Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Russian women stranded in Cuba since USSR fall

Russian women stranded in Cuba since USSR fall
rueters
By Anthony BoadleWed Sep 5, 8:50 AM ET

They came from Russia with love to a tropical socialist utopia when the going was good.

They were young women romantically drawn to Fidel Castro's revolution, a breath of fresh air on a distant Caribbean island for those who were disillusioned with Soviet communism.

But when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, hundreds of Russian women who married Cubans and moved to Cuba were cut off from home and stranded in poverty as the Cuban economy plunged into deep crisis.

For those who had lived through the hardships of World War II in Russia as children, the long blackouts and the lack of food, medicine and fuel for transport were a cruel flashback.

"We were young and Cuba was beautiful when we got here," said film historian Zoia Barash, who arrived in 1963. Cuban leaders were so young compared to the Soviet gerontocracy and abstract art was not seen as incompatible with communism.

Her hopes of finding "true socialism" were dashed, though, as Cuba copied the Soviet model, with sweltering heat added.

"Today our situation is difficult, as it is for the whole country," said Barash, 72, who cannot make ends meet on her 260 peso ($10) monthly pension after 30 years working for the Cuban film industry.

About 1,300 women from Russia and former Soviet republics Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan still live in Cuba, scraping a living as best they can.

In an old mansion belonging to the Russian Embassy, two women run a store selling anything from vodka and pickled gherkins to imported toothpaste, Pringles and Viagra pills.

The harshest aspect is not being able to travel home. Cuba used to grant them subsidized tickets every five years, paid for in pesos. But Cuba's airline stopped flying to Moscow and tickets must now be paid for in hard cash few can afford.

"My father died in 1994 and I could not go to his funeral," said Zita Kelderari, a Ukrainian gypsy, in tears.

The Flamenco singer fell for a Cuban helicopter pilot in Kiev in 1985 and sailed to Cuba on a Soviet freighter loaded with Yugoslavian butter. When he defected to the United States a few years ago, she was left penniless in Cuba.

Only the women lucky enough to receive money from their relatives get to travel these days. On a Cuban pension alone, it would take 10 years to gather the cost of a flight home.

For most it is too late to go back and start a new life. Many are grandmothers with families to look after.

The blackouts are gone and food supplies have improved since the dark days of Cuba's post-Soviet crisis. But housing remains dilapidated and overcrowded, few have cars and access to the Internet is expensive.

NO BOOKS, NO NEWS

Havana's Russian bookstore closed when "perestroika" reforms took hold in Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions were stopped, cutting off information from Russia.

Despite the problems, some women have pressed ahead.

"I don't know what nostalgia is. There is no point sitting around crying," said Natalia Balashova, who set about uniting the women in a cultural club for Russian speakers.

Balashova's father was a Bolshevik and she was drawn to Cuba in 1969 as much by love of the Cuban military officer she met in Moscow as by Castro's "bold" transformation of Cuba.

"I knew what to expect. Cuba was building socialism and had its difficulties. We came willingly, out of love," she said. Still, she felt "shipwrecked" when her country disappeared.

Balashova said she tapped her inner reserves and wartime improvisations she learned from her mother to cope with the crisis, such as using crushed egg-shells for cleaning powder.

After a 14-year hiatus, she returned to Moscow last year, invited to attend a world conference of Russians living abroad, and got to meet President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

DEPORTED FROM CUBA

Elena Verselova, who was struggling to get ahead after two Cuban divorces, took her activism in a different direction. She became a dissident on Cuba's depressed Isle of Youth.

Verselova was deported by the Cuban government on July 26, according to her daughter Diana Aguilar, who arrived from Russia when she was a nine-month baby in her mother's arms.

Verselova was harassed and threatened by Cuban police, and eventually arrested, her daughter said. The family had to sell hard-won electrical appliances to pay for her ticket to Moscow, where she arrived with $170 in her pocket to start a new life.

"They didn't let us say good-bye to her," said Aguilar, 22, a University of Havana student. She said the Russian consulate in Cuba refused to help her mother even locate family members in Vladimir, 115 miles east of Moscow.

"I hope to leave Cuba to join my mother. I want to return to my roots in Europe," said the blond student.

A Cuban documentary "Todas iban a ser reinas" (They were all going to be queens) made last year captured the isolation of women from seven former Soviet republics living in Cuba.

"It was a migration of love, a part of our shattered utopia," said director Gustavo Cruz. "They worked in our country for many years. It would be ungrateful to forget them."

Women from other former Soviet bloc countries were also stranded in Cuba and forgotten by post-communist governments.

Stasia Strach, 65, is one of 49 native Poles living in Cuba -- only three of whom are men. The view from her small apartment overlooking Havana's Malecon, or sea-wall, is spectacular. But the elevator packed up years ago and the 130 steps are a daily effort. Going home is out of the question.

"What would I do in Poland, beg at the door of a church?" she said. "I have no pension and nowhere to go."

Palo in Caracas

From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Not even the dead are safe in Caracas
A ghoulish crime wave in the Venezuelan capital supplies a black magic cult whose popularity is fueled by faith and politics.
By Chris Kraul
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 5, 2007

CARACAS, VENEZUELA — Skulking in the dead of night in the remote and overgrown Las Pavas section of the Southern Municipal Cemetery, robbers armed with crowbars and sledgehammers first shattered the tomb's concrete vault and the granite marker that read, "To our dear wife and mother in heaven, Maria de la Cruz Aguero."

Then they lifted the coffin lid and stole leg bones and the skull of the woman, who had died Sept. 9, 1993. They sold the bones for $20 each, the skull for as much as $300, said Father Atilio Gonzalez, the cemetery's resident Roman Catholic priest.

Sometimes entire skeletons, particularly those of children, are stolen from crypts in this final resting place of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, including three former presidents.

"These unscrupulous people are insulting God and committing a mortal sin," said Gonzalez. He said that graves in the city's largest cemetery are robbed every night, and it's getting worse. "They have perfect liberty to desecrate the tombs because the government does nothing to stop it."

The desecration of the woman's tomb was part of a ghoulish crime wave, including assaults, rapes and dope deals, that has made the cemetery so dangerous that funeral home workers say they carry weapons whenever they have to go there. Parts of the vast cemetery, particularly the remote hillside sections reserved for the poor, are in ruins and choked with weeds, providing perfect cover for thugs and the homeless.

In the past when graves were robbed, the primary objective was to steal personal effects such as jewelry or gold dental fillings, said Odalys Caldera, an investigator in the city's judicial police. Today, thieves are pillaging the graves for darker reasons.

The buyers of the bones are paleros, the practitioners of a black magic cult related to Santeria whose rise in popularity here is fueled by a strange brew of faith and politics.

"Santeria, witchcraft and black magic are much more out in the open now. That's the reason," Caldera said. "Of course the state is aware of the robberies, but hasn't taken the necessary steps to impede them."

Santeria, which combines Catholicism and African and indigenous spiritualism, was brought to the New World by slaves from Africa centuries ago and still thrives, particularly in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and, increasingly, Venezuela. It is also popular in regions of the United States with strong Caribbean immigrant communities, such as south Florida, Washington and Los Angeles,areas where hundreds of thousands are thought to practice it.

Although most Santeria followers steer clear of the use of human remains and Satanism, the paleros embrace them. They use bones in black magic rituals in which the objective is to cast evil spells on enemies: to induce bad luck for an unfaithful spouse, a car accident for unwanted in-laws, a serious illness for a business competitor, Gonzalez said.

Police, church officials and historians offer a variety of theories for the rise in Santeria generally and of black magic in particular in Venezuela. Some, including anthropologist Rafael Strauss, point to the vacuum left by the Roman Catholic Church, which, as in many other Latin American countries, has lost believers in Venezuela to evangelical and other Protestant religions. Church rolls also are suffering from a lack of interest among younger people.

"We are seeing a new syncretism that is uniting parts of different religions," said Strauss, a retired University of Central Venezuela professor. "It's how people make it easier to meet their spiritual needs."

Gonzalez acknowledged that the country is suffering a crisis in belief.

"People are losing faith," he said. "Instead of assuming responsibility to accomplish something good, they resort to witchcraft, which they see as the easy way."

But others see politics at work. Father Manuel Diaz is a parish priest in the El Hatillo suburb of Caracas where three Santeria babalaos, or shamans, have recently opened centers. He says the government of leftist President Hugo Chavez is encouraging the rise of Santeria to counter the authority of the Catholic Church, which Chavez has viewed as his enemy.

In a pastoral letter to his parishioners last month, Diaz said the government has a "concrete objective, to undermine the authority of the church and align its faithful with certain ideologies." In the letter, he wrote that leaders of the movement to discredit the church were coming from an unnamed "Caribbean country," presumably Cuba.

Although Santeria and other spiritualist religions have been present in Venezuela since Spanish colonial days, the rise of black magic, including that practiced by paleros, is relatively new, said Maria Garcia de Fleury, a comparative religions professor at New Sparta University in Caracas.

"We've always had a little witchcraft, but nothing like what has been unleashed recently," De Fleury said. "This is not Venezuelan."

Without offering hard evidence, De Fleury and some church officials blame the growing presence of Santeria on Cuba, which she says is exporting babalaosalong with doctors, teachers and sports trainers to Venezuela as part of closer economic relations with Chavez.

"It's because the government is behind Santeria, promoting it, letting in Cuban babalaos who are proselytizing very actively," De Fleury said.

While not addressing Santeria, Chavez in a February 2003 broadcast of his "Alo Presidente" TV talk show denied that he was a believer in black magic. He is known to be a mystic of sorts, and some say that he believes he is the reincarnation of a 19th century Venezuelan leader, Ezequiel Zamora.

"President Chavez, who knows the mentality of Venezuelans, takes advantage of their magical religious imagery to further his popularity and his revolution," university professor Angelina Pollak-Eltz said in an essay shortly after Chavez took power in 1999.

Yarlin Mejia, a hotel worker who is also a babalao in the Catia slum of Caracas, said the majority of Santeria believers stay away from witchcraft. "The paleros work for evil," Mejia said. "I do it differently. I work for positive things."

Half a dozen people come every Sunday to Mejia's house, where his ceremonies involve "white magic" -- rituals that aim to help believers attain specific goals, be it a new house, a better job or success at school. A chicken is usually sacrificed. Mejia says interest is growing and attributes it to the presence of Cubans.

"They're everywhere," Mejia said.

Father Gonzalez, whose parish could be said to include the hundreds of thousands of dead that populate the Southern Municipal Cemetery, made a baleful round of the grounds recently to assess the losses.

Half a dozen more graves had been "profaned" over the weekend in the Black Road section of the cemetery, a place of paupers' graves where 70% of the tombs have been robbed, he said.

He said lax municipal vigilance has turned the cemetery to which he has given heart and soul for 18 years into a frequent crime scene. Three or four armed assaults a week and several rapes a month happen here.

Maria Machado, who had come to visit the grave of her husband, Jose, who died in 2000, said she feared for her life each time she paid her respects.

"It wasn't this way before, when there was another president," said Machado, whose husband's grave was bordered by several looted tombs, one of which contained the carcass of a chicken sacrificed in a Santeria rite.

"I'm worried I'll come here some day and my husband will be gone," Machado said. She and her two grandchildren were the only visitors in the Las Pavas section of the cemetery, which when founded in 1867 was far beyond the southwestern borders of the city.

On a recent day, the cemetery was the scene of a macabre ritual that has become a regular occurrence whenever a young gang member is buried, Gonzalez said. It provided another example of the lawlessness here.

During the funeral procession for a 25-year-old gunshot victim, friends suddenly halted the cortege and removed the corpse from the coffin to give it one last joy ride around the cemetery on the back of a buddy's motorcycle.

As a final homage before burial, the dead man was given a 30-gun salute -- from pistols fired by his pals. One of the bullets punctured the umbrella of Father Gonzalez, who officiated at the burial.

"Now I suffer not just from the pain felt by the loved ones of the dead," he said, "but for the lack of respect for this holy place."

chris.kraul@latimes.com