban couples sometimes remain under the same roof for years or even lifetimes, learning that while divorce on the island is easy, housing is not. The phenomenon is a testament not only to the communist-run island's severe housing shortage, but also to Cubans' ability to stay friendly — or at least civil — under the most awkward of circumstances.
"In a developed country, you get divorced and someone goes to a hotel and then to a new house," said Llera, a 60-year-old mechanic. "Here we had to keep living like a couple."
By law, Cubans cannot sell their homes and because the state controls almost all property, moves must be approved. Housing is so scarce, however, that often there is nowhere to go.
The government has long estimated an island-wide shortage of half a million homes. In 2006, officials reported construction of 110,000 houses, one of the largest single-year totals since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. But similar home-building initiatives this year were slowed by the rising costs of materials and Tropical Storm Noel's severe flooding of eastern Cuba.
Another Havana resident, 45-year-old Mirta, decided to divorce her husband of 18 years in 1997. The couple hired a lawyer and signed papers amicably.
But neither one could move out. A decade later, they still share the same two-bedroom apartment off the famed Malecon seaside promenade with their sons, now 18 and 20.
"We use the same kitchen, same bathroom. We have separate bedrooms, but the electricity, the telephone, the refrigerator — there's only one," Mirta said. "If you're going to get dressed, you have to hide in the bathroom or in the bedroom. There's no privacy."
She said she and her ex-husband clash over utility bills and race home from work for first use of the stove at dinner time.
"He's had other women but he always comes home to the same house," said Mirta, who asked that her full name and profession not be published because she did not want to be identified publicly as complaining about Cuba's housing crunch. "You want to be independent and open the door to your room, but with other women there, it is very uncomfortable."
The shortage is exacerbated by failed marriages. In 2006, the latest figures available, Cuba reported 56,377 marriages and 35,837 divorces. That's a yearly divorce rate of nearly 64 percent, though it does not account for those married and divorced multiple times.
Breakups are so common that Cubans joke that anyone whose parents stay together needs a lifetime of therapy.
"On some days there aren't weddings without at least one person who has been divorced," said civil registrar Patria Olano, who officiates up to 15 weddings a day at a "Marriage Palace," or government-run wedding hall, in Old Havana. "It's happy anyway because it's always a new beginning."
Couples pay $1.05 for the 5-minute legal transaction, sealed with a kiss. Olano reads a dense paragraph of regulations, then asks: "Are you sure you still want to get married?" Couples sometimes simply nod. A sign nearby reads "To get married, dress correctly. No shorts, tank tops or flip flops, please."
On a recent Friday, Pedro Angel Leon wore a sport coat to tie the knot with his girlfriend of nearly two years, Barbara Mendez. It was his third marriage, her second.
"The first marriage is for photos and parties," said Leon, a 52-year-old volleyball referee. "This time everything is more calm."
Leon moved in with his new bride and her parents before the wedding. "Finding a house is the hardest thing," he said.
Divorces are handled by notary publics and cost about the same as getting married. By law, there is no alimony unless either husband or wife is unemployed, and the communist system usually lends itself to austere lifestyles devoid of expensive possessions to fight over.
Cuba was for decades officially atheist and divorce does not carry the stigma it does in other countries. Many divorcees head back to their parents' homes, but problems arise if their former rooms have since been occupied by siblings' spouses and offspring.
Some divorced couples keep living together but throw up extra walls of plywood: One side is his, the other hers and only the children move back and forth freely.
Given ownership restrictions, a thriving black market exists for home-swapping. Every day, men and women gather along a Havana boulevard, offering trades. Some bring cardboard signs reading 1 x 2, meaning they want to swap one large apartment for two smaller ones — often because of divorce.
"Marriages end like everything else," said a man named Luis, who was hoping to trade his small apartment for a larger one. "But the house where you live, that stays with you."
Llera, the mechanic, claimed his home belonged to his 83-year-old father, who occupied the second bedroom. But his former wife said she had lived there long enough to stay put.
A court ruled in Llera's favor but the decision was overturned on appeal. As the legal battle dragged on, Llera demanded that his ex-wife sleep on the living room couch, and even called the police to make her comply.
A higher court eventually sided with him and his ex-wife moved in with relatives, leaving most of her clothes behind in protest. The failed marriage was Llera's second, and though he now lives with another woman, he doesn't plan to propose matrimony.
"It was such an ugly split," he said. "I don't want it to happen again."
Cuban divorce is easy, housing is harder
By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press WriterSun Dec 30, 2:02 PM ET
After 21 years of marriage, Pedro Llera and his wife Maura decided to call it quits.
Their divorce took 20 minutes, but Llera compares what came next to "more than a year of open war in the house."
Sleeping in the same bed and sharing a single room with their 14-year-old daughter, they battled in Cuba's courts over who should stay in their second-floor, two-bedroom apartment in Havana's spiffy Vedado district.
Estranged Cuban couples sometimes remain under the same roof for years or even lifetimes, learning that while divorce on the island is easy, housing is not. The phenomenon is a testament not only to the communist-run island's severe housing shortage, but also to Cubans' ability to stay friendly — or at least civil — under the most awkward of circumstances.
"In a developed country, you get divorced and someone goes to a hotel and then to a new house," said Llera, a 60-year-old mechanic. "Here we had to keep living like a couple."
By law, Cubans cannot sell their homes and because the state controls almost all property, moves must be approved. Housing is so scarce, however, that often there is nowhere to go.
The government has long estimated an island-wide shortage of half a million homes. In 2006, officials reported construction of 110,000 houses, one of the largest single-year totals since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. But similar home-building initiatives this year were slowed by the rising costs of materials and Tropical Storm Noel's severe flooding of eastern Cuba.
Another Havana resident, 45-year-old Mirta, decided to divorce her husband of 18 years in 1997. The couple hired a lawyer and signed papers amicably.
But neither one could move out. A decade later, they still share the same two-bedroom apartment off the famed Malecon seaside promenade with their sons, now 18 and 20.
"We use the same kitchen, same bathroom. We have separate bedrooms, but the electricity, the telephone, the refrigerator — there's only one," Mirta said. "If you're going to get dressed, you have to hide in the bathroom or in the bedroom. There's no privacy."
She said she and her ex-husband clash over utility bills and race home from work for first use of the stove at dinner time.
"He's had other women but he always comes home to the same house," said Mirta, who asked that her full name and profession not be published because she did not want to be identified publicly as complaining about Cuba's housing crunch. "You want to be independent and open the door to your room, but with other women there, it is very uncomfortable."
The shortage is exacerbated by failed marriages. In 2006, the latest figures available, Cuba reported 56,377 marriages and 35,837 divorces. That's a yearly divorce rate of nearly 64 percent, though it does not account for those married and divorced multiple times.
Breakups are so common that Cubans joke that anyone whose parents stay together needs a lifetime of therapy.
"On some days there aren't weddings without at least one person who has been divorced," said civil registrar Patria Olano, who officiates up to 15 weddings a day at a "Marriage Palace," or government-run wedding hall, in Old Havana. "It's happy anyway because it's always a new beginning."
Couples pay $1.05 for the 5-minute legal transaction, sealed with a kiss. Olano reads a dense paragraph of regulations, then asks: "Are you sure you still want to get married?" Couples sometimes simply nod. A sign nearby reads "To get married, dress correctly. No shorts, tank tops or flip flops, please."
On a recent Friday, Pedro Angel Leon wore a sport coat to tie the knot with his girlfriend of nearly two years, Barbara Mendez. It was his third marriage, her second.
"The first marriage is for photos and parties," said Leon, a 52-year-old volleyball referee. "This time everything is more calm."
Leon moved in with his new bride and her parents before the wedding. "Finding a house is the hardest thing," he said.
Divorces are handled by notary publics and cost about the same as getting married. By law, there is no alimony unless either husband or wife is unemployed, and the communist system usually lends itself to austere lifestyles devoid of expensive possessions to fight over.
Cuba was for decades officially atheist and divorce does not carry the stigma it does in other countries. Many divorcees head back to their parents' homes, but problems arise if their former rooms have since been occupied by siblings' spouses and offspring.
Some divorced couples keep living together but throw up extra walls of plywood: One side is his, the other hers and only the children move back and forth freely.
Given ownership restrictions, a thriving black market exists for home-swapping. Every day, men and women gather along a Havana boulevard, offering trades. Some bring cardboard signs reading 1 x 2, meaning they want to swap one large apartment for two smaller ones — often because of divorce.
"Marriages end like everything else," said a man named Luis, who was hoping to trade his small apartment for a larger one. "But the house where you live, that stays with you."
Llera, the mechanic, claimed his home belonged to his 83-year-old father, who occupied the second bedroom. But his former wife said she had lived there long enough to stay put.
A court ruled in Llera's favor but the decision was overturned on appeal. As the legal battle dragged on, Llera demanded that his ex-wife sleep on the living room couch, and even called the police to make her comply.
A higher court eventually sided with him and his ex-wife moved in with relatives, leaving most of her clothes behind in protest. The failed marriage was Llera's second, and though he now lives with another woman, he doesn't plan to propose matrimony.
"It was such an ugly split," he said. "I don't want it to happen again."
Monday, December 24, 2007
Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo
New York Times
December 25, 2007
Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo
By CORNELIA DEAN
Through accidents of geography and history, Cuba is a priceless ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so worried about what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power and, as is widely anticipated, the American government relaxes or ends its trade embargo.
Cuba, by far the region’s largest island, sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals, some seen nowhere else.
And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba’s economy has stagnated.
Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes.
Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and elsewhere, met last month in Cancún, Mexico, to discuss the island’s resources and how to continue to protect them.
Cuba has done “what we should have done — identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside,” said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law School who attended the conference.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new environmental laws.
But, he said in an interview, “an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer” when the embargo ends.
By some estimates, tourism in Cuba is increasing 10 percent annually. At a minimum, Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, said in an interview at the conference, “we can guess that tourism is going to increase in a very fast way” when the embargo ends.
“It is estimated we could double tourism in one year,” said Mr. Rey, who heads environmental efforts at the Cuban ministry of science, technology and environment.
About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs from Haiti west almost to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It offers crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell’s thrush, whose summer home is in the mountains of New England and Canada, and the North American warblers that stop in Cuba on their way south for the winter.
Zapata Swamp, on the island’s southern coast, may be notorious for its mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas.
Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in the region. Its relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial for numerous marine species, including some whose larvae can be carried by currents into waters of the United States, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology.
Dr. Lindeman, who did not attend the conference but who has spent many years studying Cuba’s marine ecology, said in an interview that some of these creatures were important commercial and recreational species like the spiny lobster, grouper or snapper.
Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. And like other corals in the region, they reeled when a mysterious die-off of sea urchins left them with algae overgrowth. But they have largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices.
Diving in them “is like going back in time 50 years,” said David Guggenheim, a conference organizer and an ecologist and member of the advisory board of the Harte Research Institute, which helped organize the meeting along with the Center for International Policy, a private group in Washington.
In a report last year, the World Wildlife Fund said that “in dramatic contrast” to its island neighbors, Cuba’s beaches, mangroves, reefs, seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their biggest threat, the report said, was “the prospect of sudden and massive growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts.”
To prepare for that day, researchers from a number of American institutions and organizations are working on ecological conservation in Cuba, including Harte, the Wildlife Conservation Society, universities like Tulane and Georgetown, institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden, and others. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle migration and land use patterns.
Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a tradition of collaboration that dates from the mid-19th century, when Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. In the 20th century, naturalists from Harvard and the University of Havana worked together for decades.
But now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of problems. The Cancún meeting itself illustrated one.
“We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the United States,” Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero, the director of the Cuban science and environment agency and leader of the Cuban delegation, said through a translator in opening the meeting. “This we cannot do.” While the American government grants licenses to some (but not all) American scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban researchers seeking permission to come to the United States, researchers from both countries said.
So meeting organizers turned to Alberto Mariano Vázquez De la Cerda, a retired admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate from Texas A & M and a member of the Harte advisory board, who supervised arrangements for the Cuban conferees.
The travel situation is potentially even worse for researchers at state institutions in Florida. Jennifer Gebelein, a geographer at Florida International University who uses global positioning systems to track land use in Cuba, told the meeting about restrictions imposed by the Florida Legislature, which has barred state colleges from using public or private funds for travel to Cuba.
As a result of this move and federal restrictions, Dr. Gebelein said “we’re not sure what is going to happen” with her research program.
On the other hand, John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that he had difficulty obtaining permission from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs.
“I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do,” said Dr. Thorbjarnarson, who did not attend the conference. “It is not easy to walk that line.”
But he had nothing but praise for his scientific colleagues in Cuba. Like other American researchers, he described them as doing highly competent work with meager resources. “They are a remarkable bunch of people,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson said, “but my counterparts make on average probably less than $20 a month.”
American scientists, foundations and other groups are ready to help with equipment and supplies but are hampered by the embargo. For example, Maria Elena Ibarra Martín, a marine scientist at the University of Havana, said through a translator that American organizations had provided Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other equipment. They shipped it via Canada.
Another thorny issue is ships.
“If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out on a ship,” said Robert E. Hueter, who directs the center for shark research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., and attended the Cancún meeting.
But, he and others said, the United States government will not allow ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in the previous six months, and the Cuban government will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters.
One answer might be vessels already in Cuba, but nowadays they are often tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Cancún meeting said.
And even with a ship, several American researchers at the conference said, it is difficult to get Cuban government permission to travel to places like the island’s northwest coast, the stretch closest to the United States. As a result, that region is the least-studied part of the Cuban coast, Dr. Guggenheim and others said.
Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of information researchers almost everywhere else take for granted: the Internet.
Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to the Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to people who need it most.
In any event, “we find we do not have access,” Teresita Borges Hernández, a biologist in the environment section of Cuba’s science and technology ministry, said through a translator. She appealed to the Americans at the meeting to do “anything, anything to improve this situation.”
Dr. Guggenheim echoed the concern and said even telephone calls to Cuba often cost as much as $2 a minute. “These details, though they may seem trite,” he said, “are central to our ability to collaborate.”
Dr. Gebelein and several of the Cubans at the meeting said that some American Web sites barred access to people whose electronic addresses identify them as Cuban. She suggested that the group organize a Web site in a third country, a site where they could all post data, papers and the like, and everyone would have access to it.
For Dr. Guggenheim, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they contemplate a more prosperous future can be seen 90 miles north, in the Florida Keys. There, he said, too many people have poured into an ecosystem too fragile to support them.
“As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort,” Dr. Guggenheim said, “we don’t want to see and they don’t want to see the same mistakes, where you literally love something to death.”
But there are people skeptical that Cuba will resist this kind of pressure. One of them is Mr. Houck.
The environmental laws he worked on are “a very strong structure,” he said, “But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the wrong thing. Over time, you can wear the law down.”
That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, “where there’s no armed citizenry out there with high-powered science groups pushing in the opposite direction. What they lack is the counter pressure of environmental groups and environmental activists.”
As Mr. Rey and Daniel Whittle, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, put it in the book “Cuban Studies 37” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), “policymaking in Cuba is still centralized and top down.” But, they wrote, “much can be done to enhance public input in policymaking.”
Mr. Rey said in the interview that Cubans must be encouraged to use their environmental laws. By “some kind of cultural habit,” he said, people in Cuba rarely turn to the courts to challenge decisions they dislike.
“There’s no litigation, just a few cases here and there,” Mr. Rey said. “In most community situations if a citizen has a problem he writes a letter. That’s O.K., but it’s not all the possibilities.”
Mr. Rey added, “We have to promote more involvement, not only in access to justice and claims, but in taking part in the decision process.”
“I know the state has a good system from the legislative point of view,” Mr. Rey said. But as he and Mr. Whittle noted in their paper, “the question now is whether government leaders can and will do what it takes to put the plan on the ground.”
December 25, 2007
Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo
By CORNELIA DEAN
Through accidents of geography and history, Cuba is a priceless ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so worried about what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power and, as is widely anticipated, the American government relaxes or ends its trade embargo.
Cuba, by far the region’s largest island, sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals, some seen nowhere else.
And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba’s economy has stagnated.
Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes.
Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and elsewhere, met last month in Cancún, Mexico, to discuss the island’s resources and how to continue to protect them.
Cuba has done “what we should have done — identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside,” said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law School who attended the conference.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new environmental laws.
But, he said in an interview, “an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer” when the embargo ends.
By some estimates, tourism in Cuba is increasing 10 percent annually. At a minimum, Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, said in an interview at the conference, “we can guess that tourism is going to increase in a very fast way” when the embargo ends.
“It is estimated we could double tourism in one year,” said Mr. Rey, who heads environmental efforts at the Cuban ministry of science, technology and environment.
About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs from Haiti west almost to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It offers crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell’s thrush, whose summer home is in the mountains of New England and Canada, and the North American warblers that stop in Cuba on their way south for the winter.
Zapata Swamp, on the island’s southern coast, may be notorious for its mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas.
Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in the region. Its relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial for numerous marine species, including some whose larvae can be carried by currents into waters of the United States, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology.
Dr. Lindeman, who did not attend the conference but who has spent many years studying Cuba’s marine ecology, said in an interview that some of these creatures were important commercial and recreational species like the spiny lobster, grouper or snapper.
Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. And like other corals in the region, they reeled when a mysterious die-off of sea urchins left them with algae overgrowth. But they have largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices.
Diving in them “is like going back in time 50 years,” said David Guggenheim, a conference organizer and an ecologist and member of the advisory board of the Harte Research Institute, which helped organize the meeting along with the Center for International Policy, a private group in Washington.
In a report last year, the World Wildlife Fund said that “in dramatic contrast” to its island neighbors, Cuba’s beaches, mangroves, reefs, seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their biggest threat, the report said, was “the prospect of sudden and massive growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts.”
To prepare for that day, researchers from a number of American institutions and organizations are working on ecological conservation in Cuba, including Harte, the Wildlife Conservation Society, universities like Tulane and Georgetown, institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden, and others. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle migration and land use patterns.
Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a tradition of collaboration that dates from the mid-19th century, when Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. In the 20th century, naturalists from Harvard and the University of Havana worked together for decades.
But now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of problems. The Cancún meeting itself illustrated one.
“We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the United States,” Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero, the director of the Cuban science and environment agency and leader of the Cuban delegation, said through a translator in opening the meeting. “This we cannot do.” While the American government grants licenses to some (but not all) American scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban researchers seeking permission to come to the United States, researchers from both countries said.
So meeting organizers turned to Alberto Mariano Vázquez De la Cerda, a retired admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate from Texas A & M and a member of the Harte advisory board, who supervised arrangements for the Cuban conferees.
The travel situation is potentially even worse for researchers at state institutions in Florida. Jennifer Gebelein, a geographer at Florida International University who uses global positioning systems to track land use in Cuba, told the meeting about restrictions imposed by the Florida Legislature, which has barred state colleges from using public or private funds for travel to Cuba.
As a result of this move and federal restrictions, Dr. Gebelein said “we’re not sure what is going to happen” with her research program.
On the other hand, John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that he had difficulty obtaining permission from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs.
“I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do,” said Dr. Thorbjarnarson, who did not attend the conference. “It is not easy to walk that line.”
But he had nothing but praise for his scientific colleagues in Cuba. Like other American researchers, he described them as doing highly competent work with meager resources. “They are a remarkable bunch of people,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson said, “but my counterparts make on average probably less than $20 a month.”
American scientists, foundations and other groups are ready to help with equipment and supplies but are hampered by the embargo. For example, Maria Elena Ibarra Martín, a marine scientist at the University of Havana, said through a translator that American organizations had provided Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other equipment. They shipped it via Canada.
Another thorny issue is ships.
“If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out on a ship,” said Robert E. Hueter, who directs the center for shark research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., and attended the Cancún meeting.
But, he and others said, the United States government will not allow ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in the previous six months, and the Cuban government will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters.
One answer might be vessels already in Cuba, but nowadays they are often tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Cancún meeting said.
And even with a ship, several American researchers at the conference said, it is difficult to get Cuban government permission to travel to places like the island’s northwest coast, the stretch closest to the United States. As a result, that region is the least-studied part of the Cuban coast, Dr. Guggenheim and others said.
Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of information researchers almost everywhere else take for granted: the Internet.
Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to the Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to people who need it most.
In any event, “we find we do not have access,” Teresita Borges Hernández, a biologist in the environment section of Cuba’s science and technology ministry, said through a translator. She appealed to the Americans at the meeting to do “anything, anything to improve this situation.”
Dr. Guggenheim echoed the concern and said even telephone calls to Cuba often cost as much as $2 a minute. “These details, though they may seem trite,” he said, “are central to our ability to collaborate.”
Dr. Gebelein and several of the Cubans at the meeting said that some American Web sites barred access to people whose electronic addresses identify them as Cuban. She suggested that the group organize a Web site in a third country, a site where they could all post data, papers and the like, and everyone would have access to it.
For Dr. Guggenheim, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they contemplate a more prosperous future can be seen 90 miles north, in the Florida Keys. There, he said, too many people have poured into an ecosystem too fragile to support them.
“As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort,” Dr. Guggenheim said, “we don’t want to see and they don’t want to see the same mistakes, where you literally love something to death.”
But there are people skeptical that Cuba will resist this kind of pressure. One of them is Mr. Houck.
The environmental laws he worked on are “a very strong structure,” he said, “But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the wrong thing. Over time, you can wear the law down.”
That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, “where there’s no armed citizenry out there with high-powered science groups pushing in the opposite direction. What they lack is the counter pressure of environmental groups and environmental activists.”
As Mr. Rey and Daniel Whittle, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, put it in the book “Cuban Studies 37” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), “policymaking in Cuba is still centralized and top down.” But, they wrote, “much can be done to enhance public input in policymaking.”
Mr. Rey said in the interview that Cubans must be encouraged to use their environmental laws. By “some kind of cultural habit,” he said, people in Cuba rarely turn to the courts to challenge decisions they dislike.
“There’s no litigation, just a few cases here and there,” Mr. Rey said. “In most community situations if a citizen has a problem he writes a letter. That’s O.K., but it’s not all the possibilities.”
Mr. Rey added, “We have to promote more involvement, not only in access to justice and claims, but in taking part in the decision process.”
“I know the state has a good system from the legislative point of view,” Mr. Rey said. But as he and Mr. Whittle noted in their paper, “the question now is whether government leaders can and will do what it takes to put the plan on the ground.”
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Carlos "Patato" Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81
New York Times
December 6, 2007
Carlos Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81
By BEN SISARIO
Carlos Valdés, better known as Patato, whose melodic conga playing made him a giant of Latin jazz in Cuba and then for more than half a century in America, died on Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his manager, Charles Carlini.
Born in Havana, Patato (a reference from Cuban slang to his diminutive size) played in the 1940s and early ’50s with important groups like Sonora Matancera and Conjunto Casino. He became a star in the early days of Cuban television for his virtuosic playing and for his showmanship; his signature song was “El Baile del Pingüino” (“The Penguin Dance”), which he illustrated with side-to-side, penguinlike movement in perfect time.
He came to the United States in the early 1950s and settled in New York, where he quickly established himself as an indispensable player, performing and recording with some of the top names in jazz and Latin music. In the ’50s and ’60s he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Machito, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones; he played with Herbie Mann from 1959 to 1972.
Known for his fluid, improvisatory melodies, Mr. Valdés tuned his drums tightly to produce clear, precise tones, and he popularized the playing of multiple conga drums; when he began his career, conga players, or congueros, typically used only one or two drums, but Mr. Valdés played three, four or more to allow a wider range of tones.
He is also associated with using a key to tune the congas instead of heating the skins with a flame. Latin Percussion, the leading Latin drum company, makes a Patato line of conga drums.
Mr. Valdés had an influential role in expanding the rumba form. His 1968 album “Patato & Totico,” recorded with Eugenio (Totico) Arango, a singer who was a boyhood friend from Havana, was particularly inventive. Instead of sticking to the usual format of drums and vocals, the album added several other instruments played by star musicians like Israel (Cachao) López on bass and Arsenio Rodríguez on tres, a six-string Cuban guitar. It is said to be Mr. Rodríguez’s last recording session, and its innovations had a lasting effect on Latin jazz.
“I had these ideas and wanted to advance them through jazz,” Mr. Valdés said in an interview with Latin Beat magazine in 1997. “I wanted something progressive.”
He was also a flamboyant performer who knew how to work a crowd. One of his performance hallmarks was jumping atop his drums and dancing while keeping the beat. In the 1956 film “And God Created Woman,” he is briefly seen teaching Brigitte Bardot to dance the mambo.
He is survived by his wife, Julia; two daughters, Yvonne and Regla; and two grandchildren, Jose Valdes and Mayra Garcia.
Mr. Valdés never stopped touring, recently working with his group the Conga Kings, which also includes Giovanni Hidalgo and Candido Camero, a fellow octogenarian. While flying back a few weeks ago from concerts in California — including one at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Nov. 9 — he had trouble breathing, and the plane made an emergency landing for him in Cleveland. He had been hospitalized since then.
December 6, 2007
Carlos Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81
By BEN SISARIO
Carlos Valdés, better known as Patato, whose melodic conga playing made him a giant of Latin jazz in Cuba and then for more than half a century in America, died on Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his manager, Charles Carlini.
Born in Havana, Patato (a reference from Cuban slang to his diminutive size) played in the 1940s and early ’50s with important groups like Sonora Matancera and Conjunto Casino. He became a star in the early days of Cuban television for his virtuosic playing and for his showmanship; his signature song was “El Baile del Pingüino” (“The Penguin Dance”), which he illustrated with side-to-side, penguinlike movement in perfect time.
He came to the United States in the early 1950s and settled in New York, where he quickly established himself as an indispensable player, performing and recording with some of the top names in jazz and Latin music. In the ’50s and ’60s he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Machito, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones; he played with Herbie Mann from 1959 to 1972.
Known for his fluid, improvisatory melodies, Mr. Valdés tuned his drums tightly to produce clear, precise tones, and he popularized the playing of multiple conga drums; when he began his career, conga players, or congueros, typically used only one or two drums, but Mr. Valdés played three, four or more to allow a wider range of tones.
He is also associated with using a key to tune the congas instead of heating the skins with a flame. Latin Percussion, the leading Latin drum company, makes a Patato line of conga drums.
Mr. Valdés had an influential role in expanding the rumba form. His 1968 album “Patato & Totico,” recorded with Eugenio (Totico) Arango, a singer who was a boyhood friend from Havana, was particularly inventive. Instead of sticking to the usual format of drums and vocals, the album added several other instruments played by star musicians like Israel (Cachao) López on bass and Arsenio Rodríguez on tres, a six-string Cuban guitar. It is said to be Mr. Rodríguez’s last recording session, and its innovations had a lasting effect on Latin jazz.
“I had these ideas and wanted to advance them through jazz,” Mr. Valdés said in an interview with Latin Beat magazine in 1997. “I wanted something progressive.”
He was also a flamboyant performer who knew how to work a crowd. One of his performance hallmarks was jumping atop his drums and dancing while keeping the beat. In the 1956 film “And God Created Woman,” he is briefly seen teaching Brigitte Bardot to dance the mambo.
He is survived by his wife, Julia; two daughters, Yvonne and Regla; and two grandchildren, Jose Valdes and Mayra Garcia.
Mr. Valdés never stopped touring, recently working with his group the Conga Kings, which also includes Giovanni Hidalgo and Candido Camero, a fellow octogenarian. While flying back a few weeks ago from concerts in California — including one at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Nov. 9 — he had trouble breathing, and the plane made an emergency landing for him in Cleveland. He had been hospitalized since then.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Cuba puts 'camel' bus out to pasture
Chicago Tribune
WORLD
Cuba puts 'camel' bus out to pasture
Humped and aging vehicles being phased out for Chinese fleet
By Michael Martinez
Tribune correspondent
November 19, 2007
HAVANA
The worst of Cuba's aging buses is called "the camel." It looks even uglier than that.
It's actually a tractor-trailer that hauls a homemade double-humped cabin made of two bus shells welded together, a peculiarly Cuban contrivance whose patchwork conjures up a post-apocalyptic image of transit.
While the big rig is depicted affectionately in political cartoons on state-run television, it also remains the starkest emblem of the island's transportation woes, especially at rush hour when commuters pack the 18-wheelers right up to their 300-person capacity.
"The only difference is that sardines come with olive oil and tomato sauce," wisecracked Rafael Martinez, 34, a camel commuter who sat on a park bench in central Havana as about 100 other people waited in line for the next bus.
With public transportation emerging as the No. 1 concern among Cubans, interim leader Raul Castro has initiated several recent measures that analysts see as a test of whether he can address the country's toughest issues during the long convalescence of his brother Fidel.
Raul Castro fired the minister overseeing the transportation sector, a move viewed as aggressive because the sacking of the Cabinet-level official came just three months after Fidel Castro handed over provisional control of the government after his surgery.
No official explanation for the firing was given.
In March, new Transport Minister Jorge Luis Sierra described Cuba's transportation infrastructure as having "serious" problems.
"It has been decapitalized and suffers serious organizational flaws," he said, adding that illegal ticket sales and passengers who evade paying fares have exacerbated the deficiencies.
In seeking to turn the problems around, Cuban officials last month unveiled 552 new, cleaner-running Yutong buses from China for intercity travel in Havana, with hundreds more to arrive by December. Last year, Cuba bought 1,000 coach buses from China for long-distance travel among provinces.
In a communist country where having an automobile is a luxury, public transportation is a cornerstone for day-to-day living. It's also central to Raul Castro's efforts to get workers to the office on time and make Cuba's developing economy more efficient.
"One of the things that his regime has to do is satisfy the immediate demands of the Cubans, and the immediate demands of the Cubans are more food, more consumer goods and better transportation," said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "His legitimacy is going to be based on whether he can deliver on those things."
Last year, fewer people used Havana buses, falling to a daily rate of 460,000 passengers in a city of 2.2 million people. That figure has since risen to 580,000, thanks to the new buses, and officials hope they will bring daily ridership to more than 1 million people next year, according to the government daily Granma.
The new Yutongs have been well-received, especially by those who travel hundreds of miles from the provinces to the island's capital.
In many of those provinces, local transportation often amounts to hopping onto the back of a truck for the equivalent of four cents or riding in a horse-drawn cart, said Eddie Trujillo, 47, of Sancti Spiritus, who was hoping to be picked up in a new Yutong for his four-hour ride home. He was waiting in a Havana terminal with about 200 other people.
At another terminal in Havana, Dereyda Ramirez, 38, of Moa, and Dulce Estable, 80, of Cruces, said they like that the new buses have air conditioning, two television monitors for movies -- and a bathroom. On the old coach buses, passengers had to wait until the next stop to use a restroom, they said.
On the streets of Havana, Cubans wryly liken their experiences on the camels to advisories for mature-audience films. There's sex, violence and adult language. There are bodies pressed suggestively together, confrontations with pickpockets and audible angst about commuting in a non-air-conditioned semi with a steel floor.
The "camel" was born during Cuba's "special period" in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and ended its subsidies to Cuba, forcing the island into wartime-like austerity.
"Next to the food shortages, those buses are the most everyday and visible symbol of the special period," said analyst Philip Peters of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
Even with new buses, many Cubans still hitchhike because some say they are not convinced overall service is better. After waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop with about 20 other commuters, 23-year-old Hector Ramonet stepped off the curb and tried to hitch a ride.
"I'm in a hurry," he said. He had no takers. Five minutes later, a Yutong arrived.
On one camel bus, driver Joel Perez, 44, made sure the cabin was empty at the end of a run. He was looking forward to a Yutong replacement.
"No," he said about the camels, "I'm not going to miss them."
WORLD
Cuba puts 'camel' bus out to pasture
Humped and aging vehicles being phased out for Chinese fleet
By Michael Martinez
Tribune correspondent
November 19, 2007
HAVANA
The worst of Cuba's aging buses is called "the camel." It looks even uglier than that.
It's actually a tractor-trailer that hauls a homemade double-humped cabin made of two bus shells welded together, a peculiarly Cuban contrivance whose patchwork conjures up a post-apocalyptic image of transit.
While the big rig is depicted affectionately in political cartoons on state-run television, it also remains the starkest emblem of the island's transportation woes, especially at rush hour when commuters pack the 18-wheelers right up to their 300-person capacity.
"The only difference is that sardines come with olive oil and tomato sauce," wisecracked Rafael Martinez, 34, a camel commuter who sat on a park bench in central Havana as about 100 other people waited in line for the next bus.
With public transportation emerging as the No. 1 concern among Cubans, interim leader Raul Castro has initiated several recent measures that analysts see as a test of whether he can address the country's toughest issues during the long convalescence of his brother Fidel.
Raul Castro fired the minister overseeing the transportation sector, a move viewed as aggressive because the sacking of the Cabinet-level official came just three months after Fidel Castro handed over provisional control of the government after his surgery.
No official explanation for the firing was given.
In March, new Transport Minister Jorge Luis Sierra described Cuba's transportation infrastructure as having "serious" problems.
"It has been decapitalized and suffers serious organizational flaws," he said, adding that illegal ticket sales and passengers who evade paying fares have exacerbated the deficiencies.
In seeking to turn the problems around, Cuban officials last month unveiled 552 new, cleaner-running Yutong buses from China for intercity travel in Havana, with hundreds more to arrive by December. Last year, Cuba bought 1,000 coach buses from China for long-distance travel among provinces.
In a communist country where having an automobile is a luxury, public transportation is a cornerstone for day-to-day living. It's also central to Raul Castro's efforts to get workers to the office on time and make Cuba's developing economy more efficient.
"One of the things that his regime has to do is satisfy the immediate demands of the Cubans, and the immediate demands of the Cubans are more food, more consumer goods and better transportation," said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "His legitimacy is going to be based on whether he can deliver on those things."
Last year, fewer people used Havana buses, falling to a daily rate of 460,000 passengers in a city of 2.2 million people. That figure has since risen to 580,000, thanks to the new buses, and officials hope they will bring daily ridership to more than 1 million people next year, according to the government daily Granma.
The new Yutongs have been well-received, especially by those who travel hundreds of miles from the provinces to the island's capital.
In many of those provinces, local transportation often amounts to hopping onto the back of a truck for the equivalent of four cents or riding in a horse-drawn cart, said Eddie Trujillo, 47, of Sancti Spiritus, who was hoping to be picked up in a new Yutong for his four-hour ride home. He was waiting in a Havana terminal with about 200 other people.
At another terminal in Havana, Dereyda Ramirez, 38, of Moa, and Dulce Estable, 80, of Cruces, said they like that the new buses have air conditioning, two television monitors for movies -- and a bathroom. On the old coach buses, passengers had to wait until the next stop to use a restroom, they said.
On the streets of Havana, Cubans wryly liken their experiences on the camels to advisories for mature-audience films. There's sex, violence and adult language. There are bodies pressed suggestively together, confrontations with pickpockets and audible angst about commuting in a non-air-conditioned semi with a steel floor.
The "camel" was born during Cuba's "special period" in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and ended its subsidies to Cuba, forcing the island into wartime-like austerity.
"Next to the food shortages, those buses are the most everyday and visible symbol of the special period," said analyst Philip Peters of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
Even with new buses, many Cubans still hitchhike because some say they are not convinced overall service is better. After waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop with about 20 other commuters, 23-year-old Hector Ramonet stepped off the curb and tried to hitch a ride.
"I'm in a hurry," he said. He had no takers. Five minutes later, a Yutong arrived.
On one camel bus, driver Joel Perez, 44, made sure the cabin was empty at the end of a run. He was looking forward to a Yutong replacement.
"No," he said about the camels, "I'm not going to miss them."
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