HAVANA, CUBA
{05-06-2012}

Report: IKEA used Cuban prison labor to make furniture in the late 1980s
Alfonso Chardy  // The Miami Herald

A report that Swedish furniture and housewares company IKEA employed Cuban prisoners to build tables and sofas in the 1980s has provoked a strong reaction among Miami exiles.

The German daily newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of Frankfurt, recently reported that in September 1987 Cuban authorities negotiated for 35,000 dining tables, 10,000 children’s tables and an unspecified number of sofas to be built for IKEA.

The newspaper said German reporters found the information while reviewing archives of the Cold War era and that East German officials facilitated the deal with Cuba. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was officially abolished in 1990.

IKEA started an investigation last fall looking into purchasing practices and possible agreements to build furniture by prisoners in the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s and 1980s, said Mona Liss, IKEA spokesperson in the United States.

Liss emailed El Nuevo Herald that the company would widen the probe. “We take these allegations very seriously,” she said.  IKEA has one South Florida store, in Sunrise.

According to information in the archives, East German officials met with Lieutenant Enrique Sánchez, identified as the person in charge of a Cuban agency known as EMIAT, which supplied patio furniture to diplomatic houses and high-ranking Cuban officials. They discussed furniture to be built “in prison facilities of the Ministry of Interior.”

Especially incensed about the allegations were former political prisoners in Miami. “Cuba never misses the opportunity of seeking strong foreign currency to grease the regime’s repressive machinery,” said Luis González Infante, a prisoner for 16 years and president of the organization Cuban Historical Political Penitentiary.

Liss acknowledged IKEA had agreements of a limited nature with Cuba but said the Swedish firm has not had any long-term business relationships with any Cuban provider. “As far as we know, there have only been occasional test purchases of a limited amount of products from Cuban suppliers in the late 80s,’’ she said.

There are indications that IKEA considered the quality of Cuban furniture unacceptable. In early 1988, the first delivery of sofas was canceled.

East German officials traveled to Cuba in an effort to try to fix the quality problem, but it is not known when the contract ceased.

Ylva Magnusson, an IKEA spokesperson in Helsingborn, Sweden, said the company was trying to contact former employees who would have knowledge of the agreements.

South Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Friday that she urges IKEA to continue its investigation of the allegations. “All entities, including major corporations, have a moral responsibility to assure they are not used by tyrannical regimes to further violate human rights,’’ she said.

In Miami, former political prisoners said forced labor is habitual in Cuba’s correctional system, although none had any information about the alleged collaboration with IKEA. “Although there was forced labor, political prisoners in Cuba refused to do that type of work,” said Ernesto Díaz, who was a prisoner when the agreements with IKEA were allegedly in place.

The issue of forced labor in Cuba also arose in a different context several years ago when three Cuban men forced to work 16-hour shifts at 3½ cents an hour repairing ships for a Cuban joint venture in Curacao sued in U.S. federal court in Miami.

The three — Alberto Justo Rodríguez, Fernando Alonso Hernández and Luis Alberto Casanova Toledo — won an $80 million judgment in 2008, alleging the Curacao Drydock Co. conspired with the Cuban government to force them into virtual slave labor.

Lawyers said the deal was designed so the Cuban government could pay off its debt with Curacao Drydock by providing free labor, and at the same time skirt the U.S. embargo by working on American ships in a third country.  “These arrangements have been the lifeblood of the regime for 15 years,’’ attorney John Andres Thornton said at the time.

HAVANA, CUBA
{04-28-2012}

Cuban authorities arrest British man in corruption probe
Juan O. Tamayo  //  The Miami Herald

    In the latest of Cuba’s burgeoning corruption scandals, government investigators have arrested a British architect who spearheaded an ambitious project to build a 1,200-home golf resort just east of Havana, according to news reports.

Architect Stephen Purvis has been chief operating officer for Coral Capital Group Ltd., a British investment fund that backed the Bellomonte golf resort and partnered in a $43 million development project in the port of Mariel, west of Havana.

Rhys Patrick, spokesman for the British embassy in Havana, confirmed “there’s a British citizen arrested and under investigation,” according to reports Wednesday by Radio Martí and Cuba Standard, a Florida-based Web site on the Cuban economy.

Cuba’s investigation of Coral Capital was the latest in a long string of official corruption scandals that have become known since ruler Raúl Castro replaced ailing brother Fidel in 2006.

They have hit the aviation, telecommunications, nickel, juice, cigar and several other industries and led to the arrests or dismissals of scores of government officials — including Julio Cesar Díaz Garrandés, boyfriend of Raúl Castro’s youngest daughter.

Although Coral Capital’s managing partner, Amado Fakhre, also a British citizen, was arrested in October, the Cuban government has made no public comment on the case or most of the other corruption scandals.

Coral Capital, registered in the British Virgin Islands, was founded in 1999 to invest in Cuba projects such as the Hotel Saratoga in Havana and the golf resort. It also owned a trading company that sold heavy equipment to the Cuban government and financed other import deals.

Its web site has claimed it invested $75 million in Cuba and had more than $1 billion in projects, including the 650-acre Bellomonte, one of at least four huge golf resorts that Castro has green-lighted to expand Cuba’s tourism industry.

The Reuters news agency in Havana has reported that the Cuban investigation involves bribes paid by Coral Capital’s trading arm to usually poorly paid government officials to win large contracts for state purchases.

The Cuba Standard report noted that many foreign business persons in Havana are complaining about the lack of transparency in corruption prosecutions, and one predicted it would be difficult for Cuba to find foreign investors in the future.

Havana, cuba
{04-21-2012}

Cuban Dissident Held without Charges for Weeks
Associated Press

   The opposition Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation on Thursday denounced the fact that former political prisoner Jose Daniel Ferrer remains in jail without any charges being filed against him more than two weeks after being arrested.

“He continues to be detained, allegedly under ‘provisional imprisonment’ in the political secret police station in Santiago de Cuba, where he has remained interned, under cruel and subhuman conditions, since April 2,” commission spokesman Elizardo Sanchez said in a communique.

Ferrer, who was among the “Group of 75” dissidents sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the spring of 2003, heads the illegal Patriotic Union of Cuba and was arrested in Santiago along with other opposition members.

The commission said that as of early Thursday the formal charges against Ferrer had not been made known and he had not been assigned a defense attorney.

According to the text of the communique, the opposition figure is in “solitary confinement” and is being subjected to “a particular form of biological torture” given that he is being exposed to an “enormous plague of mosquitoes.”

The commission also emphasized the “provisional imprisonment” of Bismarck Mustelier, whom it said is also a member of the Patriotic Union and “has been held in the high-security Aguadores prison” in Santiago.

As a member of the Group of 75, Ferrer was released on parole in March 2011 and was among the 12 opposition members of the Group who refused to travel to Spain as a condition of their release from prison.

In recent months, Ferrer has been briefly arrested several times in Havana and Santiago, the province where he resides.

Cuba’s communist government considers dissidents to be counterrevolutionaries and mercenaries in the service of the United States.

Miami, Florida
{04-18-2012}

Cuban dissident’s wife says police may file charges against him
Juan O. Tamayo //  ElNuevoHerald.com

    Cuban police want to file fresh charges against leading dissident José Daniel Ferrer García, freed last year after eight years in prison, which could return him to prison to serve the rest of his 25-year sentence, his wife said Monday.

Meanwhile, the Cuban man who shouted “Down with Communism” before a Mass by Pope Benedict XVI has said he planned his outburst “because someone had to tell the world what [Cubans] feel in a loud voice,” Radio Martí reported. There were unconfirmed reports late Monday that police arrested Andres Carrión, 38, again because of his comments to the Miami radio station.

Ferrer’s wife, Belkis Cantillo, said police told her when she visited him in jail Monday that they wanted to charge him with public disorder for organizing street marches, and receiving outlawed financial aid from the United States.

Ferrer has been one of the most aggressive dissidents in eastern Cuban since his release from prison in March last year, organizing a long string of public protests that drew some of the harshest police crackdowns over the past year.

Founder of the dissident Patriotic Union of Cuba, he was arrested April 2 along with 42 others dissidents during protest marches in his hometown of Palmarito del Cauto and neighboring Palma Soriano. He has not been charged, and has no lawyer. The 42 were freed later.

The human rights group Amnesty International issued a weekend statement saying it considered Ferrer a “prisoner of conscience, detained solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression.”

Ferrer was sentenced to 25 years in prison during a 2003 sweep of 75 dissidents known as Cuba’s Black Spring. He was freed, under an unspecified “extrapenal license,” as part of the government’s 2010 agreement with the Catholic Church to free political prisoners.

Cantillo and Amnesty said they feared that under the terms of his release, Ferrer could be returned to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence if police file fresh charges against him.

Police detained him several times over the past year but freed him after hours or a few days and never filed charges.

Havana human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz said Ferrer’s current 14-day arrest may well be the authorities’ way of punishing him for his activism, and warning him of worse to come if he keeps it up.

Ferrer appeared to be in good health and spirits during his wife’s visit Monday to his jail in the city of Santiago de Cuba, Cantillo told El Nuevo Herald by phone.

Carrión, who was arrested March 26 after his protests just minutes before the pope started a Mass in Santiago de Cuba on the first day of his visit to the island, was freed Friday and spoke by phone with Radio Martí Sunday.

“I took advantage that the Holy Father was here and I saw that it was the best opportunity for me to express what I felt, which is what all Cubans feel,” Carrión told Radio Martí, the Miami-based U.S. government station that broadcasts to Cuba.

Carrión had not participated in dissident activities before but said he “planned the action, as far as it was possible to plan,” to “express my constitutional right to free speech.”

Radio Martí said it interviewed Carrión on a public telephone because the government had blocked all the cellphones that dissidents had delivered to his home on the outskirts of Santiago.

He said he was not mistreated while detained, but that before he was released he had to sign a document confirming that he was forbidden from leaving the city, meeting with dissidents or giving interviews.

“I am still in prison. The only change is that they put me home. I am persecuted, monitored,” he told Radio Martí.

MIAMI, FLORIDA
{04-13-2012}

Havana prisoner who took video transferred to isolation cell in notorious prison
Juan O. Tamayo

    An inmate who shot several videos inside a Havana prison to publicize its awful conditions has been transferred to an isolation cell in one of Cuba’s worst prisons, a dissident journalist reported Monday.

    A Colombian inmate who appeared in one of the videos to proclaim his innocence has been on a hunger strike for more than a month and was moved to a cell in the hospital wing of the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, the journalist added.

    Opposition activists also reported that all but one of the 43 government critics arrested last week in eastern Santiago de Cuba had been released as of Monday. The exception was José Daniel Ferrer García, a leading dissident and former political prisoner.

    Dissident journalist Virgen Dania García said Dalvinder Singh Jagpal, an Indian citizen who shot the 10 videos inside the Combinado del Este prison in January, had been transferred to the notorious Agüica prison in the central province of Matanzas.

    Singh is being held in an isolation cell, where he cannot speak to anyone or leave his cell and is always watched by four guards, said García, who added that she received the information from an inmate who left Agüica last week.

    Havana human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz said Agüica was among the five or six worst of Cuba’s 50 maximum security prisons because its cells can be unbearably hot or cold, depending on the season.

    “I’ve been in several prisons, and believe me, that’s one of the worst,” said Sánchez Santa Cruz, who was in Agüica serving part of the 30-month sentence he received in 1998 for criticizing the government.

    Singh’s videos of the Combinado del Este prison — which appeared to be the first ever smuggled out of Cuba’s 200-plus prisons — showed filthy toilets, mold-covered walls, leaking sewage and food he described as worse than “animal feed.”

    García said he was transferred to Agüica one week after El Nuevo Herald published the videos. García, who writes the blog “Cuba por Dentro”— Inside Cuba — helped to smuggle the video camera into the prison and to smuggle out the videos.

    Singh was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 10 years on a charge of corruption of minors. Ten months later, he was sentenced to another 20 years on a drug charge. He denies both charges.

    García also reported that John Alexander Serrano, a 31-year-old Colombian who appeared in the videos, has been on a hunger strike for more than a month to highlight his claim that he is innocent of the drug smuggling charges pending against him.

    Arrested early this year, he is now being held in the hospital within the Combinado del Este prison, according to García — not because he needs medical attention but because prison authorities want to keep him in isolation.

    The dissident journalist noted that after the videos were made public, police interrogated her about how the camera was smuggled into the prison and whether any guards had been bribed. “I told them I did not know,” she told El Nuevo Herald.

    García added that she also was detained during Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba last month, to keep her away from papal activities. She was beaten and kept handcuffed for 32 hours after she soiled herself, she added.

    Sánchez Santa Cruz meanwhile reported that Ferrer García, one of the 43 dissidents arrested last week, was being held Monday at a State Security detention facility known as Versailles in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba.

    Ferrer has been highly active in dissident activities, and helped found the opposition Patriotic Union of Cuba, since his release from prison last spring. He had been jailed since the 2003 crackdown that sentenced 75 dissidents to long prison terms.

    In the past year, his hometown of Palmarito del Cauto and the neighboring town of Palma Soriano, 18 miles northwest of Santiago, have become the focus of scores of anti-government protest and harsh police sweeps.

El cobre, cuba
{03-26-2012}

Papal Visit to Cuba
Mini Whitefield

    Our Lady of Charity has held a special place in the hearts of Cubans since 1612 when three salt collectors spotted a small wooden statue of the Virgin Mary bobbing in the Bay of Nipe after a violent storm.

The 15-inch wooden statue carrying the infant Jesus was attached to a plank that read “Yo soy La Virgen de la Caridad’’ (I am the Virgin of Charity), and when they fished her out, miraculously neither the statue nor her clothing appeared to be wet.

At first the virgin occupied a chapel near the main church but she was later placed above the main altar at the beginning of the 18th century when a second church was built. When the third church was constructed on a hill overlooking this copper mining town outside Santiago in 1927, the virgin was moved on her feast day, Sept. 8, to her current position in a glass case high above the main altar.

Our Lady of Charity, affectionately known as Cachita, became the patron saint of Cuba in 1916 after soldiers, who fought in the war of independence against Spain and credited her miraculous intervention for their victory, petitioned the Vatican.

To celebrate the 400th Jubilee anniversary of her discovery and prepare for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, a replica of the virgin was paraded from one end of the island to the other, even visiting Combinado del Este prison. Church officials said they were surprised by the large numbers and fervor of Cubans who turned out to greet the processions.

This replica will be taken to Santiago for Benedict’s Mass Monday evening and the pope will present her with a golden rose. Benedict also will be spending Monday night at a recently renovated retirement home for priests on the grounds of the shrine and visit the church for private prayers Tuesday morning.

For centuries now, the virgin has been a source of comfort for Cubans on the island and off. A copy of the Our Lady of Charity statue was smuggled out of Cuba in a suitcase in 1961 and now draws exiles to La Ermita shrine in Coconut Grove.

Here in El Cobre, pilgrims come in thanksgiving and to present petitions for the healing of a sick child, a sports victory or even for protection from rough seas before a rafter begins a perilous trip to the United States. She is a favorite of pregnant women who pray for their unborn children and often arrive directly from the hospital to give thanks when their babies are born healthy.

A small pair of shoes left as a fulfillment of a promise after a child took his first steps after receiving treatment for deformed feet is on display at the church, as are sports jerseys, soccer balls and baseballs, trophies and even medals from the Pan American Games brought by grateful athletes. But most of the items left behind are at a separate Chapel of Miracles.

MIAMI, FLORIDA
{03-14-2012}

Cuban cardinal’s prayers ignore real victims
Fabiola Santiago

     Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the highest Catholic authority on the island, and the Apostolic Nuncio to Cuba, Bruno Musaro, offered a Mass in the Cathedral of Havana to pray for the health of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who had a cancerous tumor removed from his pelvis on Feb. 24 in the Cuban capital.

The cathedral was packed with the faithful, and in a country where the government all but prohibited religious worship until the 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II, the attendees included the foreign ministers of Cuba and Venezuela and other well-known Cuban government supporters.

No doubt Chavez needs the prayers. On so many levels, the strongman with a recurrence of cancer who wants to turn Venezuela into another bastion of totalitarian rule needs the prayers.

But where are the merciful public prayers and the dedicated homilies of the island’s Catholic hierarchy for those who suffer in Cuba at the hands of the ruthless Cuban government, a 53-year dictatorship supported by the likes of Chavez?

Where were the public prayers when dissident Orlando Zapata was languishing in a prison and then a hospital on the hunger strike that weakened him so much it killed him?

Where were the public prayers of the Catholic hierarchy when the founder of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollan, was agonizing in a hospital, dying from a sudden and suspiciously contracted respiratory disease?

Are the prayers of Ortega and Musaro indeed prayers or politics, a calculated move of religious chess aimed at facilitating the highly anticipated trip of the Pope to Cuba later this month? Is being an oppressed Catholic, as long as one is a Catholic, good enough for a cardinal who has a history of falling short when it comes to defending his people but who appears to be highly attuned to the needs of the dictatorship?

In a recent letter to Pope Benedict XVI, dissident Guillermo Fariñas, who also came close to dying on a hunger strike, warns the pontiff that his visit to Cuba could send the message to the government that it can continue to abuse opponents who fight for basic human rights.

Some 750 dissidents across the island signed the letter, which asks the pontiff to meet with members of the opposition during his visit.

One can only pray that their words don’t fall on deaf ears, and that religious leaders have a worthier mission in mind.

But for now all we hear are the Sunday prayers of a cardinal and a nuncio, and as benevolent as they may appear to charitable Catholic ears, they have already spoken volumes in a church where many of “the faithful” were dressed in the colors of the Venezuelan flag as if they were attending a political rally.

In Miami — where some are preparing for a pilgrimage to Cuba to participate in the Pope’s visit, where the Catholic Church is involved in apostolate work on the island, and from where thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to the island flows — the faithful await answers to their prayers.

Because they too have prayers, only they seldom seem to reach Havana, where the presence of good always feels so, so far away.

MIAMI, FLORIDA
{02-29-2012}

U.S. Catholics make plans to see the pope in Cuba
Mimi Whitefield

    The Archdiocese of Miami flights that will carry some 300 pilgrims to Cuba for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit next month are a study in logistics.

Organized for the archdiocese by Airline Brokers, a Coral Gables company that is a veteran in the Cuba travel business, tandem pilgrimage flights will leave Miami International Airport on March 26 bound for Santiago, where the pope will celebrate a sunset Mass at Revolution Square. But while the pilgrims are at the Mass, the two chartered planes return to Miami — carrying all of the travelers’ luggage — then return to Santiago later. The pilgrims will once again board the planes and head to Havana, where the pope is scheduled to meet with church officials and celebrate a morning Mass in the Plaza of the Revolution on March 28.

Meanwhile, the planes will return to Miami empty. The aircraft later go back to pick up the travelers after the morning Mass, the pope’s last before he returns to Rome. Security reasons, as well as a small tarmac at the Santiago airport, meant the multiple flights were the only option, said Vivian Mannerud, chief executive of Airline Brokers. With two very large aircraft carrying the pope and his entourage, plus at least one other plane for Cuban leader Raúl Castro and other officials, there really wasn’t room for the two Miami planes to wait around, Mannerud said.

Besides ferrying passengers to and from Cuba during an air charter career that began in 1982, Mannerud has transported Olympic athletes, horses for the U.S. equestrian team, relief supplies, rosaries and Bibles when Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998. Soon that list will include the mattresses that Benedict will sleep on in Cuba.

City Furniture, at the request of the archdiocese, is donating two mattresses, said Keith Koenig, president of the Tamarac-based furniture company. He and his wife Doreen also will be among the pilgrims on the archdiocese flight.

The pilgrims are being asked to report to MIA at 4 a.m. for the Santiago flight. When they board, they’ll find water bottles emblazoned with Benedict’s image and headrest covers displaying the Vatican flag and the seal of the Archdiocese of Miami. Since early January when the dates for the visit were announced by the Vatican, the archdiocese and air charter companies have been scrambling to see that everyone who wants to be in Cuba to coincide with the pope will be able to get there. Some air charter companies that fly from Miami to Havana or Santiago have added extra flights to accommodate people who want to make their own plans to see the pope.

Marazul Charters, for example, has added five more charters out of Miami that will get pilgrims to Havana in time for the pope’s Mass. Others are just fitting in pilgrims on their regular flights. Bill Hauf, president and owner of Island Travel & Tours, said there are still seats available on his Tampa-Havana flight the Sunday before the pope’s visit.

He had hoped to launch a new Cuba service from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Havana on March 21. Demand was there for the inaugural flight, he said, but quickly fell off, prompting him to postpone the service until October while he develops the market.

Hauf said he also planned to offer packages for the papal visit and requested 500 hotel rooms in December. He said the only answer he got from the Cubans was to submit hotel requests by Feb. 26. Without confirmed hotel rooms, he said, “we decided it was too much risk. You have to have a hotel room to match up with a flight.’’

When Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, there was a whole year to organize the trip. This time, there will be fewer than three months.

To transport pilgrims for John Paul’s 1998 visit, the Archdiocese of Miami chartered a cruise ship and 400 people signed up. But the archdiocese canceled it the month before the pope’s January trip amid criticism from Cuban exiles, including some of the church’s biggest fundraisers.

The archdiocese ended up chartering a plane that flew to Havana for the pope’s Mass in the Plaza of the Revolution and returned to Miami the same day.

This time, criticism of the pope’s visit has been more muted, but the church has stuck with the air charter option.

Airline Brokers, and C & T Charters of Coral Gables, which is working with the Archdiocese of New York, are the only U.S. companies organizing special pilgrimage trips.

Ya’lla Tours USA had hoped to offer “A Catholic Journey to Cuba,’’ but the company, which specializes in pilgrimages to the Holy Land, pulled the plug on its six-day trip in January after a disagreement over pricing with the Cuban Ministry of Tourism. “They raised rates by 25 percent midway through the process,’’ said Ronen Paldi, president of the Oregon-based company.

“There had been a lot of interest,’’ he said, “but people need a much longer lead time to prepare for such pilgrimages.’’

Because they are religious trips, pilgrims don’t have to get permission from the U.S. government to travel to Cuba but they do need to get visas from the Cuban government. Many still haven’t heard about their visas but are keeping their fingers crossed.

C&T Charters has put together several Havana packages for the Archdiocese of New York.

The all-inclusive trips include airfare, meals, hotel and transfers to the pope’s Havana Mass, as well as guided tours to churches and other religiously significant places, said John H. Cabañas, C&T owner. An eight-day, seven-night trip from Miami to Havana costs $2,963 (double occupancy) and a six-day trip costs $2,562. C&T is also offering similar religiously themed trips from New York’s JFK airport.

Cabañas said he expects religious travel to Cuba to remain strong all year because this is the 400th anniversary of the discovery of a much-venerated statue of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, floating in the Bay of Nipe.

Nearly 1,000 people initially expressed interest in the Archdiocese of Miami’s trip, but some dropped out after Cuba raised hotel rates and the price of the trip went up. Now, the price for a single traveler staying at a “Grade A” hotel is just over $2,100. There are other options that include lower-priced hotels.

The package includes some meals and transfers to the Masses where the pope will give the homily as well as to the Mass that Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, leader of the pilgrimage, will celebrate in Havana’s Cathedral.

There was a waiting list for the Santiago-Havana trip and the archdiocese has been busy contacting people on the list to see if they want to take a regular charter from Miami and then hook up with the pilgrimage group in Havana, Mannerud said.Organizing the pilgrimage is especially meaningful for Mannerud. When she first began charter service to Cuba, she said, “almost all the churches were closed up, boarded up.’’But relations between the Catholic Church and the state began to thaw in the mid-1980s. By 1991, religious believers were allowed to join the Community Party of Cuba and Caritas, a confederation of Catholic relief organizations, that was permitted to open a branch in Cuba. Mannerud’s charter company transported many of the relief supplies destined for the island’s Catholics.
When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, Mannerud was determined to attend his funeral even though there were virtually no seats available on flights to Rome and she was still recovering from treatment for cancer. She made it to the funeral. “I came back a different person,’’ she said.

Even though there has been some criticism of the pope’s trip and her role in organizing the pilgrimage, Mannerud said, “I follow what my faith tells me.’’

miami, florida
{28-02-2012}

Cuban archbishop evacuates Ladies in White from basilica amid fears of police beating
Juan O. Tamayo

      The archbishop of Cuba’s second-largest city helped evacuate 14 women dissidents who had sought refuge at the El Cobre Basilica amid reports that police were waiting nearby to beat them, dissidents reported Monday.

Lady in White member Thaimí Vega alleged, meanwhile, that she suffered a miscarriage after police detained her to keep her from joining the other women for Sunday’s mass at El Cobre, nine miles west of Santiago de Cuba.

The incidents came on a weekend when police arrested about 30 members and supporters of the Ladies in White around the eastern region of Santiago alone, dissident Prudencio Villalón reported. Three more members were detained Monday.

Villalón, who accompanied the 14 Ladies in White to the Our Lady of Charity Basilica, said they declared a hunger strike on the steps after mass Sunday morning, saying that they had received threats from a large group of police deployed at a nearby junction.

“The police were sending (text) messages to the Ladies in El Cobre with things like ‘we’re waiting here to give you all such a beating,’” said member Belkis Cantillo, whose daughter was among the 14 women.

A priest in El Cobre telephoned Santiago Archbishop Dionisio Garcia, who also serves as head of the Conference of Cuban Bishops, and Garcia arrived around 7 p.m. with two church vans. He did not allow photos of him with the women, Villalón said.

It was the second time in as many months that officials of Cuba’s Catholic Church, sometimes accused of being too timid in their dealings with the communist government, have protected dissidents who sought the protection of temples.

Last month, the bishop of Holguin and a parish priest protected a small group of opposition activists from a government-organized mob, armed with sticks and rocks, that besieged the church in that eastern city where they had attended a Sunday mass.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega also interceded on behalf of the Havana Ladies in White in 2010, and now they march after Sunday masses at the Santa Rita church without any harassment. But the women in the Santiago area have been harshly repressed whenever they try to march after Sunday masses at El Cobre or the Santiago Cathedral.

Cantillo said the 14 women at El Cobre, which holds the image of Cuba’s patron saint, had slipped in through back roads on Saturday. But she and others were arrested nearby and in their home towns to keep them from attending the mass.

She reported that three of the 14 were detained Monday as they started a march demanding the release of 12 male dissidents — themselves detained Sunday when they went on the streets of Palma to demand safe passage home for the women at El Cobre.

Thaimí Vega told El Nuevo Herald by telephone that she was one of the Ladies in White detained by police Saturday as she tried to slip into El Cobre. Her story could not be independently confirmed.

Vega, a 22-year-old from Palma Soriano, said police intercepted her on a highway checkpoint near El Cobre around 2 p.m., after finding white clothes in her bag. “They told me, ‘you’re not going anyplace.’ ”

She told police that she was about six weeks pregnant and was not feeling well, Vega alleged between sobs. But police kept her until 9 p.m., when they put her on a passing truck for the trip home.

Vega said she started to bleed profusely once at home and had “no doubt that she had miscarried,” although she had not been to see a doctor as of Monday. “Those doctors work for the government and who knows what they could do,” she said.

Vega’s husband, Dunieski Domínguez, 31, a member of the dissident Cuban Patriotic Union, said she told him she was pregnant two weeks ago. Vega, who has a five-year-old boy from a previous marriage, said she had not seen a doctor to confirm the pregnancy because it was too early.

HAVANA, CUBA
{02-02-2012}

DISSIDENT BLOGGER SAYS CUBA WANTED MORE ON HUMAN RIGHTS FROM ROUSSEFF TRIP
ASSOCIATED PRESS

CUBAN BLOGGER YOANI SANCHEZ SAID HER COMPATRIOTS HAD HOPED FOR MORE FROM BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT DILMA ROUSSEFF, who avoided criticizing the human rights situation on the communist island during a state visit to Havana this week.

Sanchez said she had looked for at least a “small wink” from Rousseff, who was imprisoned and tortured for fighting Brazil’s dictatorship in the 1960s, after a jailed dissident, Wilman Villar, died last month following a hunger strike and President Raul Castro vowed to maintain single-party rule.

“It was pure chance that she came at this time, but people had hoped for more,” Sanchez said in an interview last night in Havana. “I would’ve hoped for a small wink, a phrase with a double meaning that we could interpret, and that the government could interpret too.”

Rousseff, who concludes a three-day visit to Havana today, said that it was an internal matter for Cuba to decide whether to allow Sanchez to leave the island after Brazil last week granted the 36-year-old blogger an entry visa to attend next month a screening of a documentary she appears in. Sanchez, a critic of the Castro government on the Generation Y blog, has been denied permission to leave Cuba for four years.

“Brazil gave the visa to the blogger,” Rousseff, 64, told reporters yesterday in Havana before meeting with Castro and his brother Fidel. “The rest is not a matter for the Brazilian government.”

Throwing Stones

Rousseff, who has vowed to make human rights a cornerstone of her foreign policy, failed to comment on the Cuban government’s record, pointing instead to the U.S. detention camp for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay on the island’s southeastern tip.

“He who throws the first stone has a roof made of glass,” said Rousseff, whose Workers’ Party has long supported Cuba. “We in Brazil have our problems too.”

While critical of the Brazilian president’s stance, Sanchez said Rousseff’s silence is preferable to her predecessor and mentor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s siding with the Castro government after the death of another jailed hunger striker in 2010, she added.

“I wake up every day and say to myself, today I am going to behave like a free person,” Sanchez said. “Dilma once said the same. She paid a high personal and physical cost, but in the end life proved her right and Brazil became a democracy.”

‘Zero Comparison’

Julia Sweig, an author of publications on Cuba and Brazil, said criticism of the Castro government is more widespread today than it’s ever been since the 1959 revolution and taking many forms that escape the attention of foreign governments and media. As Cuba’s second-biggest investor, helping Castro ease state control of the economy, Brazil is well-positioned to discuss the island’s rights record behind the scenes in a productive manner, she added.

“Yoani’s situation bears zero comparison to what Dilma went through,” said Sweig, director of the Latin America program at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “Unlike Dilma, she hasn’t been and won’t be jailed or tortured and I seriously doubt she’s going to be president of Cuba.”

Cuba’s government relies on beatings, short-term detentions, forced exile and travel restrictions to repress virtually all forms of political dissent, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report this month. Cuba denies it’s holding any political prisoners and considers dissident activity to be counterrevolutionary supported by anti-Castro “mercenaries” in the U.S.

Castro Visit

While blocked from traveling abroad, Sanchez has emerged as a leader among a group of young dissidents who describe the daily travails of life in Cuba through difficult-to-access social media. Many of her chronicles are published by newspapers throughout Latin America. She has also written a book, “Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today.”

Sanchez said the visibility she has gained through blogging gives her some protection from the Cuban government.

“The day I stop blogging, they’ll put me on trial,” she said.

Rousseff, who travels to Haiti today, discussed the possibility of hosting Raul Castro at a future date, according to a Brazilian official with the president who isn’t authorized to comment on the two leaders’ talks publicly.