Cuba - The Trawler.org
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Rodriguez: Cuba bloggers talk tech, social media at Havana confab; dismissed as subversive by state media (Associated Press, US)
337 days ago by Lawrence.Gutman
Getting online as a visitor in Cuba can be a challenge. After finding an internet café or hotel business center and waiting for a terminal, you realize that the connection is dial-up and your email won’t open for ten minutes. Several hotels offer wifi, but the service is uneven and often down.
In the grand scheme of things, being forced to contend with a slow connection isn’t really that bad. Consider that only between one and three percent of Cubans have regular access to the internet, which is to say they can use email and view a national network of state-run sites. Less than fifteen percent have used email at least once in the past year. Access for most Cubans is gained by visiting a café where an hour online costs a prohibitively expensive $1.50. According to an NPR report from 2011, some have taken to bringing black-market laptops to the tourist zones in hopes of catching a wisp of hotel wifi. This is done outdoors, of course, since Cubans are largely barred from entering hotels. A June 21 Associated Press story by Andrea Rodriguez (published in the Washington Post) called the island “one of the world’s most unplugged nations.”
Given these constraints, it’s heartening to see last week’s arrival of Havana’s first “Festival click”. Eventoblog (EBE), which hosts an annual internet festival in Spain, organized the event. SXSW it is not. About fifty people attended and few of them had access to sites bearing a “www.” prefix throughout the festival itself.
Among the attendees was Yoani Sánchez, founder of the blog Generación Y and Cuba’s leading digital dissident. Sanchez’ presence was enough to attract the attention of international journalists. It was more than enough to attract the editorial gaze of Cubadebate, a state-run site, that denounced the festival as a CIA plot to advance “the strategy of constructing networks ahead of an aggression, as was done in Libya, Syria and before in Yugoslavia, and strengthen the idea of the counterrevolution linked to the United States as a promoter of freedom on the Internet.” So be it. But in the interest of fostering additional debate on this issue, Cubadebate might suggest that someone switch on the $70 million fiber-optic cable that links Venezuela to Cuba to, presumably, the World Wide Web.
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ROBLES: Miami Prosecutors: No proof that Cuba is involved in Medicare money-laundering case (Miami Herald, US)
338 days ago by Lawrence.Gutman
A Havana bank may seem an unlikely recipient of Medicare payments from the U.S. For the Cuban banking system, however, there’s a first time for everything. On June 13, federal prosecutors charged Oscar Sanchez, 46, with conspiracy to commit money laundering after he allegedly moved $31 million in defrauded Medicare deposits to Havana. Prosecutors contend the Miami check-cashing agent and Cuban-born U.S. citizen laundered millions in government checks and wire transfers previously distributed to complicit providers. Sanchez and his yet-to-be-charged co-conspirators opened fifteen accounts in Montreal and Trinidad from which to move the funds. The fortune eventually landed at the Havana branch of the Republic Bank of Trinidad, though a federal motion suggests that some of it may now reside in Cuban-owned banks. While Sanchez finds himself on the hook for fleecing $31 million, prosecutors value the entire operation at $63 million.
Were Cuban officials aware of the plot? According to U.S. attorney Wifredo Ferrer, “there is no allegation and we have no evidence that the Cuban government is involved in this case.” Yet, as Frances Robles reports in The Miami Herald on June 18, the admission comes just days after federal prosecutors described Sanchez as “a capitalist for Cuban banks.” According to O. Benton Curtis, a former prosecutor with the Department of Justice, the Cuban government may well have been aware of the deposits. “In light of the current allegations, as well as what has been unearthed by law enforcement in other investigations and cases,” Curtis argues, “I do not think that is a terribly unreasonable inference to draw.”
Unsurprisingly, suspicion of Havana’s knowledge of the scheme runs deep among some anti-Castro activists. As Maria Werlau, Executive Director of the New Jersey-based Cuba Archive, claims, “it is almost impossible to conceive that anyone not in the pay of Cuban intelligence would pour millions into Cuban banks.” Werlau also questions why the launderers would turn their fortune over to banking officials well versed in freezing accounts unless some prior arrangement was made.
Others doubt that Cuban officials had any knowledge of the transactions. Florida International law professor José Gabilondo noted the presence of “charged nationalistic language” in a pretrial motion against Sanchez. Whether the use of tangy language in a motion – in Miami, no less – against a man accused of laundering Medicare funds to Havana exonerates Cuban bankers from guilt remains to be seen.
As Robles reports, the charges against Mr. Sanchez are without precedent; laundered Medicare dollars have never found their way to Cuban banks. Yet this story will likely drive a well-precedented series of accusations and counter-accusations back and forth across the Florida Straits in the coming months. Don’t bank on a summer thaw.
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SANCHEZ: New Man, Honest Man (El Pais, Spain)
341 days ago by Lawrence.Gutman
Just this March, The Economist published “Cuba: Revolution in Retreat”, a report on the island’s “journey toward capitalism” since Raúl Castro’s election to the National Assembly presidency in 2008. As Cuban officials enact “a slow but irreversible dismantling of communism”, the question of whether politics or economics will fire the engines of reform seems increasingly dated. The question for now is whether the steady creep of economic liberalization will necessarily drive political change.
Two recent pieces address some obstacles to reform by examining state responses to Cuba’s post-Special Period nouveau riche. The first, in The Economist of May 19, discusses the arrests of senior managers accused of using under-the-table bonuses to supplement their employees’ state salaries of about $20 per month. The second, in the June 14 edition of Spain’s El País under the byline of Generación Y blogger Yoani Sánchez, highlights the rising frequency of Interior Ministry raids on the homes of construction bosses, importers and hotel executives suspected of corruption. In both cases, the arrests are conducted by the Departamento Técnico de Investigación. They are enabled by its caravans of minibuses bound for the Villa Marista, a Ministry prison where, according to officials, “everybody sings”.
By and large, the targets of the raids are too young to claim the de facto legal immunity enjoyed by participants in the early triumphs of the 1959 Revolution. As Sánchez points out, “(t)o have taken part in the fighting in the Sierra Maestra, or in the first days of the revolutionary process, is now the best insurance against ending up in jail.” Sanchéz argues that the Raúlistas are continuing a longstanding habit of linking age to political loyalty. As of this moment, economic liberalization may seem an unlikely engine of political reform. But for how long?
Rodriguez: Cuba bloggers talk tech, social media at Havana confab; dismissed as subversive by state media (Associated Press, US)
337 days ago by Lawrence.GutmanGetting online as a visitor in Cuba can be a challenge. After finding an internet café or hotel business center and waiting for a terminal, you realize that the connection is dial-up and your email won’t open for ten minutes. Several hotels offer wifi, but the service is uneven and often down.
In the grand scheme of things, being forced to contend with a slow connection isn’t really that bad. Consider that only between one and three percent of Cubans have regular access to the internet, which is to say they can use email and view a national network of state-run sites. Less than fifteen percent have used email at least once in the past year. Access for most Cubans is gained by visiting a café where an hour online costs a prohibitively expensive $1.50. According to an NPR report from 2011, some have taken to bringing black-market laptops to the tourist zones in hopes of catching a wisp of hotel wifi. This is done outdoors, of course, since Cubans are largely barred from entering hotels. A June 21 Associated Press story by Andrea Rodriguez (published in the Washington Post) called the island “one of the world’s most unplugged nations.”
Given these constraints, it’s heartening to see last week’s arrival of Havana’s first “Festival click”. Eventoblog (EBE), which hosts an annual internet festival in Spain, organized the event. SXSW it is not. About fifty people attended and few of them had access to sites bearing a “www.” prefix throughout the festival itself.
Among the attendees was Yoani Sánchez, founder of the blog Generación Y and Cuba’s leading digital dissident. Sanchez’ presence was enough to attract the attention of international journalists. It was more than enough to attract the editorial gaze of Cubadebate, a state-run site, that denounced the festival as a CIA plot to advance “the strategy of constructing networks ahead of an aggression, as was done in Libya, Syria and before in Yugoslavia, and strengthen the idea of the counterrevolution linked to the United States as a promoter of freedom on the Internet.” So be it. But in the interest of fostering additional debate on this issue, Cubadebate might suggest that someone switch on the $70 million fiber-optic cable that links Venezuela to Cuba to, presumably, the World Wide Web.
ROBLES: Miami Prosecutors: No proof that Cuba is involved in Medicare money-laundering case (Miami Herald, US)
338 days ago by Lawrence.GutmanA Havana bank may seem an unlikely recipient of Medicare payments from the U.S. For the Cuban banking system, however, there’s a first time for everything. On June 13, federal prosecutors charged Oscar Sanchez, 46, with conspiracy to commit money laundering after he allegedly moved $31 million in defrauded Medicare deposits to Havana. Prosecutors contend the Miami check-cashing agent and Cuban-born U.S. citizen laundered millions in government checks and wire transfers previously distributed to complicit providers. Sanchez and his yet-to-be-charged co-conspirators opened fifteen accounts in Montreal and Trinidad from which to move the funds. The fortune eventually landed at the Havana branch of the Republic Bank of Trinidad, though a federal motion suggests that some of it may now reside in Cuban-owned banks. While Sanchez finds himself on the hook for fleecing $31 million, prosecutors value the entire operation at $63 million.
Were Cuban officials aware of the plot? According to U.S. attorney Wifredo Ferrer, “there is no allegation and we have no evidence that the Cuban government is involved in this case.” Yet, as Frances Robles reports in The Miami Herald on June 18, the admission comes just days after federal prosecutors described Sanchez as “a capitalist for Cuban banks.” According to O. Benton Curtis, a former prosecutor with the Department of Justice, the Cuban government may well have been aware of the deposits. “In light of the current allegations, as well as what has been unearthed by law enforcement in other investigations and cases,” Curtis argues, “I do not think that is a terribly unreasonable inference to draw.”
Unsurprisingly, suspicion of Havana’s knowledge of the scheme runs deep among some anti-Castro activists. As Maria Werlau, Executive Director of the New Jersey-based Cuba Archive, claims, “it is almost impossible to conceive that anyone not in the pay of Cuban intelligence would pour millions into Cuban banks.” Werlau also questions why the launderers would turn their fortune over to banking officials well versed in freezing accounts unless some prior arrangement was made.
Others doubt that Cuban officials had any knowledge of the transactions. Florida International law professor José Gabilondo noted the presence of “charged nationalistic language” in a pretrial motion against Sanchez. Whether the use of tangy language in a motion – in Miami, no less – against a man accused of laundering Medicare funds to Havana exonerates Cuban bankers from guilt remains to be seen.
As Robles reports, the charges against Mr. Sanchez are without precedent; laundered Medicare dollars have never found their way to Cuban banks. Yet this story will likely drive a well-precedented series of accusations and counter-accusations back and forth across the Florida Straits in the coming months. Don’t bank on a summer thaw.
SANCHEZ: New Man, Honest Man (El Pais, Spain)
341 days ago by Lawrence.GutmanJust this March, The Economist published “Cuba: Revolution in Retreat”, a report on the island’s “journey toward capitalism” since Raúl Castro’s election to the National Assembly presidency in 2008. As Cuban officials enact “a slow but irreversible dismantling of communism”, the question of whether politics or economics will fire the engines of reform seems increasingly dated. The question for now is whether the steady creep of economic liberalization will necessarily drive political change.
Two recent pieces address some obstacles to reform by examining state responses to Cuba’s post-Special Period nouveau riche. The first, in The Economist of May 19, discusses the arrests of senior managers accused of using under-the-table bonuses to supplement their employees’ state salaries of about $20 per month. The second, in the June 14 edition of Spain’s El País under the byline of Generación Y blogger Yoani Sánchez, highlights the rising frequency of Interior Ministry raids on the homes of construction bosses, importers and hotel executives suspected of corruption. In both cases, the arrests are conducted by the Departamento Técnico de Investigación. They are enabled by its caravans of minibuses bound for the Villa Marista, a Ministry prison where, according to officials, “everybody sings”.
By and large, the targets of the raids are too young to claim the de facto legal immunity enjoyed by participants in the early triumphs of the 1959 Revolution. As Sánchez points out, “(t)o have taken part in the fighting in the Sierra Maestra, or in the first days of the revolutionary process, is now the best insurance against ending up in jail.” Sanchéz argues that the Raúlistas are continuing a longstanding habit of linking age to political loyalty. As of this moment, economic liberalization may seem an unlikely engine of political reform. But for how long?
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