Students challenge Cuban regime in rare video
Rare video showed Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón
getting an earful from students demanding Internet access, more
accountability.
Posted on Thu, Feb. 07, 2008
BY PABLO BACHELET
pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com
WASHINGTON --
In a rare glimpse of public discontent in Cuba, a new video circulating
on the Internet shows university students making barbed remarks to a top
government official and questioning why they were barred from foreign
travel and local hotels, among other hardships.
One student, Alejandro Hernández, spoke of the ''possible merits'' of
the candidates in a recent election for deputies, whose bios were posted
on a cafeteria board but who never bothered to make the rounds at the
university in the southeastern province of Santiago de Cuba. The
unopposed candidates, all members of the Communist Party, easily won
their seats in the Jan. 20 election, with interim Cuban leader Raúl
Castro obtaining 99.4 percent of the vote, closely followed by his
ailing brother Fidel Castro who temporarily ceded power in 2006.
''Who are they? I don't know who they are,'' Hernández says in the video
during a gathering apparently led by Ricardo Alarcón, the head of Cuba's
National Assembly. The video was obtained by the Spanish-language
service of the BBC and portions were posted on its website on Tuesday.
VIDEO SPREADING
By Wednesday, the video was the talk among some Cuba watchers.
''I've never seen anything like that before,'' said Phil Peters, a Cuba
expert with the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think-tank.
''Not having been there, I'm hesitant to draw big conclusions,'' Peters
wrote on his ''Cuban Triangle'' blog on Wednesday, before noting the
event at a Brookings Institute seminar on Cuba. ``Events such as this
could be a sign of a government that's out of touch. Or they could mark
a government that is confident that it can brook criticism, that
benefits from an airing of criticism within the system and has some
responses up its sleeve.''
The candid remarks from the students also come as legislators are
expected to pick the Cuba's new leadership on Feb. 24.
At other public forums, citizens have reportedly made blunt criticisms
of their everyday hardships, and the state-controlled media has even
published articles criticizing some problems with the communist system.
But even as Cubans have been invited by Raúl Castro to debate their
government's shortcomings in gatherings being held across the island,
the video -- provided anonymously to the BBC -- serves as evidence of
discontent that international press is not usually privy to.
The video, which is sharp and appears to be professionally edited, shows
Alarcón getting an earful from student representatives of the University
of Computer Science.
Hernández, dark-haired and goateed, also says it would be ''very
opportune'' for ''other Ochoas to emerge'' -- an apparent reference to
Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, a popular army leader who was executed in 1989,
presumably for questioning the Castro brothers.
Hernández's remarks, according to the BBC report, received wide applause
from the audience. Student Eliécer Avila, reading from a notebook, said
he came from a poor area of Puerto Padre in Las Tunas, a province in
eastern Cuba. He questioned why the country's goods and services were
sold in hard currency-pegged ''convertible pesos,'' but workers were
paid in ordinary pesos that had ``25 times less purchasing power.''
''A worker,'' he said, ``has to labor for two or three days to buy a
toothbrush.''
In an apparent act of protest, Hernández was wearing a T-shirt
displaying the Internet's ''@'' symbol. According to the BBC report,
students at the gathering also wanted to know why they could not access
sites like Yahoo!.
HOTELS OFF-LIMITS
Avila also complained his countrymen did not have a ''viable'' option to
go to certain hotels or travel outside the country. The island's luxury
hotels are reserved for tourists and Cubans have to obtain a permit to
travel overseas. ''I don't want to die without going to the place where
the Che fell, there in Bolivia,'' he said, referring to Che Guevara, the
guerrilla who became an icon of the Cuban revolution.
Alarcón is shown giving a rambling, defensive response, noting his young
audience did not know what Cuba was like before the revolution. The
convertible peso matter was being revised, he said, and he professed
ignorance of Internet access issues.
The BBC story quotes Alarcón as saying more Cubans go to classy hotels
now than before 1959. ''Let's see how many Bolivians can travel,'' he said.
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