Cuban Philatelic Society of America

My comments in reply to CPSA Exhibit #10 are in red.

Cuban Philatelic Society of America

September 28, 2009

Re: Call to Action: Special open Board meetings, held on Sept. 8, 15, and 22 to review and act on the improvement of member services, operational procedures, and other recommendations.

Purpose: To set new procedures and a system of checks and balances that will improve the communications and responses to the needs of the society and its members.

Members present on Sept. 22, 2009:

F. Iglesias, C. San Martin, A. Marti, S. Garcia-Frutos, G. Alvarez, F. Belleau , L. Diaz, A. Codina, I. Ortiz-Bello, M. A. de Dios, J. Farah, J. Ruhi, J. Pallares, J. Rua, G. Bonce,

J. Inguanzo, J. Algazi, R. del Campo-Valdes, G. Chavez, A. Perez, J. Rodriguez,

F. Jimenez, C. Martinez.

Consulted via telephone/email: Dr. Y. Kouri (MA), J. Thompson (CA), Dr. R. Rosende (NY), I. Prats (PR), D. Chaij (TN)

At the final meeting held on Sept. 22, 2009, there were present seven (7) Board members and fifteen (16) regular members for a grand total of 23 members. There was a unanimous vote to enact all the following directives and guidelines in order to accomplish these tasks listed here below:

Office of the Treasurer/Secretary/President:

1)Mail received- every week the mail from our PO box will be picked up by the treasurer or the vice-treasurer or the secretary, or vice secretary and opened, distributed and reviewed at the weekly meetings for immediate action. Good

2)The people responsible for the mail pick-up will all have access keys to the PO box.Good

3)Payments received will be processed right away and checks deposited within the week. About time.Payments that require special acknowledgment such as new members applications, will get a welcome letter from the president.Good

4)Note that the “Auction” related payments to the sellers and in-coming payments from the buyers are handled by the auction manager. Payments to the sellers are dependent on the incoming payments from the buyers, some understandable delays may occur.Agree

5)Regular dues payments will not require acknowledgment, unless special circumstances call for it. AgreeThe check is the receipt.
Most banks nowadays don't return checks—thus not a valid receipt.

6)Returned mail – returned magazines. Every effort will be made to contact that member. If our efforts are not fruitful, we will publish their names in order to ask other members for help.Good idea—about time.

7)The Treasurer’s Report – in order to make this financial report clearer with more detail, the following items will be added-expanded, El Boletin and The Cuban Philatelist will have a separate entries for, printing cost and postage. Operational postage will be separate. The “Storage Expense” will be identified as Storage rental for our back issue inventory, and older files cartons, of which we have

about 40 cartons. The “auction” income and expense, will only include sales proceeds minus the payouts to the sellers, netting our commission take. Any incidentals will be specified: ie: Awards, etc. There is not much more to detail here. This report will be updated 3 times per year and published in TCP.

Good—most of these recommendations were made to the Society Officers and Directors by me over three years ago—it took a long time and repeated complaints over the years to get some action.

See file2006-05-11--Informe del tesorero de la CPSA.pdf

8)We will start to offer a back issue service.
This is already offered in the inside cover of all Society journals.

9)A separate report, showing total numbers of members per category, will be prepared by the president to show the current status of of the membership: 1) current paid members, 2) Life members, 3) members that have not yet paid
(a 2 year grace period for domestic and 1 year for foreign members, is given before officially being dropped), 4) resigned, 5) deceased 6) net grand total of members. This will appear twice a year in TCP.Theseare basically the same recommendations as item #2 in the 2006-05-11--Informe del tesorero de la CPSA.pdf from three years ago.Membership counts just started to be published in The Cuban Philatelist (TCP) No.57 of Sep-Dec 2009, but no count of life members or deceased members was included and both were not zero. The extremely long grace period given members before being dropped for non-payment of dues is one of the reasons the Treasurer's reports of dues collected never coincide with membership counts in the lists of members the Society publishes. It is not only an absurd way to manage the finances of the Society; it is misleading to the membership and especially to advertisers in the Society publications, since at all times they are misrepresenting the number of members in the Society by carrying in their lists non-paying members. It also lends itself to questioning whether elections results are reliable or fraudulent, since no one knows whether votes from non-paying members are included in the elections counts. I suspect this may be the case—though it really doesn't matter because the elections are rigged anyway. Great way to manage a Society…

10)Current Member’s Directory. Our last directory was included in the El Boletin #68 issue of March of 2007. The president will update it and have a new one included in the TCP #57 of Sept-Dec. 2009. Our growth has been small and less than 5% from 2007. This is despite the fact that we have had Society tables at a few past stamp shows.Basically we have not had a new membership list for over 2 ½ years. Additionally, the logic of growth being just 5% implying that not much has changed in the membership list is in error. If 50% of the members dropped their membership during that period and 55% new members joined the Society that would also be a 5% difference and the membership list would be totally obsolete. The only up-to-date membership list available to Society members has been the one I kept in the Society Website. My creation and posting of that list on the Society Website was initially opposed and never supported by the CPSA Board. However, when they replaced my CPSA Website with their own shortly after this “Call for Action” went out, they included a current membership list in the new Website.

11)We will also look into testing some reasonable advertising to spark up membership in Lynns Stamp News, American Philalelist-APS, etc.Good idea.

12) Our president and publisher of The Cuban Philatelist has been working to maintaining and deliver the three yearly issues This work will continue with the support of our past-editor as consulting editor, and our vice-president as co-editor. Please send your articles for publication, we all benefit! Agree.

13) Our auction manager has been been doing a most excellent and difficult of job of gathering and publishing El Boletin auctions. We all need to support his efforts by supplying much needed material for our auctions. This is a very important part of our income.Agree.

Webmaster – CPSA website:

For the effectiveness of the proposed improvements afore mentioned, the Board of Directors and the Officers responsible in the Miami, Florida central office have to take full control of all ‘official’ communications and monies received. For these reasons the following list of corrections to the “philat.com/cpsa” website must be implemented immediately:

1)Bylaws – Upload the1991 amended bylaws.The 1991 Ammendment to the Society Bylaws was never published in either the Society journal or bulletin. Additionally, I do not have any record of any communication to the Society membership of the Ammended Bylaws. Furthermore, the original Bylaws posted in the Society Website have been there for several years now and none of the Society Officers or Directors ever mentioned that the "1991 Ammendment" was missing. Moreover, the original Bylaws stipulated the process for changing the Bylaws in Section 29. Modifications to the present Bylaws shall be requested, through a proposal by ten members, which proposal is to be addressed to the General Assembly, and the latter will resolve the matter in two different meetings. Does the Society have any minutes of the meetings at which the 1991 Ammendment to the Bylaws was approved? The Society Bylaws stipulate that such meeting minutes are required for all official Society meetings.

2)Membership Application Page – Remove the personal P.O. box address of the webmaster and replace it with the official Coral Gables, FL, P.O. box address.
After receiving countless complaints from members about lack of responsiveness from the Society to submitted applications of membership originating from the application form that I posted for the Society on the Website, I simply changed the address to send the application forms to my P.O. Box address so I could quickly acknowledge receipt of the applications to the submitters and track their processing by the Society. I then immediately forwarded the applications to the Miami address of the Society where they sometimes were officially processed weeks later as evidenced from continued complaints from new members of the fact that their checks were often not cashed for months. In fact, in numerous occasions, I have helped the Society Treasurer collect back dues from members by contacting them directly. Additionally, most of the members that submitted their applications to me were members that I specifically recruited from my contacts and referred them to the Website to procure an application.
If they would have instead requested an application from the Miami Society address, they might well still be waiting for response.

3)Membership Application PDF - the Application itself –

1. Remove the personal P.O. box address of the webmaster and replace with the official Coral Gables, FL P.O. box address.
   See my response to #2 above.
2. Remove the personal name and member number of the webmaster from the “sponsored by” line and replace with “CPSA web applicant.”
   Don't agree, members obtained through my efforts in maintaining the Website free of charge to the Society are indeed sponsored by me and should be credited to my efforts.

4)CPSA Mail and Money received by the Webmaster – Any official correspondence and monies that is intended for CPSA business, officers or directors, must be right away forwarded to the Coral Gables, FL P.O. box. The webmaster is to avoid any direct involvement in these matters.

1. “e-mails” must be forwarded to the general new e-mail address, , or a particular Director or Officer.
2. If by post office letter, it is to be mailed only the Miami PO box, and the postage will be reimbursed if so desired.

I have only been filling the void in responding to membership correspondence by the Society Officers. I can provide countless examples of complaints about the lack of responsiveness by the Society Officers to membership correspondence. All monies received together with application forms have been promptly forwarded with the applications to the CPSA address in Florida.

5)The Webmasters name appears twice in the “Contacts” page in the “OFFICERS” column and in the “Board of Directors” listing. This is incorrect and his name is to be removed as he is not currently an elected member of the Board. His name should only appear separately only as “Webmaster: First & Last name.” I disagree. My name was dropped from the list of Directors by "error" and the supposed error was never corrected in spite of my request to the Board to do so. My name was then also left out of the last election ballot "inadvertently" in spite of my active participation in all Society matters. This was a very convenient way to thwart my continued calls for modifications to deficient Society operations. A similar approach was also used to eliminate from the list of candidate Directors in the same election ballot the name of Arturo Martín de Nicolás who had also been complaining about Society operations.

6)The following unauthorized statement that is presently on the website at the end of the “CONTACTS” page (both in English & Spanish) under the heading “FULL MEMBERSHIP LIST” must have the following verbiage removed:

“If you would like to get in touch with a particular Society

member, please contact Ernesto Cuesta and he will put you in touch

with whoever you desire. If you would like to make a mailing to our

entire membership or a portion of it, the CPSA will do the mailing for

you for a fee of 50 cents per member (U.S. currency) provided you provide us with ready-to-mail franked packages.”

This offer was placed in the Website with sole the intent of procuring additional revenues for the Society and to date there have been no requests serviced.

A)The CPSA has not authorized this statement, and the CPSA name is herewith misrepresented as being the seller of its membership list. The CPSA is not in the business of being a mailing service to anyone for a fee.

B)Any members contact information request must be handle through a Board member and certain procedures must be followed.

C)The CPSA maintains a privacy policy of not mailing anything to its members, except for our publications and official Society notices, no commercial correspondence or otherwise.

D)If the webmaster has actually sold this service, it has been done outside our knowledge and the Board asks the webmaster for a full disclosure of any such sale or sales.
I found the tone and content of Mr. Iglesias' certified letter and attached "Call for Action" insulting to me as Webmaster, especially the insinuation in this paragraph 6D that I had misappropriated Society funds by selling the Society's mailing list to dealers and pocketing the proceeds. Additionally, reading further, entry #1 in the “New Services” section below clearly indicates that the existing Society Website is being replaced, so what is the point of making all of these demands on me as the current Webmaster other than an intentional and offensive attack on me.

Furthermore, I later learned that the Society had already made a copy of the CPSA Website I had been maintaining for the Society since 1998, made all of the changes they listed herein, and had the replacement Website fully operational as early as September 18(See "Your Opinions" posting #3), ten days before hypocritically mailing this “Call for Action” communiqué to the membership, openly attacking me instead of addressing Website issues via a private communication. Obviously, Mr. Iglesias sees no problem in violating MY privacy rights.

7)No one is authorized to use the CPSA name without written authorization of the Board of Directors. The “official” website status can be recognized only when the directives of the Board are satisfied and approved its content.

8)Remove all reference and e-links that appear in our CPSA website to the FILACUBA website. Reasons being the following items that the CPSA DOES NOT endorse: 1) the personal ‘black list’, 2) the group of opinions and articles that clearly criticize and are controversial to the business and operational procedures of the CPSA. These were the same reasons that led to the conflict of interest between the CPSA and the webmaster, and which originally resulted in the webmaster removing them and creating his independent Filacuba site in 2007.

It is ironic that the CPSA Board is not following its own advice since there is still a link to my FILACUBA Website from the Links to Other Significant Philatelic Sites in the “Bulletin Board” page of the new CPSA Website—after seven months of operation.

9)Bulletin Board Page: Change/update the “Miami Meetings Address” to the new address: South Miami High School, 6865 SW 53rd Street, Miami. Fl. 33155. Meetings are every Tuesday at 6:30pm.

NEW SERVICES:

The Board is happy to announce the following new services that will make communications smoother for our membership, and hope that you will agree:

1)A new official CPSA website that will feature “inter-active Auctions” is in preparation. One will be able to scroll through descriptions and ‘click’ on the lot pictures to enlarge them. There will be a ‘bid’ button that will auto launch an email with the lot description and be ‘bid ready’ to send, or download the bid sheet and mail it to the auction manager. Hardcopy of El Boletin will still be printed and mailed. (Site will be ready in a couple of weeks).
So may I ask what was the purpose of the entire Webmaster section above other than to attack and intentionally offend me?

2)PayPal – We now have a PayPal option that can be used to pay for the auction lots, membership dues or anything else. We think that this will help speed up of our transactions and be specially attractive to our foreign members in saving time, money and being secure! (Available now)
About time—this was my recommendation a long time ago.

3)A new general e-mail address is: , you can use it to contact us and for PayPal payments. (Available now)

ELECTIONS:

The election ballots for this year’s elections will be mailing in the week of September 21, 2009. The official ballots must be returned to our Coral Gables, FL P.O. box by November 9, 2009. PLEASE VOTE!! The ballots and the return addressed envelope are mailing inside the new issue #56of The Cuban Philatelist.