HAVANA 4th April (by Victoria Alcalá) Every April, visitors to Old Havana’s historical centre will find squares, parks, streets, museums and old houses possessed by a dancing spirit. And it was this spirit invoked by dancer and choreographer Isabel Bustos and her company Retazos, which turns balconies, windows, stairs and walls into stages for the International Dance Festival. This absolutely unique dance festival began in 1996 in two or three house-museums in the Historical Center of Havana.
In the words of Isabel Bustos, it started with “five or six people who ran from house to house, from balcony to balcony, from courtyard to courtyard, from garden to garden, two dancers here, two there.” Since then, it has gradually taken over almost all of the institutions run by the Office of the Historian as well as the main squares and streets in all the ancient parts of the city. The premise behind the International Dance Festival is to draw inspiration from the city’s architecture, to awaken the imagination, to promote new creative environments and to encourage the exchange of ideas and artistic experiences between the people of different languages and cultures.
The invitation goes out from the Retazos Company which is directed by Isabel Bustos. Hundreds of Cubans and foreign visitors attend, fascinated by this opportunity to translate into movement the sensations and emotions that are awakened by the beauty of the splendid Havana architecture. For this year’s festival expect Old Havana’s plazas and streets to be filled with over 1,500 participants that include dancers, choreographers, musicians and painters from all over the world. Part of the International City Dance Network established in Barcelona this is a real cultural highlight in the beating heart of Old Havana, which should not be missed.
( Photos cubaabsolutely )

2014: Details of Event Hundreds of dancers, artists and choreographers from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Spain, France, Mexico and Venezuela will take part in the event. Meetings, exhibitions, lectures, video-dance showings and passacaglias will take place during the mornings, while master classes, passacaglias and workshops will be held in the afternoons. The evenings have been reserved for shows. The principal stages will be Plaza de Armas, Plaza de San Francisco de Asís, Plaza Vieja; Rumiñahui, Simón Bolívar and Las Carolinas Parks; Galería Oswaldo Guayasamín, Casa Benito Juárez, Casa Simón Bolívar, Casa de la Poesía, Factoría Habana, Vitrina de Valonia, Las Carolinas Theater and the streets of Mercaderes, Oficios, Amargura and Obrapía.
Highlights & Program Opening & Closing Ceremony (April 9 & 13) April 9, 4pm at Teatro Las Carolinas. Gigantería Stilt Walking Company (Havana) / Passacaglias for the opening of exhibitions Transparencias (Isabel Bustos and José Eduardo Yanes, Pantalla TV Movimiento y Ciudad).
April 9, 9pm at Plaza de Armas. Opening of the 19th International Dance Festival in Urban Landscapes. Old Havana: City in Motion with the premiere of Retornos: Gente y ciudad, choreography by Isabel Bustos with the performance of Gente y ciudad, a premiere by the Retazos Dance Company. April 13, 9pm Closing Ceremony at Plaza de Armas,
Daily Program (April 10-12) 11am to 1.30pm: Shows for kids at various venues (Sat and Sun ONLY) 3pm starting at Plaza de Armas. Gigantería Stilt Walking Company (Havana) and TECMA (Pinar del Río) / Passacaglia presenting guest companies on streets, parks and plazas 6pm at Casa Benito Juárez, Casa Simón Bolívar, Casa de la Poesía, Factoría Habana, Vitrina de Valonia; 7pm at Casa Guayasamín; 8pm at Casa de África; 9pm at Las Carolinas Theater .
Video-Dance Festival (April 7-12) Plaza de Armas April 9, 8.30pm, Showing of Cosecha, Prizewinner of Technologias que danzan, 2013
Espacio DV DANZA a La Cancha (Calle Amargura e/ Mercaderes y San Ignacio) April 10, 8.30pm, Works performed in the Festival Breaking 8, Italia April 11, 8.30pm, Works performed by British choreographer and filmmaker Billy Cowie April 12, 8.30pm, Screening of selected international works April 13, 8.30pm, Screening of selected national works
Teatro Carolina Amargura No. 61 e/ San Ignacio y Mercaderes, Habana Vieja, La Habana, Tel. +(53) 7 860 4341 www.danzateatroretazos.cu

HAVANA – WASHINGTON April 3, (AP By DESMOND BUTLER, JACK GILLUM and ALBERTO ARCE,) — In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government. McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the U.S. government. McSpedon didn’t work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian aid. According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,” using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet. Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.” At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes. “There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project’s contractors. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission.” The program’s legality is unclear: U.S. law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization. Officials at USAID would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level manager who declined to comment. USAID spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year and found them to be consistent with U.S. law. “USAID is a development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world,” he said. “In the implementation,” he added, “has the government taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That’s how you protect the practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to protect the partners we’re working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba.” But the ZunZuneo program muddies those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and deliver aid to the world’s poor and vulnerable — which requires the trust of foreign governments. “On the face of it there are several aspects about this that are troubling,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. and chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s State Department and foreign operations subcommittee. “There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a U.S. government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAID subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested.” The Associated Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project’s development. The AP independently verified the project’s scope and details in the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates — through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those directly involved in ZunZuneo. Taken together, they tell the story of how agents of the U.S. government, working in deep secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba. And it all began with a half a million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government. ___ ZunZuneo would seem to be a throwback from the Cold War, and the decades-long struggle between the United States and Cuba. It came at a time when the historically sour relationship between the countries had improved, at least marginally, and Cuba had made tentative steps toward a more market-based economy. It is unclear whether the plan got its start with USAID or Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. contracts. But a “key contact” at Cubacel, the state-owned cellphone provider, slipped the phone numbers to a Cuban engineer living in Spain. The engineer provided the numbers to USAID and Creative Associates “free of charge,” documents show. In mid-2009, Noy Villalobos, a manager with Creative Associates who had worked with USAID in the 1990s on a program to eradicate drug crops, started an IM chat with her little brother in Nicaragua, according to a Creative Associates email that captured the conversation. Mario Bernheim, in his mid-20s, was an up-and-coming techie who had made a name for himself as a computer whiz. “This is very confidential of course,” Villalobos cautioned her brother. But what could you do if you had all the cellphone numbers of a particular country? Could you send bulk text messages without the government knowing? “Can you encrypt it or something?” she texted. She was looking for a direct line to regular Cubans through text messaging. Most had precious little access to news from the outside world. The government viewed the Internet as an Achilles’ heel and controlled it accordingly. A communications minister had even referred to it as a “wild colt” that “should be tamed.” Yet in the years since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, Cuba had sought to jumpstart the long stagnant economy. Raul Castro began encouraging cellphone use, and hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly using mobile phones for the first time, though smartphones with access to the Internet remained restricted. Cubans could text message, though at a high cost in a country where the average wage was a mere $20 a month. Bernheim told his sister that he could figure out a way to send instant texts to hundreds of thousands of Cubans— for cheap. It could not be encrypted though, because that would be too complicated. They wouldn’t be able to hide the messages from the Cuban government, which owned Cubacel. But they could disguise who was sending the texts by constantly switching the countries the messages came from. “We could rotate it from different countries?” Villalobos asked. “Say one message from Nica, another from Spain, another from Mexico”? Bernheim could do that. “But I would need mirrors set up around the world, mirrors, meaning the same computer, running with the same platform, with the same phone.” “No hay problema,” he signed off. No problem. ___ After the chat, Creative hired Bernheim as a subcontractor, reporting to his sister. (Villalobos and Bernheim would later confirm their involvement with the ZunZuneo project to AP, but decline further comment.) Bernheim, in turn, signed up the Cuban engineer who had gotten the phone list. The team figured out how to message the masses without detection, but their ambitions were bigger. Creative Associates envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be called “Proyecto ZZ,” or “Project ZZ.” The service would start cautiously and be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAID saw as the most open to political change. “We should gradually increase the risk,” USAID proposed in a document. It advocated using “smart mobs” only in “critical/opportunistic situations and not at the detriment of our core platform-based network.” USAID’s team of contractors and subcontractors built a companion website to its text service so Cubans could subscribe, give feedback and send their own text messages for free. They talked about how to make the website look like a real business. “Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise,” a proposal suggested. In multiple documents, USAID staff pointed out that text messaging had mobilized smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, among others. In Iran, the USAID noted social media’s role following the disputed election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 — and saw it as an important foreign policy tool. USAID documents say their strategic objective in Cuba was to “push it out of a stalemate through tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition process going again towards democratic change.” Democratic change in authoritarian Cuba meant breaking the Castros’ grip on power. USAID divided Cuban society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side sat the “democratic movement,” called “still (largely) irrelevant,” and at the other end were the “hard-core system supporters,” dubbed “Talibanes” in a derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani extremists. A key question was how to move more people toward the democratic activist camp without detection. Bernheim assured the team that wouldn’t be a problem. “The Cuban government, like other regimes committed to information control, currently lacks the capacity to effectively monitor and control such a service,” Bernheim wrote in a proposal for USAID marked “Sensitive Information.” ZunZuneo would use the list of phone numbers to break Cuba’s Internet embargo and not only deliver information to Cubans but also let them interact with each other in a way the government could not control. Eventually it would build a system that would let Cubans send messages anonymously among themselves. At a strategy meeting, the company discussed building “user volume as a cover … for organization,” according to meeting notes. It also suggested that the “Landscape needs to be large enough to hide full opposition members who may sign up for service.” In a play on the telecommunication minister’s quote, the team dubbed their network the “untamed colt.” ___ At first, the ZunZuneo team operated out of Central America. Bernheim, the techie brother, worked from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, while McSpedon supervised Creative’s work on ZunZuneo from an office in San Jose, Costa Rica, though separate from the U.S. embassy. It was an unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in Washington, according to U.S. officials. McSpedon worked for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape. In 2009, a report by congressional researchers warned that OTI’s work “often lends itself to political entanglements that may have diplomatic implications.” Staffers on oversight committees complained that USAID was running secret programs and would not provide details. “We were told we couldn’t even be told in broad terms what was happening because ‘people will die,'” said Fulton Armstrong, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Before that, he was the US intelligence community’s most senior analyst on Latin America, advising the Clinton White House. The money that Creative Associates spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, government data show. But there is no indication of where the funds were actually spent. Tensions with Congress spiked just as the ZunZuneo project was gearing up in December 2009, when another USAID program ended in the arrest of the U.S. contractor, Alan Gross. Gross had traveled repeatedly to Cuba on a secret mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology typically available only to governments, a mission first revealed in February 2012 by AP. At some point, Armstrong says, the foreign relations committee became aware of OTI’s secret operations in Costa Rica. U.S. government officials acknowledged them privately to Armstrong, but USAID refused to provide operational details. At an event in Washington, Armstrong says he confronted McSpedon, asking him if he was aware that by operating secret programs from a third country, it might appear like he worked for an intelligence agency. McSpedon, through USAID, said the story is not true. He declined to comment otherwise. ___ On Sept. 20, 2009, thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Colombian rocker Juanes’ “Peace without Borders” concert. It was the largest public gathering in Cuba since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Under the watchful gaze of a giant sculpture of revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Miami-based Juanes promised music aimed at “turning hate into love.” But for the ZunZuneo team, the concert was a perfect opportunity to test the political power of their budding social network. In the weeks before, Bernheim’s firm, using the phone list, sent out a half a million text messages in what it called “blasts,” to test what the Cuban government would do. The team hired Alen Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, to write Cuban-style messages. Some were mildly political and comical, others more pointed. One asked respondents whether they thought two popular local music acts out of favor with the government should join the stage with Juanes. Some 100,000 people responded — not realizing the poll was used to gather critical intelligence. Paula Cambronero, a researcher for Mobile Accord, began building a vast database about the Cuban subscribers, including gender, age, “receptiveness” and “political tendencies.” USAID believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programs and “maximize our possibilities to extend our reach.” Cambronero concluded that the team had to be careful. “Messages with a humorous connotation should not contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create animosity in the recipients,” she wrote in a report. Falcon, in an interview, said he was never told that he was composing messages for a U.S. government program, but he had no regrets about his involvement. “They didn’t tell me anything, and if they had, I would have done it anyway,” he said. “In Cuba they don’t have freedom. While a government forces me to pay in order to visit my country, makes me ask permission, and limits my communications, I will be against it, whether it’s Fidel Castro, (Cuban exile leader) Jorge Mas Canosa or Gloria Estefan,” the Cuban American singer. Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a lawyer specializing in European data protection law, said it appeared that the U.S. program violated Spanish privacy laws because the ZunZuneo team had illegally gathered personal data from the phone list and sent unsolicited emails using a Spanish platform. “The illegal release of information is a crime, and using information to create a list of people by political affiliation is totally prohibited by Spanish law,” Almeida said. It would violate a U.S-European data protection agreement, he said. USAID saw evidence from server records that Havana had tried to trace the texts, to break into ZunZuneo’s servers, and had occasionally blocked messages. But USAID called the response “timid” and concluded that ZunZuneo would be viable — if its origins stayed secret. Even though Cuba has one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations in the world, the ZunZuneo team thought that as long as the message service looked benign, Cubacel would leave it alone. Once the network had critical mass, Creative and USAID documents argued, it would be harder for the Cuban government to shut it down, both because of popular demand and because Cubacel would be addicted to the revenues from the text messages. In February 2010, the company introduced Cubans to ZunZuneo and began marketing. Within six months, it had almost 25,000 subscribers, growing faster and drawing more attention than the USAID team could control. ___ Saimi Reyes Carmona was a journalism student at the University of Havana when she stumbled onto ZunZuneo. She was intrigued by the service’s novelty, and the price. The advertisement said “free messages” so she signed up using her nickname, Saimita. At first, ZunZuneo was a very tiny platform, Reyes said during a recent interview in Havana, but one day she went to its website and saw its services had expanded. “I began sending one message every day,” she said, the maximum allowed at the start. “I didn’t have practically any followers.” She was thrilled every time she got a new one. And then ZunZuneo exploded in popularity. “The whole world wanted in, and in a question of months I had 2,000 followers who I have no idea who they are, nor where they came from.” She let her followers know the day of her birthday, and was surprised when she got some 15 personal messages. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” she told her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra Valdes, also a journalism student. Before long, Reyes learned she had the second highest number of followers on the island, after a user called UCI, which the students figured was Havana’s University of Computer Sciences. Her boyfriend had 1,000. The two were amazed at the reach it gave them. “It was such a marvelous thing,” Guerra said. “So noble.” He and Reyes tried to figure out who was behind ZunZuneo, since the technology to run it had to be expensive, but they found nothing. They were grateful though. “We always found it strange, that generosity and kindness,” he said. ZunZuneo was “the fairy godmother of cellphones.” ___ By early 2010, Creative decided that ZunZuneo was so popular Bernheim’s company wasn’t sophisticated enough to build, in effect, “a scaled down version of Twitter.” It turned to another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc. Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Eberhard earned millions in his mid-20s when he sold a company that developed cellphone ring tones and games. His company’s website describes him as “a visionary within the global mobile community.” In July, he flew to Barcelona to join McSpedon, Bernheim, and others to work out what they called a “below the radar strategy.” “If it is discovered that the platform is, or ever was, backed by the United States government, not only do we risk the channel being shut down by Cubacel, but we risk the credibility of the platform as a source of reliable information, education, and empowerment in the eyes of the Cuban people,” Mobile Accord noted in a memo. To cover their tracks, they decided to have a company based in the United Kingdom set up a corporation in Spain to run ZunZuneo. A separate company called MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account at the island’s Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Ltd. to pay the bills. A memo of the meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from any U.S. ownership so that the “money trail will not trace back to America.” But it wasn’t just the money they were worried about. They had to hide the origins of the texts, according to documents and interviews with team members. Brad Blanken, the former chief operating officer of Mobile Accord, left the project early on, but noted that there were two main criteria for success. “The biggest challenge with creating something like this is getting the phone numbers,” Blanken said. “And then the ability to spoof the network.” The team of contractors set up servers in Spain and Ireland to process texts, contracting an independent Spanish company called Lleida.net to send the text messages back to Cuba, while stripping off identifying data. Mobile Accord also sought intelligence from engineers at the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, which organizers said would “have knowledge of Cubacel’s network.” “Understanding the security and monitoring protocols of Cubacel will be an invaluable asset to avoid unnecessary detection by the carrier,” one Mobile Accord memo read. Officials at USAID realized however, that they could not conceal their involvement forever — unless they left the stage. The predicament was summarized bluntly when Eberhard was in Washington for a strategy session in early February 2011, where his company noted the “inherent contradiction” of giving Cubans a platform for communications uninfluenced by their government that was in fact financed by the U.S. government and influenced by its agenda. They turned to Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, to seek funding for the project. Documents show Dorsey met with Suzanne Hall, a State Department officer who worked on social media projects, and others. Dorsey declined to comment. The State Department under then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton thought social media was an important tool in diplomacy. At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, Clinton said the U.S. helped people in “oppressive Internet environments get around filters.” In Tunisia, she said people used technology to “organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change.” Ultimately, the solution was new management that could separate ZunZuneo from its U.S. origins and raise enough revenue for it to go “independent,” even as it kept its long-term strategy to bring about “democratic change.” Eberhard led the recruitment efforts, a sensitive operation because he intended to keep the management of the Spanish company in the dark. “The ZZ management team will have no knowledge of the true origin of the operation; as far as they know, the platform was established by Mobile Accord,” the memo said. “There should be zero doubt in management’s mind and no insecurities or concerns about United States Government involvement.” The memo went on to say that the CEO’s clean conscience would be “particularly critical when dealing with Cubacel.” Sensitive to the high cost of text messages for average Cubans, ZunZuneo negotiated a bulk rate for texts at 4 cents a pop through a Spanish intermediary. Documents show there was hope that an earnest, clueless CEO might be able to persuade Cubacel to back the project. Mobile Accord considered a dozen candidates from five countries to head the Spanish front company. One of them was Francoise de Valera, a CEO who was vacationing in Dubai when she was approached for an interview. She flew to Barcelona. At the luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she met with Nim Patel, who at the time was Mobile Accord’s president. Eberhard had also flown in for the interviews. But she said she couldn’t get a straight answer about what they were looking for. “They talked to me about instant messaging but nothing about Cuba, or the United States,” she told the AP in an interview from London. “If I had been offered and accepted the role, I believe that sooner or later it would have become apparent to me that something wasn’t right,” she said. ___ By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord’s failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the U.S. government. The operation had run into an unsolvable problem. USAID was paying tens of thousands of dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba’s communist telecommunications monopoly routed through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that it could either afford or justify — and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or worse. In a searing evaluation, Creative Associates said Mobile Accord had ignored sustainability because “it has felt comfortable receiving USG financing to move the venture forward.” Out of 60 points awarded for performance, Mobile Accord scored 34 points. Creative Associates complained that Mobile Accord’s understanding of the social mission of the project was weak, and gave it 3 out of 10 points for “commitment to our Program goals.” Mobile Accord declined to comment on the program. In increasingly impatient tones, Creative Associates pressed Mobile Accord to find new revenue that would pay the bills. Mobile Accord suggested selling targeted advertisements in Cuba, but even with projections of up to a million ZunZuneo subscribers, advertising in a state-run economy would amount to a pittance. By March 2011, ZunZuneo had about 40,000 subscribers. To keep a lower profile, it abandoned previous hopes of reaching 200,000 and instead capped the number of subscribers at a lower number. It limited ZunZuneo’s text messages to less than one percent of the total in Cuba, so as to avoid the notice of Cuban authorities. Though one former ZunZuneo worker — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about his work — said the Cubans were catching on and had tried to block the site. ___ Toward the middle of 2012, Cuban users began to complain that the service worked only sporadically. Then not at all. ZunZuneo vanished as mysteriously as it appeared. By June 2012, users who had access to Facebook and Twitter were wondering what had happened. “Where can you pick up messages from ZunZuneo?” one woman asked on Facebook in November 2012. “Why aren’t I receiving them anymore?” Users who went to ZunZuneo’s website were sent to a children’s website with a similar name. Reyner Aguero, a 25-year-old blogger, said he and fellow students at Havana’s University of Computer Sciences tried to track it down. Someone had rerouted the website through DNS blocking, a censorship technique initially developed back in the 1990s. Intelligence officers later told the students that ZunZuneo was blacklisted, he said. “ZunZuneo, like everything else they did not control, was a threat,” Aguero said. “Period.” In incorrect Spanish, ZunZuneo posted a note on its Facebook page saying it was aware of problems accessing the website and that it was trying to resolve them. ” ¡Que viva el ZunZuneo!” the message said. Long live ZunZuneo! In February, when Saimi Reyes, and her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra, learned the origins of ZunZuneo, they were stunned. “How was I supposed to realize that?” Guerra asked. “It’s not like there was a sign saying ‘Welcome to ZunZuneo, brought to you by USAID.” “Besides, there was nothing wrong. If I had started getting subversive messages or death threats or ‘Everyone into the streets,'” he laughed, “I would have said, ‘OK,’ there’s something fishy about this. But nothing like that happened.” USAID says the program ended when the money ran out. The Cuban government declined to comment. The former web domain is now a placeholder, for sale for $299. The registration for MovilChat, the Cayman Islands front company, was set to expire on March 31. In Cuba, nothing has come close to replacing it. Internet service still is restricted. “The moment when ZunZuneo disappeared was like a vacuum,” Guerra said. “People texted my phone, ‘What is happening with ZunZuneo?’ “In the end, we never learned what happened,” he said. “We never learned where it came from.” ___ Contributing to this report were Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur in Washington, and AP writers Andrea Rodriguez and Peter Orsi in Havana.

HAVANA 31. March (Latin American Herald Tribune) Cuba reported on Monday the entry into force of the announced salary hikes for athletes, coaches and specialists in the sector, whose incomes will depend on the results and awards they obtain. Athletes’ income has been structured into six categories, with base pay that varies from around $18 a month for second-string baseball players to roughly $60 a month for Olympic medalists.
In addition to those base salaries, athletes are also eligible to receive bonuses for outstanding results in competitions. Players in Cuba’s top baseball league will also vie for premiums based on runs scored, pitching wins and stolen bases, among other categories. The squad that wins the league championship will share the equivalent of $2,600, with bonuses of $1,800 and $1,200 for the second- and third-place teams, respectively. In another change, prize money won in international competitions will be paid out entirely to athletes, coaches and specialists involved in those events. A total of 80 percent will go to the athletes and 15 percent and 5 percent, respectively, to the coaches and specialists. The Cuban government announced last September the pay raises for the sports sector and also said that Cuban athletes could be hired abroad.
However, the information published by Communist Party daily Granma on Monday says that “the implementation of the hiring system abroad” remains under study. The entry into force of the new salaries comes just days after salary increases that will take effect in June were announced for health professionals.

New York, Mar 30 (PL) Cuban Film Conduct Opens New York Film Festival of Havana on 3 April, an event marked for the popularity peaked by the movie directed by Ernesto Daranas among the public in the Caribbean country.
Until April 15, the festival, whose program includes 45 Latin American films and also includes a tribute to the 55 years of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) will be extended.
In its fifteenth edition, the event will screen 24 productions selected island especially for the occasion by film critic and director of the Cinematheque of Cuba, Luciano Castillo, said festival artistic director, Diana Vargas.
Although these works are emblematic of Cuban cinema, are little known in the US, he added.
Another significant element, he said, will be the presence of prestigious Cuban directors like Gerardo Cuban Chijona and actor Jorge Perugorría, among others.
Board American films, the festival covers Billboard tapes Argentina , Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Spain, Guatemala, Panama and Puerto Rico, Vargas said.
The festival will close Lucia Puenzo of Argentina, with the New York premiere of his film The German doctor, an unnerving story about experiments in the South American nation by the Nazi Josef Mengele.At the end, we will deliver the Havana Star Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Documentary.The main headquarters of this annual event lie in the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and meeting Queens counties and the Bronx.

Havana 29 March  An exhibition of sixteenth and seventeenth century Japanese Nanban art opened in Havana on Friday (March 28) to mark 400 years since Samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga’s visit to Cuba and the development of friendly ties between the two nations. The collection features a full-body portrait of the samurai who first visited Cuba as well as collection of works from some of Japan’s most important Nanban artists. “We are presenting original works in Havana’s Fine Art Museum, of which we are very proud because of the Ibero-American countries this collection is only in Mexico, Argentina, Chile Spain and our Cuba. So, in Ibero-America there are only five collections, and we are proud to have one of them,” said curator, Teresa Toransio.
In 1614, Tsunenaga stopped over in Cuba as he headed to establish relations with Mexico and the Vatican. Over the centuries, the Asian superpower and the Caribbean’s Communist-lead nation have enjoyed friendly ties. “(The exhibition) gives everyone the opportunity to appreciate the ancient art of this wonderful country which has a fabulous tradition. This is something that is appreciated both in Japan and Cuba and it allows us to further strengthen relations,” said Mario Naito Lopez, a Cuban resident of Japanese descent. Japan has also organised a series of other cultural events in Cuba to celebrate 400 years of relations, including a concert of traditional Japanese music at the iconic Cabana Fortress.

At face value, they are three old planes not worth much more than their parts and scrap metal. Stolen from the Cuban government during a six-month period ending in April 2003 — two by hijackers, one by its pilot — all three landed at Key West International Airport, a 116-mile flight from struggling Havana to the gleaming shores of the U.S.Fidel Castro repeatedly demanded the planes be returned. Instead, they were seized by U.S. courts to satisfy part of a $27 million judgment won by a Cuban-American woman who had unwittingly married a Cuban spy in Miami. The story of what happened to the planes in the ensuing years reads like another chapter in the history of stymied, contentious U.S.-Cuba relations, with the new owners unable to get the planes anywhere. The first of the three planes to land in Key West was a yellow, Soviet-built crop-duster that pilot Nemencio Carlos Alonso Guerra used to fly seven passengers, many of them relatives, to the U.S. in November 2002.
Cuba wanted the biplane back, but a Florida judge agreed with Ana Margarita Martinez that it should be seized and sold to partially pay the judgment she was awarded under an anti-terrorism law. In 1996, her husband, Juan Pablo Roque, had fled back to Cuba after infiltrating the Miami-based anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue. The next day, Cuban fighter jets shot down two of the group’s Cessnas over international waters, killing four pilots.The aging Antonov AN-2 Colt was auctioned at the Key West airport in 2003 and Martinez placed the highest bid, $7,000. We had a victory — we got to keep this property of the Cuban government,” Martinez said after the auction. She hoped to sell it for a profit later but instead gave it to Cuban-American artist Xavier Cortada, who painted half of it with a colorful mural as part of an exhibit commemorating Cuba’s independence. After the exhibit,Cordada eventually donated the plane to Florida International University, which planned to display it but couldn’t find a building to house it. Today, it deteriorates under tarps on a far corner of FIU’s campus. Even if it could be flown, there would be another hurdle: The plane would have to be deregistered in Cuba or given special authorization to fly by the Federal Aviation Administration. That, however, requires maintenance documents and certificates proving the plane is safe — all of them in Cuba.
Don Soldini, who purchased a hijacked DC-3, is one of the few who stood a chance of getting Cuban plane records. “I would’ve flown it back,” he said last week. Soldini, who went to Cuba as a teen to fight in the revolution, remains on good terms with the island’s leaders. He was barely 18 when he hitchhiked from Staten Island to Key West in the late 1950s, intent on joining the Cuban revolution. He flew to the island on a passenger DC-3, an elegant, bulbous-shaped plane now synonymous with World War II and the 1940s to ’60s-era commercial airline service. Once in Cuba, Soldini joined the underground and eventually fought in the rebel army, marching alongside Raul Castro and his troops.
After the revolutionaries’ 1959 victory, Soldini remained in Cuba but felt uneasy there as an American. He left and eventually started a real estate development company in Florida with offices in 21 countries. Starting in the 1970s, he began visiting Cuba about twice a year. In March 2003, a Cuban DC-3 similar to the one Soldini had first flown in was hijacked by six knife-wielding men and diverted to Key West. Thirteen days later, another Cuban airliner was hijacked to Key West by Adermis Wilson Gonzalez. “My goal was always to come to this nation and work to give my family a better future,” Wilson Gonzales said in a letter to The Associated Press last week from a federal prison in Pennsylvania. He is serving a 20-year sentence for air piracy.
Like the biplane before, both planes were auctioned.
Two aspiring pilots from Colorado came to the sale and, to their surprise, won. Wayne Van Heusden bought the DC-3 for $12,500 and Matthew Overton purchased the Antonov AN-24 for $6,500.
“My grand idea, initially, was to give it to the Cuban authorities, because it’s their plane,” Van Heusden said. He imagined filling the plane with medical supplies and flying to the island, but he couldn’t find financial support. He and Overton ran into the same hurdle: They were unable to fly the planes without the maintenance documents. The fees for keeping the planes in Key West quickly accumulated, and both decided to sell. Overton put his plane on eBay, but the winning bid didn’t go through. Key West International Airport took the plane, and today it is used for emergency drills. Soldini heard about the DC-3 and felt nostalgia for the day he flew to join the revolution. He bought the plane from Van Heusden and reached out to the Castros. But after the long, impassioned speeches Fidel Castro gave demanding the U.S. return the planes, Soldini said the aging Cuban leader didn’t want it.
“He’s more interested in the political impact rather than the practical,” Soldini said. “I couldn’t do anything.” Soldini returned to Key West, disassembled the plane and put it on a truck. He parked the plane at a central Florida hangar, where it remains. He made an extensive documentary tracing the plane’s history, from its California manufacture to its days in Cuba.
He hopes that one day it will be in a museum, since it will never fly again.

(AP) By CHRISTINE ARMARIO 

One of the world’s leading databases of stolen works of art is offering to help the Cuban government recover dozens of modernist works missing from Havana’s National Museum of Fine Arts.
The heist was confirmed late last week by officials with Cuba’s state-run National Council of Cultural Heritage, which added it was in the process of finishing an inventory of the missing pieces which will be made public. Miami gallery owner Ramon Cernuda, a Cuban-American exile and prominent collector of Cuban art, alerted the Havana museum last month after he became suspicious of 11 works being offered for sale in Miami, including one he purchased.On Friday, Cuban officials confirmed the works, including several by acclaimed Cuban painter Leopoldo Romañach, were part of a larger trove of stolen art, thought to be about 95 pieces in all. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun grand jury proceedings in the case, Cernuda told Reuters yesterday. The FBI said, however, that it could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. The disclosure of the theft is a first for the Cuban government since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. In its statement, officials from the National Council of Cultural Heritage stated that the works were cut from their frames while in storage. Most of the missing works were by Cuban artists, it said. The statement indicated the Cuban government would work “with any proper authorities inside or outside the country” to “alert museums, galleries, auction houses and others.”In years past, the Cuban government has stayed mum when museum pieces have been put on the market, raising suspicions that the sales had been officially approved in the face of hard economic times.
Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the London-based Art Loss Register, said he was in the process to reaching out to Cuban law enforcement and officials at the museum to offer help. The organization is the recognized leader in recovering stolen artworks and it operates the largest private database of reported stolen art – although Radcliffe says they have never worked with Cuba. “There are some governments who absolutely do report their stolen items, and there are some governments who do not report their items to anyone, ever,” said Radcliffe, adding that Cuba has previously resided in the latter camp. If Cuba decides to take Radcliffe up on his offer, it could bode well for the recovery of the pieces. Having recovered some 2,000 pieces since it was established in 1991, the Art Loss Register monitors on-the-record art transactions worldwide. In past decades, many museums were so embarrassed about losing artworks to theft, that they were often not reported, Radcliffe said. In Cuba’s case, some missing museum items in the past included works expropriated from families that went into exile after the 1959 revolution. “So they are very sensitive about the subject,” he added. Cernuda has since turned over one stolen work to the FBI’s art crimes team in Miami along with the documents of the sale. He has also offered to eventually return the piece to Cuba. (Photo Ramon Cernuda)

(REUTERS) 

Cuba’s state monopoly telephone company, Etecsa, today denied reports that the island will offer Internet access for home users in the coming months, reported dpa news. The company said that false news has been circulating in recent days. “This is “untrue and misinforms people.” Different websites reported recently that the government of Raul Castro plans to authorize citizens in the coming months to contract private Internet connection from their homes at very high prices.
Etecsa denied the information and noted that the tariffs apply only to companies and organizations. “Any information on the opening of this service to households will be duly communicated by the company,” it said in a press statement.
Cuba has one of the lowest Internet access levels in the world. The population of the island need special permission to contract private access from home, granted to a select number of officials, artists, diplomats or foreign companies. These old style dial-up connections also suffer from very poor transmission speed. The best access is available at some tourist hotels but with prices averaging US $8.00 to $10.00 an hour.
In mid-2013 Etecsa opened over 100 cafes throughout the country that improved public access to a segment of the population. Those capable of paying $5.00 per hour in a country where the average wage is $20 a month includes, to a large extent, those with family members abroad that send significant remittances. The government accuses the economic embargo imposed by the United States for the bad internet access on the island. Castro detractors argue that the lack of connectivity owes to a restrictive government policy. In mid-2013 Etecsa announced that a fiber optic cable laid two years earlier from Venezuela had finally become operative. However, despite improvements in infrastructure, service continues way below regional and international standards for access to the network.

The popular Cuban singer Kelvis Ochoa presented in this city his first album made in the island along with a documentary that gathers much of his life and work, which is classified in the category of world music.
Produced by the Bis Music label, the album titled Dolor con Amor se Cura (Pain is Cured with Love), includes 10 tracks that combine rhythms such as sucu-suco, bolero, son, reggaeton, and typical sounds of African music.
The documentary Yo se de un Lugar (I know of a Place), directed by Swedish filmmaker Beat Borter, will be simultaneously exhibited from March 13 to 19 in all major cinema theaters in the country.
Speaking to the press, Ochoa pointed out the presence of special guests in which what he considers his first solo album: the Nicaraguan Salsa singer Luis Enrique, and his compatriots Alexander Abreu, Aldo López-Gavilán, Yaroldi Abreu, Gaston Joya, Harold Lopez-Nussa and Rolando Luna.
This is my best work because it approaches my daily work, he stated.
During his career, he has worked with popular musicians of his country and of the world, among them the Spanish Lolita Flores and Pastora Soler; French Manu Chau; the Puerto Rican duo Calle 13; and Cubans Descemer Bueno, Haydee Milanes, Edesio Alejandro and Roberto Carcasés.

The international rodeo championship will be one of the attractions of the 17th International Food and Agribusiness Fair of Rancho Boyeros, FIAGROP 2014, which will be held on March 15-23.
The best horsemen and horsewomen of Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Panama will perform for the enjoyment of the public, Yoandri Lazo, director of events of the Havana entity told the press on Wednesday. Lazo explained that this time there will be calf roping, double lassos, bull riding, knocking over, barrels and acrobatics among other activities. Also scheduled is a trade fair, in which some of the new technologies used in Cuban agriculture will be presented. Consumables, products, technologies, scientific-technical advances, agricultural equipment and machinery, other equipment, materials and veterinary medicines and agricultural products and services of the participating companies and entities will be on display. In this way, FIAGROP favors direct exchanges of entrepreneurs and producers, and generates the signing of agreements and negotiations between production and marketing centers of nations represented.

The 14th edidition of the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope takes place in Havana and all across the country, starting at 9am on March 15th . The Marathon has the greatest participation of any country in the world with up to 2.3 million people running, walking, rolling and pushing in an inspirational testament to the ideals and stamina of Terry Fox (1958-1981), who was a young Canadian athlete who’s right leg was amputated due to cancer but who heroically crossed his country (143 days and 5,373 kilometers (3,339 miles), running to raise awareness and funding to fight cancer. If you are in Cuba during this time this is a great event to participate in the 4km circuit whatever your level of fitness, no pre-registration required. Carlos Gattorno, director of Marabana / Maracuba project, told reporters today that the race can be attended by people in accordance with their physical capabilities, in an event that will not have awards. He added that the starting signal will be given at 10 am by Radio Reloj station. Gattorno also urged Cubans to massively attend the race, as an expression of solidarity that characterizes the people of Cuba. For more information about Terry Fox see http://www.terryfox.org

Details about Terry Fox Run

The Terry Fox Run is an annual non-competitive charity event held in numerous regions around the world in commemoration of Canadian cancer activist Terry Fox and his Marathon of Hope, and to raise money for cancer research.
The event was founded in 1981 by Isadore Sharp, who contacted Terry in hospital by telegram and expressed his wishes to hold an annual run in Terry’s name to raise funds for cancer research. Sharp himself had lost a son to cancer in 1979. In Canada, the event is held every year on the second Sunday following Labour Day. Since its inception, it has raised via the ‘Terry Fox Foundation’ close to $500 million dollars (CAD). The run itself is informal, which means that the distance often varies, usually between 5 and 15 kilometres; participation is considered to be more important than completing the set distance. There are also runs set up by schools of every level, often with shorter distances than the “official” ones.
Unlike other major fund raising events, the Terry Fox Run has no corporate sponsorship. This is in accordance with Terry Fox’s original wishes of not seeking fame or fortune from his endeavor. During his cross-Canada run, he turned down every endorsement he was offered (including from major multinationals such as McDonald’s), as he felt that it would detract from his goal of creating public awareness. The Terry Fox Runs have no advertisements on any race related materials (such as t-shirts, banners, etc.).

by John Walters 

Cuban authorities revealed some of the new pricing and accounting methodologies going into effect as the country moves toward monetary unification. A report published today recalled that as announced last October 22, 2013, the Council of Ministers had agreed to initiate a schedule for carrying out measures that will lead to that unification.
These norms are the first regulations that have been released in terms of prices and accounting, as part of that process. Currently, two currencies circulate in Cuba; the Cuban Peso (CUP) and the Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC). The published strategy corresponds to Guideline 55 of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) Social and Economic Policy. The announcement itself recognizes the complexity of such a process and deals with it via an integrated perspective meant to foster the monetary reorganization within the Cuban economy. The data were released in the Official Gazette Extra (No. 12), of 2014, courtesy of Resolutions 19, 20 and 21 from the Ministry of Finances and Pricing.
Accounting norms and methodologies are shown for wholesale and retail pricing, directed at state entities, and required by the decreed monetary unification. Toward this end, the report reflects a priority on training all managers throughout the country who may be linked to such a process. It also points out that the new pricing methodology will assist in resolving a variety of problems in the island economy.
One of the indicated problems is the connection of internal pricing with the behavior of the international market, among other notes of interest. The report specifies that the entire process will lead to a more efficient distribution of financial resources from the State budget.

(Prensa Latina) 

Drummers of Mexico, Australia, Argentina and the United States will travel to Havana to participate in the Fiesta del Tambor Festival (Drum Festival) as of March 11 to 16, with more than a thousand Cuban artists.
Professional and self-taught musicians will compete in the traditional Guillermo Barreto In Memoriam percussion contest, which is also open to foreigners in the categories of drums, kettledrums, congas, bongos and bata drums, musician and composer Giraldo Piloto, chairman of the event, told Prensa Latina.
It is an internationally known musical event and this time will receive Jojo Mayer, one of the best drummers in the world, Piloto said.
The 13th Drum Festival also sponsors a casino dance contest and concerts with famous bands such as Los Van Van, Manolito Simonet y su Trabuco and Buena Vista Social Club, among others.
Mella and Karl Marx theaters, the Salon Rosado de la Tropical, Rumba Palace and the Habana Libre hotel will be the headquarters of the Drum Festival, which also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Egrem record company.

(By Adalys Pilar MirelesPL) 

Nearly a hundred paintings have been stolen from Havana’s National Fine Arts Museum in what could well be the most serious misappropriation of Cuba’s artistic heritage of recent decades.
“Dozens of works are missing from storage,” a source employed by the museum told Cafe Fuerte. “Most are vanguard pieces.” The paintings were kept at the warehouse of the former headquarters of Cuba’s Technical Investigations Department (DTI), which has belonged to the museum following its remodeling in 2001.
Police officers were in charge of the local’s security.The thefts were detected last week, when a number of the missing pieces began to be offered to art dealers in Miami.An investigation by Ministry of the Interior and art heritage experts is underway According to the information secured by Cafe Fuerte, the pieces are works by Cuban painting masters. Apparently, news of the theft came from US art dealers.
“Someone noticed that the works they were being shown belonged to Cuba’s collection and notified the Fine Arts Museum of what was happening,” the source, who chose to remain anonymous, declared. At least two art dealers in Miami reported seeing works by Cuban painter Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951), pieces which began to circulate in the South Florida market recently.
Though the exact number of works stolen is unknown, reports suggest that it could be close to a hundred. It is believed most of the pieces belong to the avant-garde movement of the 1920s and 30s. Cuban authorities and the country’s media do not generally report on the theft of artworks, and many haven’t even been registered by Interpol. Art heritage dealers and experts around the world believe the museum should assume the responsibility of immediately reporting the stolen pieces, so that the Cuban art market can protect itself and prevent the works and objects stolen from being sold and turning their potential buyers into the direct victims of the perpetrators. This is not the first time the museum’s collection suffers a massive theft of this nature. In 1995, Cuban authorities dismantled a network of art smugglers headed by Arquimides Matienzo,a former museum administrator, and detained an additional five culprits, including an Italian citizen. The group had stolen 40 paintings from the museum. Founded in 1913, the National Fine Arts Museum is the institution tasked with storing and conserving works belonging to Cuba’s visual arts heritage.
The facility holds the largest collection of Cuban art produced between the 16th century and the present day. Its current director is Moraima Clavijo Colom.

Ivette Leyva Martinez  (Cafe Fuerte) 

The National Ballet of Cuba (BNC), headed by Prima Ballerina Assoluta Alicia Alonso, will premier two ballets next March 7,8 and 9, informed the institution. Celeste and Triade are the titles of the new choreographies of the well-known Belgian-Colombian choreographer Anabelle Lopez, music by P.I. Chaikovski, wardrove by Dieuweke van Reij and light design by Michael Mazzola. Lopez worked along with assistants Stephanie Bauger and Linnet González, who worked with ballet dancers Viengsay Valdés, Yanela Piñera, Grettel Morejón, Miguel Anaya and Lyvan Verdecia, among others. On the other hand, Triade, by Eduardo Blanco, will present young ballet dancers Chanell Cabrera, Cynthia González and Gabriela Mesa, at a choreography with music by Gioachino Rossini and wardrobe by Salvador Fernández. The premiers program will be complemented with the presentations of Prologue to a tragedy, by Brian McDonald, on the Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare, and Suite Generis, choreography of Alberto Méndez, inspired by the music of Haendel and Haydn.

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