Poverty, the Cuban Dictatorship’s Recourse / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

The Revolution is Going Well… Ever Onward! Fidel

Jeovany Jimenz Vega, 12 October 2015 — Doctor A, with 20 years of uninterrupted work to his credit, owes nothing to the little he receives in salary. Besides not being enough to feed his family, it has not allowed him to procure a proper roof and so he still lives in his shabby doctor’s office. After many disappointments, A is now tired of waiting for an improvement that will never come and chose to add his name to his polyclinic’s list of Collaborators: to go work abroad on some official “Medical Mission,” the only alternative he can see to better his life in the near term.

Engineer B works in the Mariel Free Zone and almost never seeks the light of day with his children due to the rigor of his work schedule. He knows that in the Development Zone foreign engineers and technicians receive several thousand dollars a month for the exact same work he does, but at the end of the month he receives some one hundred dollars, more or less; his share of the hard cash that goes directly from the foreign firm to the government coffers in exchange for his labor, without ever passing through his hands, and thus he is exploited by the government.

Teacher C is overwhelmed with work plans and rare is the day that doesn’t end with her at home planning her next class. During her thirty year career she has trained two generations; the father who today trusts his son to her was, in turn, taught to read by her. Nor can C live on the salary paid by the government and soon she will receive a pension that will condemn her to penury. But C can’t do anything about that, sowing light in new minds, and despite everything leaving home every morning to practice the profession she loves.

Cigar maker D is a master of rolling Habaneros. For decades he has taken the best leaf in the world and made cigars smoked by millionaire celebrities. Every day D stocks a showcase where this tobacco is sold at $250 Cuban Convertible Pesos (almost $280 US) a box, and like a good veteran, every Feria del Habano awakens a confused mixture of pride and frustration in him that he is unable to define. But D does not receive a fair wage for rolling what represents $2,000 US a day — instead, like the majority of Cubans, he receives a pittance compared to the wealth he generates.

Millions of frustrations accumulated over five decades of the Castro’s misgovernment in Cuba would make this summary interminable. A revolution that triumphed supposedly to destroy the exploitation of man by man has over time degenerated into a scheme of domination that ended up sowing poverty evenly over our country.

When the causes of such an accumulation of so much inequity and misery are analyzed–regardless of the path followed to reach a synthesis–the unavoidable conclusion upon identifying the source of all power today in this tyrannized Cuba, is a single, simple one: the poverty of my people has been the supreme economic and strategic resource of the Cuban dictatorship.

In essence, it is not nickel, nor tobacco, nor tourism, nor the systematic frauds committed by the ETECSA monopoly, neither is it the “emergent” petrochemical industry (which lost its momentum when Caracas succumbed); it is not even the billions generated annually by the more than 60 official Cuban medical missions around the world, which have allowed the rule of the Castro regime to last for more than a half century despite governing in such a disastrous manner from any point of view. If one wants  to get down to the heart of the matter, if one wants to find the common backstory behind all the ills, we will always find poverty as the sine qua non condition that perpetuates the disaster.

Only a physician sunk in poverty that threatens his family’s stability, his health and even his life, would choose to go work in the opposite end of the earth, even with the knowledge that they will steal 80% of what he is supposed to be paid. Only under pressure by the most dire proverty does that engineer, that tobacco farmer or that teacher find himself forced to go out every day and plunder life. Only by being dragged down by the most absurd shortages has it been possible for my people to remain submerged in this protracted torpor, with their thinking reduced to what is on their plates and far from the hazy “utopianisms” of civic philosophy.

Anyone seeking to understand how a once proud and prosperous people, who knew how to rid themselves of more than one tyrant, ended up in this shameful state, should firstly disabuse himself of any simplistic view, such as the one that holds that if we allowed so many outrages, it is simply because we are a pack of cowards. But anyone who has had a close encounter of the fourth kind with a Cuban who is all fired up will have perceived that this explanation is not congruent with a temperament that tends towards the explosive. The true answer will, of course, be much more complex.

The causes that keep this game of dominoes closed have to be found in the devious despotism riding on the train of a Revolution that triumphed with the unconditional support of 90% of its people. Anyone who ignores this pair of dichotomies–the initial massive support for that movement, along with the demogogic, cunning character of the top brass–will go off in the wrong direction if he tries to understand the evolution of post-1959 Cuban society, because it was that very initial turmoil that allowed the despots to modify the social framework according to their preferences before the eyes of a people who were all too credulous. The rest was determined by the rebels in the Escambray mountains, hanging teachers with barbed wire, among other bloody events, which conferred clear-cut justification on the politico-military elite to reshape the dog’s nest while letting him sleep.

The rest is known history and today, even when more amicable winds are starting to blow from the North, and weary now of the arguments pulled from the top hat of the Central Committee–that same elite that once dictated and sustained a scorched-earth economic policy with regard to any hint of private or family business–and which continues betting on keeping us in poverty as the only way of ensuring its continued power.

Thus it was for more than 50 years, and thus it has been since last December 17. Now almost a year since that historic announcement, and with both embassies fully functioning, the Cuban regime yet maintains itself as static as the walls of La Cabaña prison, restricting in just the same manner all possibility of incentives for the Cuban people, and continues displaying the same terror as always toward any alternative that supposes prosperity for my people–for it knows this to be incompatible with its monopoly of power.

Today every passing minute shows evermore that the true culprits of our misery and insolvency have always been at Revolution Square; never was there need to search for them even one meter to the North. They have always been the same, but today they remain convinced that the only way to keep a people subdued is to keep them in poverty and privation.

Poverty seen as a deliberate cause of evil, and not as its consequence–the poverty of my people adopted as a deliberate strategy of long-term domination: this is the fundamental and revelatory concept that once and for all puts everything in perspective.

I want you POOR, Fanatic, Worshipful and Thanking me for it.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison and others

Citizen Zero Resumes Publication / Jeovany J. Vega

Dear Friends of Citizen Zero:

Due to an unfortunate error, I found myself unable to publish on my site for more than two months. Thanks to the help of esteemed and friendly hands, as of today I am resuming my publishing. I hope that my faithful readers will forgive me for this lamentable delay. This blog will always be at the service of Truth and Homeland.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

20 August 2015

Minimal Vindication of José Marti / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

Painting by Carlos Enríquez of the death of José Martí.

Jeovany Jimenez Vega,20 May 2015 — In the laudable attempt to demystify José Martí, pens of the most dissimilar calibers have been employed, and all the efforts seem paltry given the transcendence of his legacy. But not all have headed in the right direction in their efforts. I concur with the argument put forth in a recent article that questions the impact of José Martí on the Cuban people during the phase immediately preceding the uprising of 24 February, 1895.

To gauge Martí’s influence within Cuban society before 1895–which, given the improbable and rudimentary level of which his advanced doctrinal thinking could reach a semi-literate Cuban population relegated to the Cuban insularity at the close of the 19th Century–would be as absurd as to presuppose that his impact would have been exclusively limited to that humble sector of the population, isolating it for no reason from the rest of a society already resounded impatiently at the imminent possibility of the war.

This would always be a biased view, because it would ignore the principal aim of the Master’s* discourse on the pages of Patria [newspaper funded and directed by Martí] and from the lecterns of Tampa and Key West: to the Creole intelligentsia, called to amplify the message precipitating the imminent push into the interior of the Island; to the military leaders, called to drag into the scrubland, inciting them with their natural leadership, the great mass of Cubans who would be the shock troops of the future Liberating Army.

The influence Martí was able to exert over the lowest-majority classes (and ultimately those most decisive in the future conflict) cannot be deduced linearly, but rather it necessarily winds through a typically extensive network of message intermediaries. While it is true that the Cuban peasant had little opportunity to imbue himself with the Martí Doctrine, nonetheless that tide of contained rancor against Spain was ready to overflow by 1895; it was waiting only for the wink of an eye, the order of the commanders of old, to be unleashed in new charges against the merciless metropolis. If that tension reached the critical point of no return, it was precisely because of the enormous and tireless organizational work and political proselytism deployed by Martí–a gigantic odyssey whose importance anyone objectively analyzing the prevailing dynamic of the final phase of the Rewarding Truce will never be able to underestimate or minimize.

It is true that Cuba at that time was going through a precarious and circumstantially complex economic situation, but bitter precedents should be taken into account: the failed attempted coup of the Little War and, later, the great frustration engendered by the failure of the Gómez-Maceo Plan [in 1885]. Therefore, it would not be farfetched to assert that, were it not for the catalyzing miracle of the Apostle,* that hour could well have passed without much fanfare.

Martí was not a military man. His strategic genius was developed purely in the political realm and was based on his exceptional diplomatic skill. This undisputed ability would carve the Master with the steady hand and tenacity of a goldsmith, throughout his life, through an exponential process of self-purification that finally converted him into a man of irascible and reactive temperament within this kind, magnetic, charming and edifying being whom History bequeathed us–so forceful that he conquered for the common cause men who were made as of stone, divided for years. Returning to the course of the Revolution those bronze-like characters was his major accomplishment, and also his way of knocking on the door of every Cuban country hut with the hilt of the liberating machete.

Too many obstacles were at that time coming between the Martí ideology and the poverty of the Cuban peasant. However, the task of translating the martyr of Dos Ríos’ strategic plan to the language of country folk was assumed by principal figures of the big war: one Máximo Gómez who had given to Cuban émigrés an unequivocal sign of his unconditional support for Martí by sending his son, Panchito, along with Martí on a proselytizing tour through the revolutionary clubs of the US; one newly-married José Maceo, who barely had to be urged by the Master to join the enterprise, overlooking his hurt pride at the racism of the last conflict–“only Martí was able to pull me from my love nest,” he would say; and one Antonio Maceo, the final man, who despite the misunderstandings, also added his unconditional machete to the deed and, having barely arrived in Oriente, would lead a massive charge of thousands of mambises through the scrub.

To those rough and uncultured men it was enough to have the presence in the camps of Cuba of their legendary leaders for them to be willing to die for the war previously conceived by Martí’s genius. Many joined, but the decisive presence of every one of these generals in the Cuban scrubland was a personal triumph of the Apostle; if the mambí soldier had greater or lesser awareness of it, very little would it matter to this man so little motivated by personal honors, but History is conclusive in this respect: If the miracle of the uprising was wrought, it was because beforehand, Martí–by way of his most formidable tool, the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC)–patiently and systematically organized, with regal intelligence, the colossal conspiracy.

It borders on insolence to reduce to mythical status the exalted merits of the Cuban who combines in himself such a sublime confluence of virtues. Yes, we greatly need to demystify Martí, strip him of the saintly cassocks that he never wore, and take him down from the altars that he never sought for himself. But to demystify him does not imply wiping out his proven merits: let us take care that our repugnance for the saccharine storyline and opportunistic flattery of despots who seek to legitimize themselves does not obscure before our gaze the brilliance and authentic nobility of the visionary hero.

Definitely, it was not a military man who fell at the light of day in the first skirmish, and if he was promoted in death to Major General by the unconquered Máximo Gómez–profound knower of men and quite sparing in conferring honors–it was also because the great soul of the Old Man from Baní, forged in all the pains of war, was ultimately conquered without reservation by the mysterious influence of the Master.

And let us not forget: If one gesture by Gómez was enough to mobilize the entire mambí army, along with this gesture–as his supreme victory–went the order of he who died at Dos Ríos for the poor of the Earth.

See: Martí and the Idea of a Single Party.

Translator’s Notes:

* A common epithet of José Martí in Cuban writings.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

For Sucelys*, to Be Reborn Tomorrow / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

And Jesus said: Father, forgive them, because they know not what they do.

Luke 23:34

I write without knowing if she will get to read these words, or if she would understand them, because there are matters in life that take us a minute or perhaps an hour to understand, but others take a year, and there will undoubtedly be some that will take a whole lifetime.

Every time I view the video in which she screams at that journalist in Panama, amidst all the vulgarity of the scene, that she financed her airfare with her miserable salary, it does not cease to amaze me.

How could she lie like that, when even a child knows that this is impossible, that all those costs were subsidized by the government? Could she explain how she was able to get by without buying clothes or shoes, how she was able to survive without buying food for years, and all while wholly saving the salary that her “Revolution” pays her so that she could travel for those couple of days to the Summit, only to add her yelling to the din of another hundred activists in the official “civil society,” who supposedly made similar “sacrifices”?

Her lost gaze in Panama provokes more than shame, sadness; there is no conviction behind those shouts, only alienation and fanaticism. Even so, she was honest when she confirmed that the Cuban people funded her expenses.

Perhaps she should have been more cautious, because she was speaking at that moment about something that cuts deep: that Rapid Response Brigade that Raúl Castro sent to Panama to scream (really, they did nothing else) financed their travel with money not paid to my colleagues–doctors and nurses–nor to my children’s teachers, and the thousands of Cuban retirees who survive on eight dollars per month.

This money could have been used to restore a Havana that is at the point of collapse, to repair the millions of potholes, improve the lamentable state of the water supply or our deplorable public transportation system–evils that persist after decades of mis-government that squanders the national treasure on repulsive political “lobbies” such as the one that boycotted, with its egocentric bluster, the forum in Panama.

But, at heart, I understand her. Like her today, I, too, one day believed in the Revolution–with a pure faith I believed in mine, the inner one, the one I never reference in quotation marks–when all the trumpets seemed to herald our apocalypse beneath the storm clouds of 1994. At that time, the future became full of uncertainties, just as the extensive waters of the Florida Straits became full of live balseros [rafters] and dead memories.

At my age of 23 years, having lived under the aegis of absolutism and the megalomaniac cult of the “big brother” iconoclast, I, too, was a fervent militant of her UJC [Young Communist League]. I did not want to–or did not know how to–or could not–(perhaps I will never know for certain) assume another posture.

And while this was going on, Sucelys was still dressing her last dolls, but she had not even been born in 1980, when some Cubans as alienated as she stopped viewing other Cubans as brothers and sisters, and hurled the same offenses that she recycled today in Panama, initiating this era of shame that still haunts us.

But one fine day, my reason adjusted its glasses, I understood, little by little, the terrible error of my distorted view, and that tyrant–formerly irreproachable–became smaller and smaller in my eyes, and returned before me to his natural condition of cockroach.

I awoke one fine day questioning myself on everything, and when I found the answers, there was no going back: I definitively disconnected myself from that matrix and questioned all my assumptions, pulverizing some and reaffirming others, but being born again in the process, from a position of personal liberty, definitively more tolerant of others, and more at peace with myself.

As history tends to repeat itself in the form of a farce, I thank God for not having placed me then in the saddest role of the scene, for having wisely shielded me from playing the part of a hired gun.

I don’t know if she will someday be able to be reborn, but I can’t help but be saddened to see her girlish eyes racked with hate, her hands that are meant to soothe a child or friend, instead of making the gestures of war, and screaming lies that darker and more-sinister others placed in her mouth, the mouth of a daughter, mother or lover.

A good Cuban used to say that in a dictatorship, all of us are victims–including the tyrant, who is the most tortured by his fear–and that almost always, the most captive are those who least perceive their bondage.

Sucelys, brilliant psychologist that she is, must know that in this truth is hidden the key to man’s alienation, to his dissolution en masse until all that’s left is that amorphous and malleable material subject to the whims of the tyrant.

The Social Forum convened at the Seventh Summit of the Americas should have served, at least, to enable the civil societies of America to extract one clear lesson: this is what happens when a totalitarian dictatorship takes over the designs of an entire nation, and alienates whole generations.

In Panama all were witnesses to the transformation of man to beast, to irrational being, to automaton repeating screams and empty slogans but unable to exchange coherent arguments in a quiet voice. May this serve as one more proof that the sleep of reason engenders monsters.

This is why today I wish to leave the balm of forgiveness and harmony on the wound that this foreign shame inflicted on Panama, because the homeland always needs more bridges and fewer walls, and the day will come when Sucelys’ gaze will be cleansed of rancor.

I dream of that day being so beautiful and purifying that the hired guns of today will also become, thanks to the miracle of redemption, part of the authentic civil society of tomorrow. This message will wait, as though in a bottle tossed to the sea, to be read when the rebirth happens.

PHOTO: Official Cuban mob at Summit of the Americas in Panama, April, 2015.

Translator’s Notes:

* This post is in the form of an open letter from the author, Jeovany Jimenez Vega, to Sucelys Morfa Gonzalez. Morfa was part of a contingent of Cuban government supporters ostensibly sent to Panama to challenge dissidents attending the Seventh Summit of the Americas in April, 2015. This article from HavanaTimes.Org provides more background about her. Regarding the incident itself, this report from independent Cuban news site 14yMedio was filed on the day it occurred.

 Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

27 April 2015

My Minutes With the Pope / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

Jeovany Jimenez Vega, 9 May 2015 — What would I say to Pope Francis if I could speak with him minutes before his meeting with Raúl Castro?*  If Jesus came into the world to save the impure, to sit also at the table of the Pharisees (those with souls most contaminated by the splinter of evil), what could I say to His Holiness that would convey to him all the pain of my people, and advise him of the true dimension of disaster through which my country lives?

Tomorrow* the Pope will face the representative of a deformed creation made up to fool the world about its true wretched nature, which hides its true face behind curtains splattered with the blood and suffering of my people. Raul Castro represents the longest-running, most perfidious and subtle dictatorship known in the Americas, whose sinister side is known only by the humble man of miserable means who dares not speak up for fear of certain reprisals; or the censored journalist confronting taboo subjects; or the ethical writer marginalized by an apostate pseudo-intellectualism who, like a prostitute, traded in his dignity for status**; or the civic activist trampled-on for defending her truths.

This Raúl Castro–at once President, Prime Minister, and Secretary General of the only legal party in my country–is the same one who orders or permits every threat, raid, repudiation rally or beating visited with impunity upon peaceful members of the opposition, every arbitrary detention and prison sentence levied without charges, as well as the constant harassment of a dissident movement not officially recognized but which he fears in his bones.

In short, Raúl Castro is the one ultimately responsible, along with Fidel Castro, for every one of the thousands of abuses that confirms the totalitarian-despotic nature of the regime that he represents. This man does not represent the people of Cuba because he was not elected in a democratic process, because his fear of the Cuban people keeps him from convening a plebiscite. By the same token, his entourage of minions never participate in public debates under equivalent conditions, and just recently, in Panama, offered to the world the most shameful and caveman-like lesson in incivility.

This man will give assurances that his government cares about the world’s poor when in reality, on dozens of official medical missions, he keeps an army of semi-slaves captive in the most despicable state of deprivation of their rights. To say that the primary source of income for the dictatorship is a supposed philanthropic venture, clearly typifies its root strategy: its monumental demagoguery.

In worldwide forums, the government insists that “differences be respected,” yet in Cuba it routinely thrashes dissidents and opponents. While outside the Island it applauds the people’s egalitarian right to technology, at home it denies us free access to the Internet. While it denounces other governments’ policies of domestic espionage, it keeps my people defenseless against the severe and constant vigilance of the political police. While in forums it voices complaints against the injustices of “savage capitalism,” it brutally exploits its own workers, and criticizes neoliberal stopgap measures while it plays the market with astronimical prices and makes daily life unsustainably expensive for the average citizen.

His Holiness should know that this charmless man sustains his government by the people’s fear, by systematic deception, by fomenting the most abject hatred of dissent, by the insolent satiation of the greed and basest instincts of his accomplices in power, by the bribery and blackmail perpretrated by all of his followers, and by the brute force thrust unmercifully against any who deviate from his commands.

His Holiness should know that this man represents the neo-bourgeoisie tied to power on the Island and not to the people of Cuba. All of the Holy Father’s gestures to reconcile this dictatorship with the world do not benefit the wellbeing of the Cuban people as long as our country is not free, and all the riches generated by these changes will inexorably end up in thehands of that indolent elite that despises us.

All this would I tell Jorge Mario Bergoglio [Francis’ name before he became Pope] prior to his visit with this little man–or, perhaps overwhelmed by a pain that I admit I am incapable of conveying in a few minutes, I would manage only to ask for his most humble prayer for retribution here on earth on the dark souls of all tyrants.

View Letter to Pope Benedict XVI

Translator’s Notes:

* This post was written prior to Raúl Castro’s scheduled meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, which took place on Sunday, May 10, 2015.

** Here, the writer is referring to author and former Cuban Culture Minister Abel Prieto, who denounced the presence of independent civil society representatives at the Summit of the Americas in March, 2015.  Various members of the Cuban opposition have expressed disappointment over Prieto’s perceived selling-out to the regime. This sentiment is exemplified in this post by another independent Cuban blogger.  

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Elections in Cuba: The Never-Ending Farce / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

Municipal delegate elections. Vote 2015 Cuba.

 

Jeovany J. Vega, 19 APril 2015 — When on this day, Sunday, 19 April 2015, the last poll closes, nothing transcendent will occur. Despite the statistics manipulated by the newspaper Granma and its libels about an electorate that presumably will have gone to the polls freely and massively to give its “absolute support” to the Revolution, at this stage that never-ending story will deceive very few people.

Irregularities at the polls; ballots that can only be marked “with pencil!” so that they can later be adulterated and thus avoid generating inconvenient statistics; candidacy commissions controlled by the only legal party in Cuba (the Communist one) who handpick the president of every assembly from the municipal level on up to the Council of State: assemblies all of which from San Antonio on the west to Maisí on the east will decide nothing outside the line approved by the one dictatorial party, and they will question nothing, but rather during their time in office they will do nothing more than unanimously approve every “guidance” emanating from Olympus.

The people of Cuba know only too well that they cannot expect anything new from this farce, that this scheme is all played out and will never offer new paths, that it is only more of the same. Thus I will not beat a dead horse but rather today I will reflect on one detail that emerged weeks ago on various online sites: in an event practically without precedent, two dissidents from Havana managed to be nominated as candidates as potential delegates to the National Assembly of People’s Power by their respective districts – something almost unheard-of in today’s Cuba.

Even so, Hildelbrando Chaviano, from the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, and Yuniel López O’Farrill, from the Arroyo Naranjo municipality, had to resign themselves to being branded as “counterrevolutionaries” in their published candidate biographies, as being part of what the nomenklatura calls “splinter groups,” among other pejorative names — outright calumnies and propagandist accusations.

But beyond it being certain that these candidates in effect openly oppose that concept of “Revolution” sustained by the Demagogues-in-Chief of the Communist Party of Cuba, I ask myself: And the other candidates, what about them?

Perhaps it will not be published in the rest of the biographies, for example, that a certain candidate, despite being an “honorable” Communist militant, also increasingly embezzles the resources of the state-owned enterprise that he runs?

Or that other one, a fervent member of a Rapid Response Brigade and participant in multiple repudiation rallies “in defense of the Revolution,” has been expelled from various positions because of continued stealing?

Or that this one, always the enthusiast in any Mayday parade that is organized, nonetheless also manages to loot any state-run warehouse that falls into his clutches?

Or that this dedicated Party comrade does not live off of her salary, but rather thanks to the natural talent that her prostitute-daughter has deployed in a chupa-chupa — something she is well aware of and approves?

Or that this old CDR-member, so combative in denouncing any countryman who enters his field of vision, yet he tolerates the sale of black-market tobacco in his own home?

Or perhaps that a certain veteran of the glorious Combatants Association does not live off the absurd pension “guaranteed” by his “Revolution,” but off the remittances arriving from that troubled and brutal country to the North that he despises?

Or that this other functionary from the provincial party lives like a millionaire thanks to the shamelessness of her husband, one of the thousands of thieves legalized by the General Customs office at the Havana airport?

To enumerate the list of moral duplicities and corruptions would make interminable the biographies of a good portion of the current candidates — and it would be even more rotten were we to ascend the ranks from the municipal to national levels.

The publication of these biographies filled with distorted information and morbidly dissected — specifically in the context in which they try to dissuade potential voters — well deserves legal action from a respected electoral authority, even the prosecutor’s office — but this would only be possible if we lived under the Rule of Law, and never in the totalitarian Cuba of today.

At any rate, if this were about competing on a level playing field for the vote of the electorate, according to what is established by law, it would be very healthy to air everyone’s dirty laundry and expose their shit equally (and I do not say that the militancy or sense of civic responsibility of Hildelbrando and Yuniel are such).

If this were to occur, I assure you that the stink would rise high and spread far in a country where half a century of absurd laws and legal limos have not left barely a place for honesty and individual prosperity to be sheltered under the law.

Let us be absolutely certain of this: today in Cuba, the “voting” will be done by millions of hypocrites and criminals.

Not participating in the election farce is the answer

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison