Commentary by CubaResponde:  Panfilo is poor black man whose crime is declaring on a 90 minute You-Tube video that he was hungry (see Lo que hace falta es Jama! – What we need is food).  This story is so bizarre that most who have no connection with Cuban in the island simply will not believe it.  But this is the Kafkian reality that Cubans have endured for the last fifty years.

What is even more unbelievable is that this absurd fascists behavior of the Cuban government is codified within Cuba’s “legal system” as exemplified by the charges of “dangerousness’ brought against Panfilo.

In the article that follows (PANFILO – Hunger, unsated) Mirta Ojito, assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, narrates Panfilo’s odyssey concluding that “What he (Panfilo) needs is food, rehab and freedom. But when he walks out of rehab, Pánfilo will still lack food. And freedom.”  This is the surreal, but all to real, reality of the life of a citizen in Cuba.

Jose A Hernandez, MD

President, Cubaresponde

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PANFILO

Hunger, unsated

Cuba, one of the few places in the world where a man can go to prison for announcing in an 81-second YouTube video that he is hungry.

Miami Herald – Sept 20, 2009 – link to original article

BY MIRTA OJITO

MAO35@COLUMBIA.EDU

Mirta Ojito is an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

Was it the song? Jama y Libertad. Food and freedom, croons Boris Larramendi.

The Madrid-based Cuban songwriter wrote the tune as part of the campaign to free Pánfilo, imprisoned last month in Cuba after he drunkenly declared in a YouTube video that there is hunger on the island.

Pánfilo was reportedly released Thursday night and sent to a rehab program for 21 days. Then, the government says, he is free to go home, which is not the same as being free.

Veteran human rights activists have long maintained that publicity and pressure work, even in Cuba, one of the few places in the world where a man can go to prison for announcing in an 81-second YouTube video that he is hungry. A campaign to free Pánfilo, www.jamaylibertad.com, was launched on August 26, about three weeks after his arrest, by a group of Cuban exiles with no experience as human-rights activists.

More than 3,000 people — from Paris to Havana and from New Jersey to Chile — signed a letter urging the Cuban government to free Pánfilo and to respect the right to basic freedoms for all its citizens. The letter was delivered Thursday in Miami to a representative of Juanes, the Colombian singer who is scheduled to perform in a pro-peace concert in Havana Sunday.

Was it Juanes? It wouldn’t do to have a Latin American star in a government-sponsored concert in La Plaza de la Revolución, while Pánfilo sat in a cell and the international campaign raged on.

We may never know why he was released. What is now apparent is that the Cuban government has quickly — quicker than ever before — rectified a grievous mistake. That is, if Pánfilo is treated as an alcoholic and not as a mentally disturbed patient.

“It must have caught the government by surprise,” said Enrique Del Risco, a writer and lecturer in New York, and one of the organizers of the campaign. “It was too quick. It moved too fast for them and there was a lot of enthusiasm around. Some people asked me, `Why Pánfilo?’ and my answer was, `Why not Pánfilo?”’

Juan Carlos González Marco, 48, who calls himself Pánfilo, became a YouTube sensation in late Spring, when he walked in front of a camera to state a simple but fundamental truth: What we need is food, only he said “jama,” [pronounced HA-ma], using Cuban slang.

Pánfilo quickly went from being the archetype of the town drunk to a symbol of all that ails the Cuban people. In June, in a second video, a sober Pánfilo asks to be left alone. If it was possible for some people to laugh with the first video, it was impossible not to be moved by the second. You can’t ignore the fear in Pánfilo’s eyes. He is a man afraid of the state.

And then there is the third video. The spontaneity of the first video is gone, and so is the soberness of the second one. In their place is a grotesque performance of a shirtless drunk ranting about hunger and the police.

Days after the third video was posted on YouTube, on July 28, Pánfilo was arrested and charged with “dangerousness,” a draconian concept which means that he has the potential of committing a crime, but hasn’t yet. He was sentenced initially to two years in prison, which was cruel, short-sighted and absurdly out of step with the modern world.

For years Cuba has reacted to outside pressure to release political prisoners. European presidents, members of the U.S. Congress, famous writers have all interceded on behalf of political prisoners, such as Armando Valladares, Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, and Angel Cuadra, who were brought to their attention by campaigns orchestrated by a handful of human rights activists. Still, it took decades to free most of them.

That was pre-Internet. Pánfilo is a different story. He may have been both doomed and saved by the Internet. His YouTube video was seen by more than half a million. But so was the news of his sentence and imprisonment and, more important, a quick thinking campaign that incorporated the best that technology has to offer.

It took days to collect more than 3,000 signatures on his behalf. Back in the ’60s and ’70s and even the ’80s, when activists like Frank Calzon, now with the Center for a Free Cuba, were campaigning to free political prisoners, communication between Cuba and Washington could take months.

“First we had to hear about the case from someone who brought it to our attention,” said Calzon. “Pánfilo was known to the world before he was imprisoned.”

He was also the perfect victim. Pánfilo was not a human-rights activist, a dissident or an intellectual. He is, simply, a man. A black man who is hungry and drinks too much. Therein lie his power and his weakness.

The government has always been intolerant of dissent, but it is particularly vicious when the dissenter is black. The most recent victims of execution in Cuba were three young black men attempting to steal a vessel to escape the island six years ago.

Pánfilo has escaped that fate. He’s never said he wants to leave Cuba. What he wants is food. What he needs is food, rehab and freedom. But when he walks out of rehab, Pánfilo will still lack food. And freedom.

Mirta Ojito is an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

CubaResponde comments:  In the article “Cuba won’t take steps to better relations with U.S.” that follows, the reader will read that Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez excuses Cuba’s snub to Obama’s foreign policy by claiming that the US must first lift its 47-year-old trade embargo/blockade.

The reader should keep in mind that the US is Cuba’s fifth largest trading partner (see From truffles to fox furs, U.S. ships more than food to Cuba), with US agricultural exports to Cuba hitting a record $711.5 million in 2008. As the same article informs us, Cuba imports 80 percent of its food from the US. This trade bonanza is a direct outcome of the “significant commerce that has been going on since the Trade Sanctions Reform and Enhancement Act of 2000 opened the door to U.S. food and medicine exports to Cuba.”

In addition, money sent by individual Cuban Americans to help family members in the island amounts to an estimated $400 to $800 million a year; imagine, this level of financial aid in spite of the usury-type laws in Cuba that charges a 10 percent fee to exchange dollars for convertible pesos.

This reality makes a mockery of the label “blockade”, even “embargo”, for the US trade restrictions, as Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez identifies below this trade status.

Jose A Hernandez, MD
President, CubaResponde

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Cuba won’t take steps to better relations with U.S.

USA Today – Sept 16, 2009 – link to original

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba will not make any political or policy concessions to improve relations with the U.S. — no matter how small, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said Wednesday, snubbing Washington’s suggestions that some reforms could lead to better ties.

He told a news conference that the United States must lift its 47-year-old trade embargo without waiting for anything in return.

Rodriguez said U.S. trade sanctions have cost the island $96 billion in economic damage since they took their current form in February 1962 as part of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

“The policy is unilateral and should be lifted unilaterally,” Rodriguez said.

He called President Obama “well-intentioned and intelligent” and said that his administration has adopted a “modern, less aggressive” stance toward the island.

But Rodriguez shrugged off the White House’s April decision to lift restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to visit or send money to relatives in this country, saying those changes simply undid a tightening of the embargo imposed by President George W. Bush.

“Obama was a president elected on a platform of change. Where are the changes in the blockade against Cuba?” Rodriguez asked. Cuban officials have for decades characterized American trade sanctions as a blockade.

Obama has suggested it may be time for a new era in relations with Cuba, but has also said he will not consider lifting the embargo. On Monday, he signed a measure formally extending the policy for one year.

U.S. officials have said for months that they would like to see the single-party, communist state accept some political, economic or social changes before they make further modifications to Cuba policy, but Rodriguez said it was not up to his country to appease Washington.

The foreign minister also refused to comment on suggestions by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that Cuba take small steps to improve relations with the U.S.

The governor, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, suggested during a recent visit here that Cuba reduce restrictions and fees for islanders who want to travel overseas and accept a U.S. proposal to let diplomats from both countries travel more freely in each other’s territory.

Rodriguez took office after a March shake-up that ousted much of Cuba’s younger leadership, including Foreign Minister and former Fidel Castro prodigy Felipe Perez Roque.

Officials from the U.S. and Cuba plan to meet Thursday in Havana to discuss reviving direct postal service between their countries, but Rodriguez refused to comment. Mail between the U.S. and the island has had to pass through third countries since August 1963.

“These talks are exploratory talks of a technical nature,” said Gloria Berbena, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Interests Section, which Washington maintains in Cuba instead of an embassy.

“They support our efforts to further communication with the Cuban people and the administration sees this as a potential avenue to improve communication between our countries’ peoples,” she told The Associated Press

Rodriguez said the embargo itself blocks such communications, as well as costing Cuba $1.2 billion a year in lost tourism revenue.

“The only country in the world where they prohibit the travel of Americans is to Cuba,” he said. “Why? Are they afraid that they could learn firsthand about Cuban reality?”

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed