Barred from the streets, Cubans mark Women’s Day online

By Leticia Pineda

TAKING to the streets to make your voice heard on International Women’s Day is a right taken for granted in most countries.

Not in Cuba.

Three activists who sought to obtain permission for demonstrations in different parts of the communist-run island were arrested on January 13, interrogated, and had their phones checked, according to the Red Feminina women’s group.

The right to assembly and protest is recognized in Cuba’s new constitution, adopted in 2019. But in the absence of a rulebook, anti-government marches are generally banned.

The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) does organize activities, mostly in businesses and schools, but it is linked to the government.

And the younger generation wants more.

“Demonstrating publicly to demand transformative policies from a gender point of view, is the focus worldwide every March 8, except in Cuba,” Red Femina wrote on Twitter on February 20, inviting Cubans instead to join a “Virtual March.”

‘No impunity’

Other groups such as “I believe you” and “Alas Tensas,” were created in 2019 to monitor gender-based violence, shortly after the arrival on the island in 2018 of Internet services on mobile phones.

The Internet “is our only place of struggle. We cannot have a physical space because that’s banned in our country,” journalist and feminism activist Kianay Anandra, 24, told AFP.

“I believe you” told AFP by email that they were working on a call for a “state of emergency on gender violence.”

But the collective turned down a request for an in-person interview given the “singular risks of the repressive Cuban context.”

In the first two months of this year, these two groups counted 15 femicides on the communist island, which has a population of about 11 million.

That is compared to just over 30 in all of each of the previous three years.

Since 2016, there have been no official figures on gender-based violence and femicide was not included as a separate crime in the new criminal code, adopted in 2022, despite calls from activist groups.

This global holiday, a focal point in the women’s rights movement, brings attention to issues like gender equality, reproductive rights, and violence and abuse against women.

Women human rights defenders and feminist movements use the transformative power of digital technology to connect, mobilize, and drive social change.

The word “WE” stands for “Women and Everyone” which emphasizes the role of women themselves and everyone in the pursuit of gender equality.

It also stands for “Women’s Empowerment,” which can only be achieved when agencies, mechanisms, institutions, private partners, and dutybearers from the national to the local level provide women equal rights and opportunities, and women take these opportunities to further themselves. With women and everyone in synergy, This year’s celebration marks, in the Philippines, a juncture in the violence and abuse against women advancement of women’s rights as it launches a new recurring theme from this year to 2028:

“Women Empowerment” sparks a renewed commitment to the advocacy and banks on the gains achieved during the 2016-2022 theme “WE Make CHANGE Work for Women,” which stressed the need for compassionate and harmonized networks towards gender equality and women’s empowerment or GEWE.

The recurring theme also aligns with the Philippine Development Plan 2023-

Land deal void from the start?

WHAT do we make of the report that the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), the government’s official counsel, has declared the land occupied by a mall and condominium project of a taipan in the National Capital Region is still part of a “military reservation” and therefore owned by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP)? If the report is accurate, that can only mean one thing: the property in question remains government property and therefore cannot be used for profit by any private or commercial entity.

The OSG likewise affirmed the findings of the Land Registration Authority (LRA) that the land titles used by the taipan for his publicly-listed company’s commercial development are of “dubious origin.”

In so doing, the OSG also declared as void the transaction entered into by the taipan with a local government unit in Metro Manila over the conversion and development of the prime “military reservation.”

How did this controversial land deal come about?

The prime property, we’re told, used to be one of the military garrisons used by the Americans in the early 1900s.

As early as May 1905, then US President Theodore Roosevelt declared the prime property, along with Fort Santiago, Estado Mayor and Malate Barracks, as military reservations.

In December 1956, the US government turned over the property, along with other military reservations, to the Philippine government, which later allowed the use of the property to a Metro Manila city solely for the construction of schools and a police station.

In April 2006, the LGU entered into a commercial joint venture with the taipan’s PSE-listed company for the conversion of the property into what is now a well-known mall and condominium project.

The taipan also converted another prime area in the military-owned property into a lucrative and posh hotel and condominium project. The taipan is said to have fostered very close ties with past and present politicians with his wide circle of connections.

With the recent disclosure by the government’s official counsel, will this taipan be able to wiggle out of this controversy using his wealth, connections and resources?

Observers say this might only be the tip of the iceberg. Has the controversial land deal been replicated in other land development projects in Metro Manila and various other parts of our country?

Do these projects also involve government-owned lands?

With the recent disclosure by the government’s official counsel, will this taipan be able to wiggle out of this controversy using his wealth, connections and resources?”

With the taipan’s broad interests in various fields—hotels, malls, media and prime real estate development both here and abroad—observers are beginning to wonder if the controversial land deal could well taint his meteoric rise in Philippine business circles over the years. No end to the drug menace

Don’t look now, but it looks like the previous administration’s bloody war on drugs has not solved the problem, with authorities confiscating some P592 million worth of illegal drugs in January this year.

A recent report by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) showed illegal drugs seized included “shabu” or crystal meth worth P403.4 million; cocaine powder worth P15.9 million; ecstasy tablets worth P19.9 million; kush worth P19.8 million, and marijuana in the form of dried leaves, bricks, plants, and stalks worth “millions.”

The agency said 4,499 drug personalities were arrested and 7,720 drug cases were filed in January alone.

But there’s also positive news. To date, 64.1 percent or 26,952 of the 42,046 barangays nationwide have already been declared “drug-free.”

The report indicated that authorities have increased their surveillance and monitoring of the nation’s airports and seaports, as well as mail and parcel services, to stop the importation of illegal drugs, prohibited precursors, and vital chemicals.

Thus, we begin this new era of the National Women’s Month Celebration, high in the hope and ambition that “WE are all for Gender Equality, WE are all for an inclusive society.”

Gender equality is the first half of the GEWE advocacy, and it is the ultimate goal when we advance the rights of women.

In the Global Gender Gap Report, at the current rate of progress, with the global gender gap being closed by only 68.1 percent, it will take 132 years to reach gender equality worldwide, a stark difference from the figure of 99.5 years in the 2020 report.

Hence, this means that none of us, or most likely many of our children, will see gender parity in our lifetimes.

But not all hope is gone, officials underline, because our right for gender equality today is for a better and more inclusive tomorrow, although not in the next generations.

While at this, we recall an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2017 by former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria entitled “President Duterte Is Repeating My Mistakes”.

We quote pertinent portions of the commentary to give readers another perspective on how the war on drugs in this country can be won.

One, “illegal drugs are a matter of national security, but the war against them cannot be won by armed forces and law enforcement agencies alone. Throwing more soldiers and police at the drug users is not just a waste of money but also can actually make the problem worse. Locking up nonviolent offenders and drug users almost always backfires, instead strengthening organized crime.”

Two, Gaviria said, his government and every administration since “threw everything at the problem—from fumigating crops to jailing every drug pusher in sight. Not only did we fail to eradicate drug production, trafficking and consumption in Colombia, but we also pushed drugs and crime into neighboring countries. And we created new problems. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in our antidrug crusade.

“Many of our brightest politicians, judges, police officers and journalists were assassinated. At the same time, the vast funds earned by drug cartels were spent to corrupt our executive, judicial and legislative branches of government.

“We do not believe that military hardware, repressive policing and bigger prisons are the answer. Real reductions in drug supply and demand will come through improving public health and safety, strengthening anticorruption measures—especially those that combat money laundering—and investing in sustainable development.

“We also believe that the smartest pathway to tackling drugs is decriminalizing consumption and ensuring that governments regulate certain drugs... Extrajudicial killings and vigilantism are the wrong ways to go...”

(Email: ernhil@yahoo.com)

The groups try to ensure the names and faces of victims that were murdered or disappeared are not forgotten.

“I want my daughter to appear, alive or dead, however she is, that justice be done,” Isis Rodriguez told AFP about her daughter, Madeleisis Rosales, who disappeared in central Havana in May 2021, aged 16.

The groups also highlighted the case of 17-year-old Leydi Bacallao, who was killed with a machete by her 49-year-old ex-partner in mid-February.

The crime, which outraged Cuban society, occurred inside a police station in the east, where she had gone to denounce her aggressor. That murder generated such outrage that it even provoked a rare reaction from the FMC. “There will be no impunity. We must deepen actions” to avoid these events, Teresa Boue, secretary general of the FMC, said on Twitter.

Gender law needed

Even so, Anandra believes it is “undeniable” that the 1959 triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution opened “a big door” for women in Cuba.

Cuba was the first Latin American country to legalize abortion in 1965, women have long been highly active in all areas of public life, while the country has one of the highest rates of female legislative participation (53.4 percent) in the world.

But the State needs to “renew itself” in the battle for women’s rights, said Anandra, who is critical of the lack of details in the government’s program for the advancement of women, which was launched in 2021.

Yanelys Nunez, a member of Alas Tensas, says the government is holding women back.

“When you impede the free right of association you are not enabling emancipatory spaces,” said the 33-year-old Cuban, exiled in Madrid since 2018 as a result of her activism.

Red Feminina demands on its website “a gender law,” which would require official records and generate public policies against gender-based violence.

That would be the only way to enact “effective” policies, the group argues. AFP