Nos miran @yoanisanchez

John Paul Rathbone escribe un articulo sobre Yoani Sánchez, luego Mr. Michael Redwood responde otro articulo defendiendo las bondades del sistema socialista cubano, entonces por ultimo Mr. Paul Nabavi aclara la cortina de humo romántica sobre la vida en Cuba. Lo bueno de todo es que nos están mirando alla afuera.  (Tomado de FT.com)

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Harsh realities of life in Cuba

From Mr Paul Nabavi.
Sir, Having lived in Cuba for more than six years to 2007, I take issue with Michael Redwood’s romantic vision of life in contemporary Cuba (Letters, February 13) and his assertion that it provides pointers to “the more sustainable society” our world needs.
Like an impressionable tourist, Mr Redwood cites the use of “bicycle rickshaws” for getting round narrow streets and says the stock of pre-1959 private cars is perhaps no worse than our own “over-extended car ownership”. He makes the unsubstantiated claim that Cuba is “realising its potential to create a transport infrastructure which does not follow the errors of the west”. I recommend he joins ordinary Cubans as they stand for hours in the tropical sun waiting for scarce buses or simply for someone to stop and give them a lift just so they can get to work.
I agree that Cuba provides its citizens with valuable public goods (healthcare, education and basic nutrition) absent in many countries of similar income levels, but surely Mr Redwood goes too far in saying that in education and health (and organic market gardening!) the Cubans “beat most of the rest of the world hands down”. People have commented on original research in Cuban medicine, and I am great admirer of the skills and dedication of Cuban doctors. However, if you talk privately to Cubans who actually use public services, they will tell you of slipping standards in basic care in hospitals and in schools. Most shockingly, I was told of the need for Cubans to give presents and make payments under the table to get many of the basic services they require.
I share Mr Redwood’s regard for the resilience and creativity of the Cuban people. They are admirable in surviving in a dysfunctional system in which many manage against the odds to live with decency and dignity. However, one must acknowledge the darker side of Cuban society, namely the widespread petty corruption and pilfering. If Mr Redwood spent some time talking with Cuban people, he would understand some of the daily realities they face in making ends meet, getting access to basic services and in putting food on the table (what they call resolver).
Mr Redwood describes a people “who appear amazingly content despite their many deprivations”. It is, of course, hard to judge other people’s happiness but I would point out that many Cuban families are split between those members who live in Cuba and those whose frustrations have led them to emigrate in search of better opportunities elsewhere. The resulting family separations cause much heartache and distress.
After decades of underinvestment in physical infrastructure, Cuba requires significant capital and significant institutional reforms. Mr Redwood warns against a rush to globalisation, which he trivialises as having “German luxury goods and American fast food outlets”. He underestimates the challenges faced by Cuba as much as he presents a romantic view of the present reality.
Paul Nabavi, Stonegate, E Sussex, UK
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The resilient, creative Cubans have much to teach the rest of us

From Mr Michael Redwood.
Sir, I have been reading the Generation Y blog from Cuba for some time now and was delighted to read your article on the fortitude of Yoani Sánchez in managing both the issues of technology and freedom of speech to consistently express the views of the Cuban people through this blog and her Twitter stream (“Voice of dissent echoes from Cuba”, February 8).
There is, however, an assumption running through these conversations that the only solution to the problems of the Cuban people is the fall of the Castro regime and the introduction of a western economy. I believe neither to be true.
The isolation of the past 50 years since the revolution and the extreme privations since the collapse of the subsidies from the Soviet Union just over 20 years ago have created a unique time capsule. Cuba today holds a number of significant pointers to the more sustainable society that our overcrowded world is seeking out.
Cuba is without question a low carbon, low waste economy. Deprived of oil and raw material it has had no choice. The people, who appear amazingly content despite their many deprivations, have shown themselves to be resilient and creative. For example, they have proved the value of the bicycle rickshaw as a quick and easy way around the narrow streets of old colonial towns just as other cities replace them with the noise, pollution and congestion of the modern automobile.
We smile at the huge numbers of 1950s automobiles but are these hybrids, kept going with ingenuity and craftsmanship, with old Russian engines and telephone wire, so much worse than an over-extended car ownership and constant replacement every few years? Cuba has one of the most extensive railway systems in Latin America and appears to be just realising its potential to create a transport infrastructure that does not follow the errors of the west.
Despite the problems with a living wage, poor housing and lack of freedom of speech so clearly highlighted by Ms Sánchez, I find much in Cuba that we would do well to learn from. In education, health, organic market gardening and many other sectors they beat most of the rest of the world hands down. A rush to globalisation, to filling Cuba with German luxury vehicles and American fast-food outlets, does not feel like progress.
So, while we may accept the revolution and introduction of communism in Cuba to have been a failure, we should not then assume that their way is totally wrong and that the way of Washington or London is somehow the only alternative. After 50 years of deprivation, the Cuban people deserve a more thoughtful approach to the future from their own government and the west.
Michael Redwood, Visiting Professor in Business Development in Leather, University of Northampton, UK
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Cuban blogger riles with her weapon of words

By John Paul Rathbone in Havana

Yoani Sánchez is Cuba’s best-known blogger and, for many outside the island, also its opposition’s most important voice. She is also, however, a philologist whose refusal to mangle the Spanish language is matched only by her love of 140-character tweets.
Resolving that contradiction is one of the lesser challenges Ms Sánchez faces as an internet-based activist in a country that, by some metrics, has less internet connectivity than even Haiti.
 “I try to tweet with the brevity and elegance of classical Spanish, while only using whole words,” she jokes of herself on a recent evening in Havana.
Such humour is characteristic of the 36-year-old, whose mordant and highly personal vignettes of Cuba’s quotidian drabness have long angered the regime – even as her writings’ literary and political merits have turned her into an international star.
Her blog Generation Y, begun on a whim in 2007 but now visited up to 14m times a month, ranges from piquant observations about lemon shortages to the human rights implications of the visit to Havana by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff last week. She has 200,000 followers on Twitter. Last year, Foreign Policy magazine voted her one of the world’s Top 100 Thinkers.
Cuba’s state-run media meanwhile accuses Ms Sánchez of conducting cyberwar. Fidel Castro has called her the leader of a group of “special envoys of neo-colonialism, sent to undermine” the Castro brothers’ rule.
Sitting in a Havana state-run restaurant with independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar, her longtime partner and collaborator, Ms Sánchez, with her slight frame and toothy grin, hardly cuts a typical figure of a counter-revolutionary agent.
 “I consider myself an independent citizen,” she says, pointing out that in Cuba’s one-party system there are “no crimes against thinking or opinion – only against the state”.
Precise attention to language is a hallmark of her conversation. Ms Sánchez puns that Cuba’s irregular Communist party congresses are “less a parley-ment than a listening-ment: there’s not been a single “No” vote in 50 years”.
But perhaps the greatest puzzle about her work is technology. How does social media operate in Cuba given the state’s information monopoly, only 2 per cent of people have access to the internet and sending a single Tweet can cost up to $1 – a fifth of the average weekly state wage?
Critics say that explains why Cuba’s fragmented opposition movement is better known outside the island than inside. Even a copybook Facebook site is a government-run intranet.
Ms Sánchez, who earns her living from a bi-weekly column in El País, the highest-circulation newspaper in Spain, says mobile phone technology, and the “echo chamber of abroad”, amplify social media’s local impact.
“I send an SMS text to 70 people, they send to 70 more, and so on. Texts can also be uploaded directly on to the internet. It is tweeting blind, but the tweets get mentioned in news stories abroad, which are broadcast by Hispanic TV and watched by Cubans on illegal satellite dishes here. The echo chamber is crucial.”
She writes the blog only once a week, she adds, “to let myself breathe”.
This ingenious network works both for incoming and outgoing news. “We were the first to learn of Gaddafi’s death,” she says. “My phone was red-hot with texts.” As Etecsa, the state telephone company, has just cut phone charges, she adds her “text newspaper” may get more effective still.
Even so, the system has limits. Ms Sánchez rolls her eyes at suggestions made by Republican party candidates campaigning in the Florida primaries last month that they wanted to reverse President Barack Obama’s loosening of travel restrictions, tighten the US embargo and promote a “Cuban spring”.
“It is far too early for that,” she says. The Arab world “spent years integrating technology into their lives. We are still in an embryonic state”. About 10 per cent of Cubans use a mobile phone; in Tunisia, it is more than 75 per cent.
“I’ve also learnt that the more restrictions there are, the less people have and the more subservient they become to who dispenses it – the state,” she adds. “We are a long way from the banality of internet ubiquity – although I am all for a bit more frivolity.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s scheduled visit in March, Havana’s recent freeing of political prisoners and her own international profile help protect Ms Sánchez. Pluck and a sense of humour meanwhile seem to keep her spirits up.
She says she was not realistically expecting Ms Rousseff to voice any human rights concerns while in Cuba – or for Havana to allow her an exit visa to visit Brazil, the 19th time permission has been denied.
“I never want to become bitter,” says Ms Sánchez. “I tweet, I blog, I write. I wake happier than most. Everyday is a new scenario.”