Cuba: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara

 

Cuban repression has continued under Raúl Castro, says watchdog

Fidel Castro's brother has used new tactics to crush dissent since taking over power, according to Human Rights Watch

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent

@rorycarroll72

 

The Cuban president, Raúl Castro, has crushed dissent and continued repression in the country since taking over from his brother Fidel, according to a Human Rights Watch report published today.
The government has extended use of an "Orwellian" law that allows the state to punish people before they commit a crime on suspicion they may do so, a tactic designed to cow actual and potential opponents, it said.
The report, New Castro, Same Cuba, paints a near-dystopian image of an island where those who step out of line risk being beaten and jailed in horrific conditions which verge on torture.
Since taking over from Fidel in July 2006 Raúl has kept up repression and kept scores of political prisoners locked up, it said. "Raúl Castro's government has used draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who have dared to exercise their fundamental freedoms," said the report.

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The New York-based group said its report was based on a clandestine fact-finding mission in June and July that conducted dozens of in-depth interviews in seven of Cuba's 14 provinces. It spoke to human rights activists, journalists, clerics, trade unionists and former political prisoners and their relatives.
The report was scathing about the international community's policies towards Cuba. The decades-old US economic embargo gave Havana a pretext to crack down on dissenters as US-backed saboteurs, it said, and should be abandoned.
The EU and Canada preached human rights but failed to pressure Havana for compliance, it added. "Worse still, Latin American governments across the political spectrum have been reluctant to criticise Cuba, and in some cases have openly embraced the Castro government. [This] silence … perpetuates a climate of impunity that allows repression to continue."
There was no immediate response from the Cuban government. In the past it has accused Human Rights Watch of being a pro-US mercenary group.
When an intestinal illness forced Fidel to step aside there were cautious hopes for greater openness and tolerance after almost half a century of communist one-party rule. Raúl, a veteran defence minister, did not promise such change but did call for honest debate about the island's severe economic problems.
In fact, according to the report, he tightened repression with greater use of a provision in the criminal code which allows people to be convicted for "dangerousness", defined as behaviour which contradicts socialist norms.
"The most Orwellian of Cuba's laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government's repressive mindset, which views anyone who acts out of step with the government as a potential threat and thus worthy of punishment," the report said. It documented more than 40 cases in which individuals were jailed for "dangerousness", including such things as handing out copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, staging rallies, writing articles critical of the government, and trying to organise independent unions.
The report suspected there were many more cases. "We found that failing to attend pro-government rallies, not belonging to official party organisations, and being unemployed are all considered signs of 'antisocial' behaviour, and may lead to 'official warnings' and even incarceration in Raúl Castro's Cuba."
Jails were overcrowded, unhygienic and unhealthy, leading to extensive malnutrition and illness, the report said, and political prisoners were routinely subjected to extended solitary confinement, beatings, restrictions of visits and the denial of medical care. "Taken together, these forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment may rise to the level of torture."
Fear permeated the lives of dissidents. "Some stop voicing their opinions and abandon their activities altogether; others continue to exercise their rights, but live in constant dread of being punished."
Human Rights Watch acknowledged advances in education and healthcare for the general population but lamented that they were not matched by respect for civil and political rights.
Most ordinary Cubans tend to complain more about food shortages and making ends meet with monthly wages of £20. Students and academics in Havana recently told the Guardian there was more open debate than before but also frustration that economic reforms had stalled.
One European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the mood had lightened despite the repression. "As Fidel's power wanes, people are less scared. There is a perception you can speak more freely. But we haven't seen the turnaround we had hoped for."
Brian Latell, an analyst at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, said that apart from an apparent suspension of the death sentence, human rights had not improved. "Raúl's imperatives for remaining in power are no different from what Fidel's always were. That is to say, no organised or potentially threatening opposition of any kind is tolerated. And there is virtually no disagreement about that within the top ruling circle of gerontocrats surrounding the Castro brothers."

Washington-Havana relations: A slight thaw, but chill remains

In the last year the US has taken incremental steps toward easing the decades-long embargo against Cuba, lifting restrictions on family travel and holding talks aimed at restarting a direct postal service.
The improvement is due in part to President Barack Obama's desire to engage with US adversaries. In addition, America's prime anti-Castro force – the ageing Cuban exile population in Florida – has seen a steady decline in its power and been replaced by a new generation of Cuban-Americans that lack strident anti-Castro animosity.
Meanwhile, the deterioration of the Cuban economy following the collapse of the Soviet Union has led the regime to rethink relations with the US, 90 miles to the north.
US-Cuba hostilities peaked with the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, when US-backed Cuban-exile fighters sought to overthrow the Castro regime. In July 1963 the US enacted a comprehensive set of sanctions that largely remain in effect today, including strict embargoes on trade and financial transactions.
Although Obama has eased some restrictions, he has pledged to maintain the embargo to keep pressure on Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother and successor.
In September a US diplomat made a six-day trip to the island, meeting top officials and opposition figures, the highest-level visit in years.
In June, in a move symbolic of the thaw, the US shut off an electronic billboard outside the office looking after its interests in Havana. It had irked the Castro government with pro-Democracy news and messages. The Cuban government had taken down anti-US billboards surrounding the building earlier in the year.

Daniel Nasaw

 Cuban rights abuses, jailing up in new repressive wave

Tracey Eaton, Special for USA TODAY

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HAVANA — Political arrests in Cuba jumped to more than 6,600 in 2012, the highest in decades as authorities shifted their strategy for dealing with growing civic resistance, dissident groups say.

Meanwhile, Cuba's communist government said Monday it is moving ahead with plans to ease a travel ban on its citizens.

An official government newspaper Escambray said immigration authorities will allow Cubans to apply for passports to travel abroad Jan. 14. The easing was announced in October.

Dissidents say Cuba's regime may be hoping that government critics will take up the offer to leave the country. Cuba is using more short-term arbitrary arrests to disrupt and intimidate critics rather than slap them with long prison sentences like those used against dozens of Cubans in a crackdown on dissent in 2003.

"The government has changed its tactics," said Elizardo Sánchez, director of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a Havana group that tracks political arrests. Repression is "low-profile, low-intensity" but "reaches more people."

Political arrests in 2012 climbed to 6,602, from 4,123 in 2011 and 2,074 in 2010, Sánchez said. Most people are freed within a few hours or days.

Former math professor Antonio Rodiles is among those subjected to the latest repressive tactics. Rodiles, founder of Estado de SATS, a group that encourages civic participation and debate, said he was beaten and punched in the eye Nov. 7 when he and others went to Cuban state security headquarters in Havana to ask about a lawyer friend who had been arrested. Rodiles, 40, was jailed for 19 days.

"Israel and Palestine have been able to at least sit down and talk. Cubans should be able to do that," he said of his attempts to have a dialogue with the government.

Héctor Maseda, who served several years in prison for his political views, says authorities are switching to short-term arrests to give the impression of tolerance.

"The government is trying to confuse public opinion. It is trying to show that repression has lessened," said Maseda, 69, a former nuclear engineer. "But that is not happening. Repression is increasing."

Cuba analyst José Cardenas said Cuban President Raúl Castro lacks the "outsized charismatic personality" of Fidel Castro, his retired older brother, so his government must use "harassment and hit-and-run tactics" to manage dissent.

"In 2013, they can't put people in jail and throw away the key anymore. They have to act in a way that doesn't draw international scrutiny," said Cardenas, a former acting assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. "The turnstile jailing of perceived and real dissidents is really the next best way to keep the opposition from growing."

U.S. reaches out to dissidents

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Americans are standing with the "courageous voices" in Cuba who wish to freely determine their own future.

"We are deeply concerned by the Cuban government's repeated use of arbitrary detention to silence critics, disrupt peaceful assembly, and impede independent civil society," Nuland said.

Cuban officials contacted for this story would not respond to the allegations on the record. Percy Alvarado, a Guatemalan who was a spy for Cuban state security for 22 years, says Cuba views dissidents as "counterrevolutionaries" because they receive financial help from the U.S. government.

U.S. financial support for "the counterrevolution inside Cuba is a flagrant violation of international law," said Alvarado, who lives in Havana.

The United States provides funds to political prisoners and their families and to independent organizations that promote democratic change, an initiative that Cuba brands subversive. Besides small stipends, USAID pays for laptops, cellphones and other equipment, so dissidents can communicate with each other and the public.

Under the radar of rhetoric

Last year, Cuba announced it was relaxing its rules against profit-making businesses and virtual bans on travel outside the country, leading some Democrats in the U.S. Congress to call for a lifting of a U.S. embargo against Cuba and fewer funds to dissidents there.

José Daniel Ferrer, 42, who served eight years in prison after his arrest in the "Black Spring of 2003" along with 74 other democratic activists, says repression is as bad as ever.

Security agents "have no rules, no limits when it comes to trying to stop, paralyze or terrorize a dissident," said Ferrer, a fisherman and member of the Christian Liberation Movement imprisoned for collecting signatures on a petition demanding freedom of speech, assembly and political participation.

Ferrer lives in Palmarito de Cauto, a town of 8,000 in eastern Cuba, and says he started listening to Voice of America, the U.S. radio service, at age 12. He first ran into trouble with the government after starting an unauthorized fisherman's cooperative in 1991.

Since then, government supporters have defaced his house with trash and human excrement. "Constant war," Ferrer calls it.

His wife, Belkis Cantillo, is a leader of Las Damas de Blanco, or Ladies in White, whose members march after Sunday Mass to protest the imprisonment of regime critics. Cantillo lost her day care job because of her activism.

Police keep Las Damas under tight surveillance and often stop the women before they reach the church. Omaglis González, 41, tried to avoid arrest one day, hiking around a highway checkpoint, but police caught her.

González said an officer twisted her arm, dislocating her wrist, while forcing her into a car. Despite such episodes, she is optimistic.

"Freedom will come one day," she said. "We can't lose hope."

Las Damas member Arelis Rodríguez has the word "Libertad" — or freedom — tattooed across her back. "Before, we were afraid to go into the street. Not today."

Despite such words, she and other Las Damas members don't march outside the fenced church grounds at El Cobre, a town in eastern Cuba. They worry police will attack them if they protest in town.

No groundswell for 'Havana Spring'

Ordinary citizens rarely join dissident protests. Cuban officials say that's because most people support the government. Critics counter that many Cubans see it as futile to challenge the totalitarian system. Most people would rather leave than fight, Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez says.

"Those expecting to see Tahrir Square break out in central Havana in 2013 will probably be disappointed," Sánchez blogged Wednesday. "Given a choice to take to the streets to overthrow the government or to throw themselves into the sea on a flimsy raft to get to Florida, millions of Cubans prefer the latter."

Sara Marta Fonseca and three other activists went to the steps of a Havana landmark called El Capitolio and shouted, "Down with Fidel!" in 2011.

When police arrived, some passersby yelled "abusers!" at the officers.

"It was marvelous," said Fonseca, 42. "For a moment I thought that it was the beginning of a social explosion."

But there was no outburst of support, and the activists were briefly jailed. Since then, Fonseca said government supporters have hurled rocks and oil at her house.

"Look what they've done to my home," she said, pointing to sticky black oil splashed on the wooden siding. "They've destroyed it."

Asked whether she might give up someday and seek political exile in the USA, Fonseca said, "What I most desire is to live in my country, in democracy, with freedom."

Tears filled her eyes, and she conceded she may leave Cuba at some point "because I have a family that's being repressed. But that's not what I want."

    
Donald Trump’s Half-Baked Cold War Revival in Cuba Is the Worst of Both Worlds

‘Misguided’

The change will push the remaining American tourists into the cruise-ship tours that work to give travelers a distorted rosy picture of Cuba.

Ronald Radosh

On Friday, President Donald Trump stood before the most hardline members of the Cuban-American community in Miami, and laid out what he said was a new tough policy on Cuba.
Trump claimed that President Barack Obama’s “misguided” 2014 opening to Cuba had not produced results. Easing restrictions, especially in the realm of human rights and political freedom, had not led to any diminishing of government repression, as Obama said the opening would accomplish. In fact, suppression of dissenting views and political arrests had increased, rather than diminished. The Obama administration had looked the other way on Cuba’s human rights violations and now Trump was canceling Obama’s policies, proclaiming “those days are over.”
During the campaign, Trump had made promises to Florida’s Cubans, whose Florida votes he needed, and he was determined to keep them. However, his speech sounded tougher than the changes he proposed, which chiefly targeted American tourism to the island. Even here, he left intact most of Obama’s policies; allowing cruise lines and commercial flights to go there and Cuban Americans to continue to send cash remittances and visit relatives. Cuba remains off the list of state sponsors of terror; new Cuban-American agreements on cooperation in the area of medicine, counter-terrorism and anti-drug smuggling are maintained, and most important, full diplomatic relations have been continued, with the U.S. Embassy in Cuba and the Cuban Embassy in our nation’s capital remain open and functioning.
The responses from both the left and the right were predictable. The editors of National Review praised the new policy as a “welcome course-correction,” while gently chiding the president for not going far enough. He might have, for example, prohibited cruise lines from having trips to Cuba, “which enable Americans to gambol on Cuba’s shores while dissidents are beaten a few miles away.”
On the left, Peter Kornbluh—who often leads The Nation’s trips to Cuba—argues in that magazine that Obama’s policy has been a smashing success, and attacks Trump for trying to “discredit the Obama policy of positive engagement” for denouncing the Castro government, and for demanding that Cuba take specific actions as a quid pro quo for improved relations. In his eyes, the policy amounts to “harassment” of American citizens traveling to the island. Missing in Kornbluh’s article is any mention of the Castro regime’s continuing political repression of dissidents.
The main changes in Trump’s Cuba policy will make it more difficult for American tourists, whose numbers have grown significantly since Obama’s opening, to easily continue traveling to Cuba. The regime needs them to come. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had paid a giant subsidy to Cuba, and the fall of the oil industry in Venezuela, whose leaders had made up the gap caused by the Soviet withdrawal with cheap oil and money, the Castro regime was forced to find new ways to continue the flow of money. The only path left was that taken by other small Caribbean nations—tourism.
One way to hurt Cuba’s treasury is to cut off the source of that income. From now on, Americans will be barred from doing business with hotels under majority control of a management company run by the military that controls most of Cuba’s tourist industry. This includes staying in their hotel rooms, eating at their restaurants, or attending shows there. They will also be prohibited from eating in state-run restaurants. Instead, individual travelers will be encouraged to stay in either an Airbnb or a privately owned apartment or house called particulares (which by and large can accommodate just a few people) and eat in privately owned restaurants called paladars. They can also stay in the few privately owned hotels.
American tourists will also be required to be part of official tours lest they be tempted to wander off and explore Cuba on their own. The monkey-wrench in this new arrangement is that tour groups must use large hotels to board the many travelers who sign up for them. Every traveler will have to produce receipts, daily diaries and the like to prove compliance. The government bureaucracy, currently the Treasury Deptartment, will have to expand to handle all the paperwork. The beneficiaries of this policy will be the cruise lines—a total of nine will sail to Cuba by the end of this year. Travelers stay in the cruise ship rooms, and the cruise lines offer their own approved and expensive tours.
The irony is that these tours are the very ones that work to give travelers a distorted rosy picture of Cuba. As a Washington Post report by Nick Mirof puts it:
By reinstating restrictions on independent travelers, the Trump administration’s new policy will hurt Cuba’s emerging private sector that caters to American visitors, critics insist.
Instead, the new rules will herd Americans back toward the kind of prepackaged, predictable group tourism that the Cuban government actually prefers — and earns more revenue from.
“I think if you come here on a package tour, you see what the Cuban government wants you to see,” said Andrew Sleyko, 36, a food scientist from Chicago who was visiting the island for the first time as Trump announced his new policy.

Related in Politics

Mirof’s argument was verified by my wife and I on our own trip to Cuba, which we write about in the current issue of The Weekly Standard. Organized tours are meant to show the supposed accomplishments of Cuban socialism; on our own, we managed to talk with many Cuban dissidents, who told us about the repressive measures taken by the regime to hinder development towards democracy. In contrast, check out the group tour put together by The Nation, permissible under the new guidelines. It is a veritable ode to the glories of the Castro revolution.
Mario Rubio, who helped Trump come up with the new Cuba policy, made the rounds on Sunday’s talk shows. On CBS’ Face the Nation he said he wouldn’t view it as putting pressure on the government, rather:
I think this is an effort to strengthen individual Cubans… This basically says that American travelers to Cuba, [can] continue to fly on commercial airlines or get there in a cruise.
But when they get there, they have to spend their money primarily with individual Cubans who own private businesses, which is what everybody who supported the Obama opening was always bragging about. They were saying there was all these new small businesses. Well, we want to put them in a privileged position.
And so American travelers to Cuba will have to spend their money with them instead of the Cuban military. That was the goal of this... to empower individual Cubans to be economically independent of the Castro military and of the Castro regime.
Rubio’s intentions and goals are sound. The problem is that the new policy will work against them. With all the new restrictions, there are predictions that fewer Americans will travel to Cuba. Instead of expanding opportunities, it may very well diminish opportunities in the fastest growing sector of the Cuban economy. Independent tour guides, taxis drivers, newly enthusiastic owners of the particulares and the 900 paladars might have their hopes raised only to be disappointed. They will find that in the coming year, their income from American travelers will vastly decline.
Moreover, the Cuban state gets its tribute from all businesses. Paladars pay a heavy tax, and owners of particulares must pay a large percentage of what they receive to the Cuban regime.
Trump said that easing restrictions “have not helped the Cuban people.” In fact, they have. Rubio acknowledges this, when he says that he wants to encourage those private businesses established during and after the Obama reset. That is why his plan leaves in place most of the Obama opening. But by making it harder to accomplish the very goals they have set, the Trump policy will only force the Stalinists in charge of Cuba to retrench, as they have in the past under similar circumstances, increase the amount of repression, and return to regarding the U.S. as an adversary.
Its power will remain; only the Cuban people will suffer.

CUBA: ‘Dissidents are in the millions; there aren't enough jail cells for so many people’

Interviews 21 January 2020 

 

CIVICUS speaks with Juan Antonio Blanco, director of the Cuban Observatory of Conflicts (Observatorio Cubano de Conflictos), an autonomous civil society project supported by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (Fundación para los Derechos Humanos en Cuba). The Observatory is a proactive civil society platform to promote non-violent change, and combines rigorous analysis of conflict with capacity development and empowerment of citizens to claim their rights.

Successful protest in the El Cerro neighbourhood, Havana, in demand for the restoration of electricity and water services, 13 September 2017.

The CIVICUS Monitor rates the space for civil society – civic space – in Cuba as ‘closed’, indicating a regime of total control where it is difficult to even imagine the existence of protests. Is this what you see?

Absolutely. Cuba is a closed society, anchored in Stalinism not only politically but also economically, as the state suffocates or blocks the initiatives and entrepreneurial talent of citizens, a phenomenon known as ‘internal blockade’. The state denies individual autonomy and crushes any independent association to maintain a balkanised society. This is, they believe, how they can ensure state control over citizen behaviour.

In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was clear that Cuba would have to make a transition to survive. The geopolitical ecosystem that had sustained it with infinite and massive subsidies collapsed alongside Eastern European communism. We all thought – and not because we believed in the so-called ‘end of history’ – that the only possible transition was towards some form of open society, political democracy and market economy. It could be more or less social democrat or liberal, but it should be based on those pillars in any case. Some of us pushed for that transition from reformist positions. We were wrong.

In the end, the transition that did take place was neither the one advocated by Marxism, towards communism, nor Francis Fukuyama’s, towards a liberal state and a market society. We transitioned towards a transnational mafia state instead. This is not about giving it yet another pejorative label: this is the reality revealed by the analysis of the changes that have taken place in the structuring of power and social classes, the instruments of domination and the mechanisms for the creation and distribution of wealth. There has been a real change in the DNA of the governance regime.

Real power is now more separate than ever from the Communist Party of Cuba. It is in the hands of a political elite that represents less than 0.5 per cent of the population, in a country that has abandoned even the ideology of the communist social pact that pushed the idea of submission based on a commitment to basic social rights, which were granted at the price of the suppression of all other rights.

In early 2019 a constitutional reform process took place that did not create any significant change in terms of opening civic space. An image of change was projected externally that contrasted starkly with the internal reality of stagnation. Some phrases placed in a speech or in the new Constitution itself have served to feed eternal hopes that leaders – who are not held accountable by the public – will see the light on their own and create the necessary change. This also distracts the attention of international public opinion from the monstrosity born out of collusion with Venezuela.

How would you describe the current conditions for the exercise of the right to protest in Cuba? Is there more space for people to make demands that are not regarded as political?

There is no greater political, legal, or institutional space for the exercise of the right to protest, but citizens are creating it through their own practices. All rights proclaimed in the Constitution are subordinate to the regulations established by supplementary laws and regulations. In the end, the Constitution is not the highest legal text, but one subordinated to the legality created by other laws and regulations. An example of this is the Criminal Code, which includes the fascist concept of ‘pre-criminal danger’, by virtue of which an individual can spend up to four years in jail without having committed a crime. Nonetheless, conflict and protests have increased.

The government has changed its repressive tactics towards political opponents to project a more benevolent outward image. Instead of long prison sentences it now resorts to thousands of short-term arbitrary detentions. Instead of holding acts of repudiation outside a meeting place, it now suppresses meetings before they happen, arresting activists in their homes. Instead of refusing to issue them passports or throwing activists in jail for attending a meeting abroad, it now prevents activists from boarding their flights. If a member of the opposition is put to trial, this is done not on the basis of accusations of political subversion but for allegedly having committed a common crime or for being ‘socially dangerous’.

At the same time, Cuban citizens – more than half of whom now live in poverty according to respected economists based in Cuba – have increasingly serious and urgent needs, the fulfilment of which cannot wait for a change of government or regime. In a different context these would be ‘personal problems,’ but in the context of a statist governance regime, which makes all solutions depend on state institutions and blocks all autonomous solutions, whether by citizens or the private sector, these become social and economic conflicts of citizens against the state.

At this point it is important to establish a difference between opposition and dissent. Opponents are those who openly adopt, either individually or collectively, a contesting political stance towards the government. A dissident, on the other hand, is someone who feels deep discomfort and disagreement with the governance regime because it blocks their basic needs and dreams of prosperity. Social dissidents tend not to express themselves in a public way if they do not believe this will help them achieve concessions on a specific demand. But if their situation becomes distressing, they move – often spontaneously – from complaining and lamenting privately to protesting publicly.

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 Trump admin puts new limits on Cuba travel, including cruise ships

Thousands of Americans have visited Cuba on cruise ships in the past five years, providing a valuable source of revenue for the communist government.

communist government.

Secretary of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump and others wait to enter 10 Downing Street in London on Tuesday.Alex Brandon / AP

June 4, 2019, 8:51 AM PDT

By Dan De Luce and Abigail Williams

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Tuesday introduced new travel restrictions on U.S. citizens visiting Cuba, prohibiting stops by cruise ships and blocking organized tour groups.

Citing Cuba's domestic "repression" and its support for the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the Trump administration said the measures are designed to prevent Cuba's military and security services from profiting off of the country's tourism industry.

"Veiled tourism has served to line the pockets of the Cuban military, the very same people supporting Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and repressing the Cuban people on the island," the Department of State said in a statement.

The Department of the Treasury and the State Department said group educational or cultural trips to Cuba, or "people-to-people" travel, would no longer be permitted.

"It kills the people-to-people category, which is the most common way for the average American to travel to Cuba," said Collin Laverty, head of Cuba Educational Travel, one of the largest Cuba travel companies in the United States.

The restrictions will mean an end to cruise ship stops for U.S. tourists, as well as visits by yachts and private and corporate aircraft.

The administration did not say whether the rules would affect U.S. airlines that recently began to fly again to the island.

Related

Slow start to Cuban seized-property claims

The changes take effect Wednesday, but Americans who have already booked a flight, reserved a room or generally "completed at least one travel-related transaction" will be permitted to travel to the island. Cruise lines and other tourism businesses said they were still assessing the impact of the new restrictions.

John Bolton, President Donald Trump's national security adviser, signaled plans to restrict travel in a speech in April to veterans of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion that ended in failure.

"We will continue to take actions to restrict the Cuban regime's access to U.S. dollars," Bolton said in a tweet Tuesday.

Since Trump entered office in 2017, his administration has staked out a tougher line on Cuba and reimposed sanctions and restrictions eased under his predecessor as president, Barack Obama, who restored diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015.

U.S. Covert Activities Against Cuba

 

Street protest, 1959. Photo by Ernesto Fernandez

The Untold Tale of Secret Foreign Policy

By Don Bohning

Less than a year after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, the United States concluded that co-existence between Washington and Havana would be impossible. This conclusion led to six years of futile covert programs under three different American presidents to depose Castro. U.S. efforts included every arrow in the covert quiver, from organizing and supporting a proxy exile invasion to economic and political destabilization, from sabotage and propaganda to psychological warfare and assassination plots.
It is now painfully obvious that the myriad U. S. covert activities directed at Cuba more than four decades ago failed miserably. Not only did they fail to oust the Cuban leader, but instead triggered the Law of Unintended Consequences, consolidating and prolonging Castro’s rule and contributing to a Soviet decision to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Simultaneously, they transformed South Florida into a hub of anti-Castro ferment and upheaval, making it the frontline in the attempts to end his rule.
The U.S. public—if it was aware at all—saw only the tip of the covert iceberg. The broad outlines emerged slowly and piecemeal in newspapers, magazines and books over the ensuing decades. Only in recent years has the scope of the U.S. government’s secret war against Castro become apparent—abetted by the declassification of thousands of once secret documents and increased willingness of surviving participants to talk with the passage of time.
Essentially, this covert war can be broken down into three phases, beginning under President Eisenhower, continuing under President Kennedy and ending under President Johnson. Each of the three phases included Castro assassination plots, but none came close to succeeding. The debate continues today as to whether Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson was even aware of them.
The first phase began in late 1959 with the accelerating deterioration in Washington- Havana relations. By October, U.S. officials were convinced that if Castro wasn’t a Communist, he was under Communist influence and had to go.
In January 1960, a Cuban task force within the CIA was formed to undertake the effort. Jake Esterline, a guerrilla warfare veteran with the OSS in Burma during World War II and prominent in the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s left-leaning president, was selected to lead it. Two months later, March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower approved a covert action plan to remove Castro. After a change in administrations from Eisenhower to Kennedy—and with many permutations in the original concept—the first phase culminated with the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by a U.S. trained and supported Cuban exile brigade.
Esterline originally designed the plan to train and infiltrate several hundred guerrillas into the Trinidad area in the middle of the island’s south coast to join with anti-Castro insurgents already active in the Escambray Mountains of central Cuba. But Richard Bissell, then head of the CIA’s clandestine services, had other ideas and the plan evolved from a guerrilla infiltration to an exile invasion. The hopes was that the invasion would spark an internal revolt or, at the least, seizure of a beachhead where a provisional government could be established which could appeal for international help. In September 1960, Jack Hawkins, a Marine colonel with amphibious landing experience, was brought in as the project’s paramilitary chief.
Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower in January 1961, raising uncertainties about the future of the project, but Kennedy eventually gave his approval. However, in mid-March, he ordered the exile brigade’s landing site changed from Trinidad to a “less noisy” locale, in the hopes of keeping U.S. government’s fingerprints off the action. The isolated Bay of Pigs, 80 miles west of Trinidad, was the new choice, providing the criteria Kennedy demanded to maintain “plausible deniability” of U.S. involvement. Still, on Sunday, April 16, 1961, the eve of the invasion and under pressure from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Kennedy ordered the last minute cancellation of already approved D-Day air strikes intended to take out the remnants of Cuba’s ragtag air force.
Esterline and Hawkins made it clear in interviews that they believe the belated change in landing site and cancellation of the D-Day air strikes doomed the invasion. They held Kennedy and Rusk responsible. However, as once-classified documents emerged, Esterline and Hawkins added Bissell to the blame list, accusing him of withholding vital information both from them and from President Kennedy, so convinced was Bissell by his own arrogance that the invasion could not fail.
As Esterline declared at a 1996 Bay of Pigs conference: “I don’t think he [Bissell] was being honest up…with Kennedy and maybe with [Allen] Dulles, too; and I don’t think he was being honest down in dealing with his two principal aides, Esterline and Hawkins. I don’t believe he was leveling with any of us.” This sentiment was further reinforced later when the two aides learned for the first time that Bissell had agreed with a Kennedy request only days before the invasion to cut back on air support but did not tell them of the decision.
In a significant incident largely overlooked by historians, Esterline and Hawkins met for three hours with Bissell at his home in the Cleveland Park section of Washington on Sunday morning, April 9, eight days before the invasion brigade’s landing at the Bay of Pigs. They told Bissell that the change in landing site and other limitations put on the project by the Kennedy administration made it impossible to succeed. They recommended he call off the invasion saying would resign if he did not.
Bissell beseeched them to stay. He argued that the project would go ahead anyway but had a better chance to succeed with them on board. They agreed, extracting a pledge from Bissell that the promised air support they felt needed for success would be forthcoming. Yet, after their Sunday meeting, Bissell agreed to cut it back, despite his pledge to Esterline and Hawkins. They did not learn that until reading declassified documents 34 years later.

GO TO PAGE # 28

Cuba continues to be repressive

John Suarez speaking at the Geneva Summit in 2013. He helps run a pro-democracy nonprofit in Miami that researches human rights violations in Cuba. Photo Credit: John Suarez

 

While there is a new president of Cuba, little has changed in that country when it comes to human rights and press freedom.

By Michael Volpe

Cuba’s record on human rights remains the same even though the 
Castro brothers appear to no longer be in charge.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing entitled “Human Rights in Cuba: 
Beyond the Veneer of Reform.”
The head of the committee is Aldio Sires, a Democrat from New Jersey, and this issue is personal to 
him.
“I left Cuba and came to the United States when I was 11 years old,” Sires said during his opening 
remarks. “Despite great progress over the last six decades to improve quality of life all
 over the world, the Cuban regime remains stuck in the dark ages. This is a government that 
continues to lock up those who speak out against it. It is a government that criminalizes the core 
freedoms that are a foundation of any democracy. It is a government that for 60 years has 
denied the Cuban people their right to choose their own government.”
Carlos Queseda is the Executive Director and Founder of the International Institute on Race,
 Equality, and Human Rights and in his opening written statement, he noted that the regime 
has made changes which while appearing to be reform, have only continued the repression.

“The contrived approval of the new Constitution in the February 24th referendum ushered in a new
 era with regard to legal guarantees for human rights in Cuba. In a calculated move to create 
a loophole through which it can avoid complying with international human rights treaty obligations, 
the Cuban government altered the text of the new Constitution to grant it supremacy 
over international law. This poses a challenge for work on human rights in Cuba, as the government 
has created for itself an easy excuse for not complying with treaty obligations,” he said in his 
written statement.
He noted that freedom of expression also remains repressed in Cuba.
“Freedom of expression and opinion is nonexistent in Cuba. Independent civil society organizations 
are not permitted to legally register, in violation of their right to freedom of association. Activists and 
their family members face constant psychological torture,” he stated in his written statement. 
“Cases of activists and their family members not receiving adequate health services are numerous. 
And, we just found out that private companies, such as Western Union, may collaborate 
with government authorities to criminalize human rights activists, in clear violation of those 
activists’ right to privacy. Finally, arbitrary detentions and further violations of due process 
guarantees are commonplace.”
Carlos Martinez de la Serna is the Program Director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, 
and he talked about the lack of press freedom in Cuba.
“Even as Cuba has seen some points of tight state control over media and freedom of expression 
loosen over the last decade, the country continues to be one of the Western hemisphere’s most 
difficult environments for the press. Independent and critical Cuban journalists constantly face 
the possibility of detention, having their homes or devices searched, their reporting equipment 
confiscated, and even criminal prosecution on anti-state charges. The slowly expanding influence of 
the internet has opened up new avenues for expression and journalistic work but has also 
expanded the set of tools of Cuban officials to monitor, surveil, and censor journalists, 
media workers, and private citizens.”
John Suarez is the Executive Director for the Center for a Free Cuba and in his opening remarks,
 he noted that while ostensibly Miguel Díaz-Canel is the leader, as President of Cuba, 
the Castro family continues to really be in charge.
“Sixty years later, Fidel Castro is gone, but his brother Raul remains, along with the 
Communist regime. What is called reform in Cuba has been a frog for the dynastic succession 
of the Castro family. Raul Castro remains in control of the government as the head of the
 Communist Party. His son Alejandro Castro, a colonel in the Ministry of the Interior, 
presided over the Cuban side in the negotiations to normalize relations during the previous 
administration,” Suarez said.
He also noted that Raul Castro presided over the new constitution, which Suarez said 
enshrined the continuation of one party rule, the Communist Party, which continues 
to be the only legal party in Cuba.
When Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas, asked questions, Suarez reiterated his point.
Castro asked, “How has governance changed, if at all, since the Castro regime, and who is in 
charge now?”
“With regards to who’s running Cuba: Raul Castro. Under the Cuban system, the head of the 
Communist Party is the ultimate authority,” Suarez responded.
Congressman Christopher Smith is a Republican from New Jersey and in his question period 
he noted that he has been able to visit the worst prisons in some of the most repressive regimes.
“I go to prisons all over the world. I’ve been to prisons in Indonesia, China, Beijing prison 
number one, where the Tiananmen Square activists were, the Lefortovo camp thirty-five, 
the infamous prison where Natan Sharansky was in the 1980s. I can’t get into a prison in Cuba,
” Smith said.
He noted further that Fidel Castro referred to him as a “provocateur” for trying to visit Cuban prisons.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross, the last time they were able to visit a Cuban 
prison was in 1989,” Suarez noted.

US demands answers from Cuba on imprisoned

 dissidents

By MATTHEW LEE December 11, 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is demanding answers from Cuba about eight
detainees it says are political prisoners held by the communist government.

In an open letter to Cuba’s foreign minister released on Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
 said Cuba had refused to respond to multiple U.S. queries about the eight, who he said were
illustrative of more than 100 political prisoners in Cuba. The list includes members of dissident
groups and a journalist.

Pompeo accused Cuba of reneging on promises to release them and other prisoners of conscience
that date to the Obama administration and ignoring requests to even discuss them. He recalled that
in October, Cuban delegates disrupted an event at the United Nations when U.S. representatives
sought to raise the issue of political prisoners, an incident for which Pompeo has sought a U.N.
investigation into alleged property damage.

“I am now asking you to provide a substantive explanation of the detention of the political prisoners
on the attached list,” Pompeo wrote to Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, calling for a detailed
description of the charges they faced and evidence against them.

He said the U.S. respects the rights of nations to imprison those convicted of crimes but not
when they are arrested only for exercising fundamental human rights such as freedom of speech
and association.

The eight detainees on the list are Yosvany Sanchez Valenciano, Melkis Faure Echevarria,
and Yanier Suarez Tamayo of the Cuban Patriotic Union; Eduardo Cardet Concepcion of the Christian
Liberation Movement; journalist Yoeni de Jesus Guerra Garcia; Martha Sanchez of the
Ladies in White; and Jose Rolando Casares Soto and Yamilka Abascal Sanchez of the
Cuban Youth Dialogue.

Pompeo sent the letter last week but the State Department made it public after Cuba
rejected it in a statement released Monday. Cuba’s foreign ministry called the letter “propaganda”
and said the U.S. has no standing to raise such matters.

“The government of the United States is acting dishonestly when it expresses concern about
 human rights in Cuba or any other place,” said Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, director-general
of the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s U.S. affairs section. “The supposed letter from the
Secretary of State and its public handling are just acts of propaganda.”

  

Cuba - World Report 2019: Cuba | 

Human Rights Watch

The Cuban government continues to repress and punish dissent and public criticism. The number of 

short-term arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, independent journalists, and others was 

significantly less in 2018 than in 2017, but still remained high, with more than 2,000 reports of 

arbitrary detentions between January and August. The government continues to use other repressive 

tactics, including beatings, public shaming, travel restrictions, and termination of employment against 

critics.
On April 19, Cuba inaugurated a new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who took over from Raúl Castro.

 Castro remained as the leader of the Communist Party and retained his seat in the National Assembly.
On July 22, the National Assembly unanimously approved a proposal for a new constitution, 

to be voted on in a national referendum on February 24, 2019. The new constitution, which 

would replace one adopted in 1976, would eliminate the objective of “achieving a

 Communist society” but retain the assertion that the Communist Party is the “superior 

leading force of society and the State.”

Arbitrary Detention and Short-Term Imprisonment

The Cuban government continues to employ arbitrary detention to harass and intimidate critics, 

independent activists, political opponents, and others. The number of arbitrary short-term detentions, 

 which increased dramatically between 2010 and 2016—from a monthly average of 

172 incidents to 827—started to drop in 2017, according to the Cuban Commission for 

Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an independent human rights group that the

 government considers illegal.
The number of reports of arbitrary detentions continued to drop in 2018, with 2,024 

from January through August, a decrease of 45 percent compared to the 3,706 reports

 during the same period in 2017.
Security officers rarely present arrest orders to justify detaining critics. In some cases, 

detainees are released after receiving official warnings, which prosecutors can use in

 subsequent criminal trials to show a pattern of “delinquent” behavior.
Detention is often used preemptively to prevent people from participating in peaceful

 marches or meetings to discuss politics. Detainees are often beaten, threatened, and held 

incommunicado for hours or days. Police or state security agents routinely harass, rough up, 

 and detain members of the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco)—a group founded 

by the wives, mothers, and daughters of political prisoners—before or after they attend Sunday mass.

In March, a former political prisoner, Ivan Hernández Carrillo, reported having been violently 

beaten and detained when he intervened to stop the arrest of his mother, Asunción Carrillo,

 a Ladies in White member, who was leaving her home to attend mass. Hernández said he 

was charged—after shouting “Down with Raul Castro!”—and fined for “contempt for the figure 

of the maximum leader.” The Carrillos were released the same day.
On August 3, dissident José Daniel Ferrer, who founded the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) 

in 2011—upon his release from eight years in prison—was arrested along with activist 

Ebert Hidalgo and charged with “attempted murder” when the car he was driving struck a

 Ministry of Interior official. Activists have said the charges are a farce and witnesses allege that 

the official threw himself in front of the car intentionally, only to get up and ride off on his motorcycle.

 Upon his release 12 days later, Hidalgo reported having been psychologically tortured and held

 in harsh conditions in a dark, dirty cell.
In September, dissident Arianna López Roque was briefly detained after burning a copy of 

the proposal for new constitution. According to Lopez, she was charged with public disorder, 

disobedience, resistance, and contempt and an official threatened with retaliating against 

her husband, who is currently imprisoned.

Freedom of Expression

The government controls virtually all media outlets in Cuba and restricts access to outside 

information. A small number of independent journalists and bloggers manage to write articles 

for websites or blogs, or publish tweets. The government routinely blocks access within Cuba

 to these websites, and only a fraction of Cubans can read independent websites and blogs 

because of the high cost of, and limited access to, the internet. In September 2017, 

Cuba announced it would gradually extend home internet services.
Independent journalists who publish information considered critical of the government are 

subject to harassment, smear campaigns, raids on their homes and offices, confiscation of their 

working materials, and arbitrary arrests. The journalists are held incommunicado, as are artists 

and academics who demand greater freedoms. Desacato laws continue to be enforced against 

opponents.
On January 30, Iris Mariño García, a journalist for La Hora de Cuba, was criminally charged

 with engaging in journalism without authorization. The manager of the newspaper said a woman

 accused Mariño of interviewing her on the street and that when police interviewed Mariño they

 focused on the paper’s opinion surveys, showing the political motivation behind the arrest. 

Mariño was detained again when attempting to take a picture of a May 1 workers’ parade. 

Officers took her to a police station and interrogated her.
In July, Roberto de Jesús Quiñones, an independent journalist whose work is published on the news 

site Cubanet, was detained for 58 hours and held incommunicado. Police raided his home and 

confiscated computers, phones, and other goods.
In April 2018, President Díaz-Canel signed Decree 349, expected to enter into force in 

cember 2018, establishing broad and vague restrictions on artistic expression. Under the regulation, 

artists cannot “provide artistic services” in public or private spaces without prior approval 

from the Ministry of Culture. Those who hire or make payments to artists for artistic services 

which lacked proper authorization are subject to sanctions, as are the artists themselves. 

The decree provides different sanctions, including fines, confiscation of materials, cancellation 

of artistic events and revocation of licenses. Local independent artists have been protesting

 the decree. On August 11, police detained and beat Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and at least 

three other artists when trying to organize a concert to protest the decree, according to press reports.

Go to Page # 22

Reports from Cuba: Xiomara Cruz Miranda 
left Havana to receive medical attention 
in Miami

 by Alberto de la Cruz

14yMedio reports from Havana via Translating Cuba:

Xiomara Cruz Miranda Left Havana To Get Medical Attention 

In Miami

The Lady in White Xiomara Cruz Miranda arrived in Miami on an American Airlines flight from
 Havana on Tuesday, to be treated for a disease she contracted in prison in the middle of last year
without receiving effective medical care. Her relatives have reported constant irregularities in
her diagnosis and treatment.
Cruz Miranda received a humanitarian visa after months of efforts, initiated on August 14th,
 as Berta Soler — leader of the women’s group — told 14ymedio. Ángel Moya (Berta’s husband),
has been another major activist on the Island.
In addition, on the other side of the Florida Straits she has had help from other fellow activist:
exiled María Elena Alpízar, as well as Iliana Curra and Mercedes Perdigón, both political
ex-prisoners, and from others in exile who started a petition addressed to the US congressman
of Cuban origin Mario Díaz-Balart.
“Thank God she must be landing already, everything went well on this side, now we are awaiting
her arrival. There is a team of doctors there, focused on improving her well-being and on getting
her a diagnosis. The Cuban American National Foundation invited her and will take care of
all expenses. An ambulance is waiting there for her and everything is ready to assist her as soon as
she arrives”, indicated Soler.
“With everything that happened with Laura Pollán and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas any activist is at risk
when they enter a hospital because State Security has doctors at their disposal, doctors who
will always follow their orders. We don’t trust them and thus of doctors who do not receive
orders from the Cuban regime,” she added.
At the airport, she was received by the Cuban doctor Alfredo Melgar. “First, will get a comprehensive
 diagnosis of Xiomara and then we will put her under treatment,” Melgar told the New Herald,
who accompanied her to the hospital. The doctor asked the community for help to welcome
Cruz Miranda and her daughter, who accompanies her on this trip.
Martha Beatriz Roque had also announced the news on her social media yesterday (on Monday):
“With God’s favor she arrives tomorrow in Miami,” she celebrated.
the Lady in White’s state of health has worsened in recent weeks, with a last relapse that
began on December 26th and extended until January 10th, but it remains unclear what disease
afflicts her.
From the beginning, Cruz Miranda has been diagnosed with tuberculosis, but her relatives and
friends have expressed doubts to the point of accusing the Government of having inoculated
her with a virus to make it difficult  — or worse — to prevent her from continuing to exercise
her political opposition. That suspicion aligns with that expressed by Ariel Ruiz Urquiola,
 who has been denouncing, for months, that the regime has infected him with HIV.
Xiomara was sentenced in 2018 to one year and four months in jail for “threats” in a trial described
as rigged by Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White. The first prison she went to, was El Guatao
 (West of Havana), and  subsequently she was transferred to a prison in Ciego de Ávila.
Last August, the Government granted her conditional release when health problems arose,
and she was transferred to La Covadonga hospital in Havana, where she was admitted into
intensive care.
Relatives have also considered that the Lady in White has cancer, as mentioned by the Cuban
Alliance for Inclusion and the Cuban Women’s Network in a protest note condemning the situation
in which the Government held the activist and asking international organizations to take action
for her safety and her defense.
“Her muscular pains worsened, as well as the intermittent fever. Doctors have confusedly declared,
everything from a disease caused by an unidentified bacteria, to even mentioning cancer.
Which has baffled relatives, friends and fellow activists, who request her release to take her
to another country in order for her to receive proper medical attention immediately,”
 both women’s organizations were asking for last fall.

Translated by: Rafael (Tampa, Florida)

Democracy activists in Cuba report ongoing 

repression

Havana, Cuba, Jan 30, 2020 / 04:50 pm (CNA).- A pro-democracy group in Cuba says its members
are continuing to experience repression and harassment from police and government officials
under the presidency of Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Eduardo Cardet, the national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement (CLM), says he was
blocked Jan. 25 from traveling to the United States from Cuba, despite having his recently
renewed passport and the appropriate visa.
According to the CLM, an immigration official at the Havana airport told Cardet he was prohibited
from traveling. Asked why, the official reportedly told Cardet that “he ought to know the reason”
and gave no further details.
Cardet was arrested Nov. 30, 2016, outside his home on charges of attacking law enforcement,
scandal, and disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2017. The CLM
contends, however, that the real reason for Cardet's arrest was his criticism of the legacy
of Fidel Castro and for his pro-democracy activism.
Cardet was released from prison under certain conditions in May 2019 and completed his sentence
in September that year.
He was consequently “totally free and had no restrictions imposed on him,” Carlos Payá,
CLM's representative in Spain, told ACI Prensa, CNA's Spanish language news partner.
Payá called the government's refusal to let Cardet travel Jan. 25 “an arbitrary decision by the regime.”
Regis Iglesia, the CLM's spokesman, says he was similarly blocked Jan. 1 from boarding an
American Airlines plane departing from Miami International Airport for Havana because the Cuban
government had notified the airlines that Iglesias was prohibited from entering the country.
The Cuban dissident leader was exiled to Spain in 2010 by the Fidel Castro regime.
The CLM blasted the travel ban as a discriminatory violation of international law and a total
disregard for the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Cuba has signed.
The organization has reported that other members had been given citations by State Security
agents and threatened with prison if they continued their activism, been called terrorists
by police officials, and been accused of vandalism.
The group said on its website last December that Cuban State Security issued a citation to
Eduardo Cardet on Christmas Day, warning him that “the expansion of this organization
will not be permitted” and that it would have “zero tolerance for the opposition.”
The Christian Liberation Movement was founded in 1988 by Oswaldo Payá and four other
founders to achieve “peaceful and democratic change and respect for human dignity.”
It advocates for free, fair, multiparty elections and other democratic reforms.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com 

 'They wanted to eliminate it', say doctors 

in Miami 

who attend Xiomara Cruz Miranda

The Cuban activist has in her body three 'very aggressive' 

germs that could have been 

introduced through 'an injection'.

DDC 

Xiomara Cruz Miranda is piped and sedated in Miami. DAILY LAS AMÉRICAS

Three bacteria detected in laboratory tests performed on the Lady of Blanco Xiomara Cruz Miranda, 

who managed to leave Cuba thanks to a humanitarian visa and is being treated

 at the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, could be proof that the Havana regime 

Inoculated some pathogen.

According to doctor Alfredo Melgar, who heads the team of doctors who seeks 

to save the life of the activist, Cruz Miranda has in her body the bacteria klebsiella, 

pseudomone and mycobacteria, three "very aggressive" germs that, according to Melgar,

 they could have been introduced through "an injection".

"That was the first thing the patient said when she arrived in Miami, 

and she also said it several times while in Cuba: that they had injected something," said the doctor 

of Cuban origin during a press conference on Tuesday, although he acknowledged that 

determining the  way bacteria arrived at the White Lady's organism "is practically impossible,

" Diario Las Américas reported.

The doctor said that the bacteria "can be eliminated with antibiotics," although "

the damage to Xiomara's body is already done, and is very large, 

especially at the pulmonary level."

The White Lady is undergoing a treatment that includes five types of antibiotics 

to fight bacteria, which have mainly affected one of her lungs. 

In addition, it is piped and under intensive sedation.

The damage that the bacteria would have caused led Melgar 

to suspect that the former 53-year-old political prisoner could suffer from 

"leukemia or lung cancer.

" However, he warned that only with a series of "more rigorous" 

tests can establish what his condition is.

On that aspect, he said that it is necessary to conduct three studies, 

but due to the weakened health of Cruz Miranda's health they have not been able to do them.

 "You need a bone marrow biopsy, a lung biopsy with a needle guided by a scanner 

and an endoscopy," he explained.

"The first thing that was attempted was to do the bone marrow test and they could not 

[the doctors attending to hers case] because she [Xiomara Cruz Miranda] did not support the study,

" he said.

The bacteria Klebsiella, pseudomone and mycobacteria 

"are very strong" and "produce inflammation and infection in vital organs 

such as the lungs, liver, heart and kidneys," Melgar said.

The team that attends the Lady in White in Miami, composed of a pulmonologist,

 a hematologist and an intensivist, reviewed the clinical history summary 

with the procedures performed at Cruz Miranda in Cuba. 

"All the reports that Cuba delivered were full of contradictions," Melgar said.

At some point they even asked Cruz Miranda "to go home, but not to use oxygen, 

because it is supposedly bad. (...) How can someone be told that they have only one lung 

[working well ] that he does not use oxygen, having an oxygen machine sent to him 

from Miami. 

If She does not use oxygen, She dies, "he said.

For Dr. Melgar, there was a 

"chain of negligence (...) 

disinterest in seeing that it is a dissident, that it is a disaffection to the regime,"

 as an "indirect way to eliminate it, as they have done with others."

The antibiotics they used in Cuba, according to what Dr. Melgar and his team have reviewed, 

were also not correct, because "they did not do the studies to determine the 

bacteria that are affecting it.

 (...) They gave random antibiotics , blindly".

Despite this diagnosis, the White Lady no longer has a fever, the tachycardias ceased and

 her blood pressure has stabilized, which is "very good sign," Melgar said.

The doctor said that if Cruz Miranda had not arrived in Miami 

last month to receive adequate care, "She would not have survived."

Cruz Miranda arrived in the US on January 20, 

after a solidarity campaign carried out inside and outside the Island. 

The activist had been diagnosed with tuberculosis after becoming seriously ill in prison. 

After receiving an extrapenal license from the Cuban regime, 

she was admitted several times without her health status improving.

 Traslated by : Print-Shop Lighthouse Publisher Press Team

 

FROM PAGE  # 18 

 

Political Prisoners

In May 2018, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights reported that Cuba was holding 120 political 

prisoners, including more than 40 members of the Cuban Patriotic Union. The government denies 

independent human rights groups access to its prisons. The groups believe that additional political prisoners, whose cases they have been unable to document, remain locked up.
Cubans who criticize the government continue to face the threat of criminal prosecution. They do not 

benefit from due process guarantees, such as the right to fair and public hearings by a competent 

and impartial tribunal. In practice, courts are subordinate to the executive and legislative branches, 

denying meaningful judicial independence.
Dr. Eduardo Cardet Concepción, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, remained in prison

 at time of writing. Cardet, who had been threatened with jail because of his support for the 

“One Cuban, One Vote” campaign, was sentenced to three years in prison on March 2017. 

As of August 2018, he was being held in solitary confinement, and denied visits and any contact

 with family members, even by phone. Authorities argued that family visits were not “contributing 

to his re-education.”
In May, Dr. Ruíz Urquiola, a former biology professor and an outspoken environmentalist, 

was sentenced to a year in prison for disrespecting a park ranger. During his imprisonment he 

went on a hunger strike. In July 2018, he was granted a conditional release for health reasons. 

In August 2018, he reported irregularities in the handling of his case, and the imposition of 

travel restrictions.

Travel Restrictions

Since reforms in 2003 to travel regulations, many people who had previously been denied permission 

to travel have been able to do so, including human rights defenders and independent bloggers. 

The reforms, however, gave the government broad discretionary powers to restrict the right to travel 

on the grounds of “defense and national security” or “other reasons of public interest,” 

and authorities have repeatedly denied exit to people who express dissent.
The government restricts the movement of citizens within Cuba through a 1997 

law known as Decree 217, which is designed to limit migration to Havana. The decree 

has been used to harass dissidents and prevent those from elsewhere in Cuba from traveling to 

Havana to attend meetings.
In April, dissidents and human rights defenders Dulce Amanda Duran, Roseling Peñalvar, and 

Wendis Castillo were barred from traveling to Lima for a civil society meeting. Castillo, 

a human rights defender and member of the Dignity Movement, had also been barred from 

traveling in November 2017, when she intended to fly to Lima for a conference on corruption 

and human rights in Latin America.
In July 2018, Rene Gómez Manzano, a prominent dissident who has been imprisoned several times, 

was intercepted at the airport before boarding a plane to attend a human rights meeting 

in Montevideo. Agents informed him that he was not authorized to travel.

Prison Conditions

Prisons are overcrowded. Prisoners are forced to work 12-hour days and are punished if they do not

 meet production quotas, according to former political prisoners. Inmates have no effective 

complaint mechanism to seek redress for abuses. Those who criticize the government or engage 

in hunger strikes and other forms of protest often endure extended solitary confinement, 

beatings, and restrictions on family visits, and are denied medical care.
While the government allowed select members of the foreign press to conduct controlled 

visits to a handful of prisons in 2013, it continues to deny international human rights groups 

and independent Cuban organizations access to its prisons.
On August 9, Alejandro Pupo Echemendía died in police custody at Placetas, Villa Clara, 

while under investigation for a crime related to horse racing. Family members say his body

 showed signs of severe beatings; authorities contend he threw himself against a wall and died 

of a heart attack. Allegations have surfaced of family members and witnesses being coerced 

to withdraw their initial statements and to confirm the official version.

Labor Rights

Despite updating its Labor Code in 2014, Cuba continues to violate conventions of the 

International Labour Organization that it ratified, specifically regarding freedom of association 

and collective bargaining. While the law technically allows the formation of independent unions, 

 in practice Cuba only permits one confederation of state-controlled unions, the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba.

Human Rights Defenders

The Cuban government still refuses to recognize human rights monitoring as a legitimate activity 

and denies legal status to local human rights groups. Government authorities have harassed, 

assaulted, and imprisoned human rights defenders who attempt to document abuses.

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Following public protest, the Cuban government decided to remove language from the 

proposed new constitution that would have redefined marriage to include same-sex couples.

Key International Actors

In November 2017, the US government reinstated restrictions on Americans’ right to travel to Cuba 

and to do business with any entity tied to the Cuban military, security, or intelligence services. 

The US also voted against a United Nations resolution condemning the US embargo on Cuba,

 a sharp break from its 2016 abstention.
In March, former Colombian President Andres Pastrana and former Bolivian President Jorge Quiroga 

were detained at Havana airport and denied entry. They had flown to Cuba to receive an award 

on behalf of the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas, a forum of 37 former presidents

 and heads of state.
In April 2018, Secretary General of the Organization of American States Luis Almagro 

criticized the election of Díaz-Canel, calling it “an attempt to perpetuate a dynastic-familial 

autocratic regime. It is called a dictatorship.”
In January 2018, the foreign policy chief of the European Union met in Havana with Cuban 

authorities to accelerate the implementation of their Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement. 

On May 15, the EU and Cuba held their first-ever ministerial-level Joint Council meeting in Brussels.
Cuba is a current member of the Human Rights Council, having been reelected for the 2017-2019 term.

How to End the Pattern of Intimidation 

 and Repression in Cuba 

Severe repression in Cuba is a common occurrence throughout the recent history of the nation.

Citizens are unable to practice freedom of expression without retaliation from the communist-controlled 
government. 
The fear of speaking out  against the government and the fear  of police is enough to silence the majority of citizens.
Thousands of Cubans have been arrested and forced to serve long sentences in sub-standard prisons 
due to government repression in Cuba. 

The culture of political violence and harassment has forced Cubans to live in a constant state of fear from 

 generation to generation.

Highlighting the long history of oppressive tactics by the Cuban government can shed light on
the importance of why Cubans have developed such an instinct of self-censorship. Here are some
prominent examples of the lengths the Cuban government has gone to in order to oppress the political
participation of their own citizens.

  Escambray Rebellion – 1959

Fidel Castro’s rise to power resulted in The Escambray Rebellion that lasted six years between 1959
and 1965. A group of insurgents fought in the Escambray Mountains against the newly-formed
Communist government, but were heavily outnumbered. Many rural farmers supported the uprising
due to the communist regime seizing large tracts of private land for government use.
 Most of them were uprooted and relocated with their families to the so-called “pueblos cautivos”
 or captive villages, far away from their native Escambray.
The lack of adequate supplies and outside assistance eventually doomed the rebellion.
Fidel Castro showed no mercy to captured insurgents, as firing squads immediately executed
any participants. The brutality and cruelty of this newly-formed government was on full display
 right from the start.

Maleconazo Uprising – 1994

The fall of the Soviet Union caused a significant economic depression in Cuba known as the
 “Special Period” in the early to mid-1990s. The financial crisis in Cuba resulted in the
Maleconazo Uprising on August 5, 1994. Many citizens took to the streets in Havana to protest
 against the government due to the lack of food, frequent blackouts, and a devalued currency.
The government quickly dispatched state police to beat and control the protesters and even fired
 weapons near the crowd. The Maleconazo Uprising only lasted a day, but the aftermath resulted
in thousands of Cubans fleeing the island on rafts to reach the United States for freedom and a
better life, seeing government petition as a futile action in their own country.

Black Spring – 2003

Repression in Cuba continued throughout the years against anyone that dared to speak out
 against the government. A crackdown on political protesters in 2003 resulted in
the arrest of 75 dissidents. Many of these people were human rights activists and independent
journalists. These arrests became known as the “Black Spring,” as the Cuban government
claimed that these individuals were secretly working with the United States.
They were all convicted in mock trials and the average jail sentence was 20 years. Most served
 seven to eight years throughout the Cuban Gulag, until in 2010-2011 when a deal brokered by
the Catholic Church to obtain their freedom on the condition that they leave the country for Spain.
The Black Spring only further highlights the continuing lack of freedom and severe government
repression in Cuba.

FHR Cuba’s Repressors Program

Repression in Cuba from the Communist government is a longstanding practice that Cubans have
come to experience all too frequently. From father to son, mother to daughter, each decade of
political activism results in the same severe persecution and arrests for Cuban citizens.
This generational violence towards Cubans by their own government has induced fear of any
political dissidence.
However, the Repressors Program was created by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba
 (FHRC) to highlight government repression and empower Cubans to expose the behavior of
abusive officials.
The Repressors Program gives Cubans the freedom to report the actions of violent and abusive
government officials via a detailed database. The program initially began in 2016 and has played
a pivotal role in limiting government oppression and exposing acts of violence and abuses of power.
Giving volunteer activists access to cameras and smartphones has exposed many violent actions
and has been a deterrent to the behavior of these diabolic government officials.

https://www.fhrcuba.org

FROM PAGE #19

Over the past two years there has been a notable increase in protests for social and economic reasons.
These protests do not have legal protection, as the right to public demonstration is non-existent.
However, the state has often preferred to appease these protests rather than react with force.
Given the degree of deterioration of living conditions – and the even more deteriorated
legitimacy of the authorities and the official communist ideology – Cuban society resembles
a dry meadow that any spark can ignite.

Domination by the political elite has been based more on control of the social psychology
than on the resources of the repressive apparatus. As a result of the Great Terror of the 1960s,
1970s and 1980s, with firing squads that never stopped and the handing out of 30-year prison
sentences for insignificant issues, three generations were formed on the false premise that
‘there is nobody who can knock down or fix this’. This has been the guiding idea of a pedagogy
of submission that is now in crisis.

Why the change?

The factors that have most influenced the current change in citizens’ perspectives and
attitudes have been, on the one hand, the breakdown of the monopoly of information that has
resulted from new digital technologies, the leader’s death and the gradual transfer of power to people
without historical legitimacy to justify their incompetence. On the other hand, the accelerated
deterioration of living conditions and the country’s entire infrastructure turns everyday life into a
collection of hardships. Health and education systems, food, medicine, the transportation
system and cooking gas and gasoline supply are in a state of collapse. Hundreds of multi-family
 dwellings are also collapsing and people waste their lives demanding, waiting for years for a
 new home or for their old home to be repaired. Many also lose their lives among the rubble
when buildings collapse.

In this context the social dissident, who had remained latent and silent, goes public to express
their discontent and demand basic social rights. They claim neither more nor less than the
right to dignity, to dignified conditions of existence. And unlike political opponents, dissidents
are not in the thousands but in the millions. There are not enough jail cells for so many people.

How did the Cuban Observatory of Conflicts come
 into existence?

The Cuban Observatory of Conflicts emerged in Cuba as an idea of a group of women who had
previously created the Dignity Movement. In its origins, this movement had the mission of
 denouncing pre-criminal dangerousness laws (i.e. laws allowing the authorities to charge and detain
people deemed likely to commit crimes, and sentence them to up to four years in prison) and
 abuses in the prison system, against any category of prisoners, whether political or not.

From the outset this was an innovative project. It was not conceived as a political organisation
or party, but as a movement, fluid and without hierarchies, fully decentralised in its actions,
without an ideology that would exclude others.

For two years these women collected information about prisons and the application of pre-criminal
 dangerousness laws. Their work within Cuba fed into reports to the
United Nations Human Rights Committee and the Organization of American States’
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They placed the letter ‘D’ for dignity,
which identifies their movement, in public sites as a reminder to the political police that they
had not been able to crush them.

However, the original mission of the Dignity Movement was too specific for a movement
whose name was such a broad concept. Nowadays, Cuban citizens’ struggles are primarily
for living conditions, for the full respect of their human dignity. This is thy the Dignity Movement
expanded its mission to supporting citizen groups in their social and economic demands, without
 abandoning its initial objective. To fight back against the psychology of submission and replace
 it with another one based on the idea that it is possible to fight and win, the Dignity Movement
now has a specific tool, the Cuban Observatory of Conflicts.

Can you tell us more about how the Observatory works?

The philosophy on which the Observatory is based is that life should not be wasted waiting
for a miracle or a gift from the powerful; you have to fight battles against the status quo every
single day. In just one year we have successfully accompanied about 30 social conflicts of
various kinds that had remained unresolved for decades, but now obtained the concessions
 demanded from the state.

What has been most significant is that when the authorities realised that these citizens were mentally
ready to go to public protests, they decided to give them what they demanded, in order to prevent
an outburst and to take credit for the result, although this would never have been achieved in
the absence of citizen pressure. They showed their preference for occasional win-win solutions to
 avoid the danger of a viral contagion of protests among a population that is fed-up with broken
promises. Each popular victory teaches citizens that protesting and demanding – rather than
 begging and waiting – is the way to go.

The method is simple: to generate a collective demand that has a critical number of petitioners
who identify with it and subscribe to it, and send negotiators to request a solution, clarifying
that they will not accept negative, delayed responses or a response that does not identify the person
responsible for its implementation. At the same time, information is filtered to social media and digital
media covering Cuba. That is the way to go along the established roads in a constructive way.
What is new here is that it is made clear that if an agreement is not reached and its implementation
verified, people are willing to take nonviolent public actions of various kinds.

Civic space in Cuba is rated as ‘closed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor.
Get in touch with Observatorio Cubano de Conflictos through its webpage and Facebook profile,
 or follow @conflictoscuba on Twitter.

 This Is Not the 'End of an Era' in Cuba

The newly elected president represents an evolution of the Castro regime—an act of self-perpetuation
masquerading as change.

Ana Quintana

 

Cuba’s new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, boasts relative youth and Castro-free genes. 

But the myth that his election will yield significant change on the island is flat-out wrong.
His 86-year-old predecessor, General Raul Castro, was due for departure. Fidel was 81 when he 

handed power over to his little brother. At age 57, Diaz-Canel seems a mere babe when compared 

to his octogenarian predecessors. Yet in terms of policy, there is little difference between them.
Diaz-Canel’s political education was forged under the Castro brothers. During his military service,

 he was part of their security detail. The Cold War era was an active time for the young soldier. 

While 20-somethings in 1980s America were watching music videos, he was Cuba’s Communist Party 

liaison to Nicaragua, an ally of both Cuba and the Soviet Union. He has not strayed far from the family

since then, assuming various roles in the Communist Party and later in government.
His loyalty has paid off. In 2013, he was appointed First Vice President. Then, on April 18 of this year, 

the single-party National Assembly elected him president. This was not a difficult choice for

 the Assembly: 

Diaz-Canel was Raul Castro’s handpicked successor and the only candidate on the ticket. 

He assumed office the following day.
Though Raul Castro may no longer occupy the president’s office, he is anything but a has-been. 

He still controls the island’s power centers: the Communist Party and the armed forces. 

Article 5 of Cuba’s constitution lays out the party’s supreme authority, stating, 

“the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Cuba … is the leading force of society and of the State.”

 And Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces have been led by the younger Castro since its 

creation in 1959.

 (Incidentally, Diaz-Canel is not the first non-Castro president to serve the regime. 

From 1959 to 1976, Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado held that title. But many today are unfamiliar 

with his name,

 because the presidency in Cuba is a powerless role when occupied by someone who doesn’t control 

the party and the military.)
Much like in the case of Che Guevara, romanticized recollections of Diaz-Canel as a long-haired, 

bicycle-riding youth are at odds with the facts. Only a shrewd political operative could have survived 

the bare-knuckled world of Cuban politics and emerged as president.

Immediately after assuming office, Diaz-Canel ended speculation that he would be an agent of change.
“I affirm to this assembly that comrade Raul will head the decisions for the present and the future of the
nation,” he announced. “Raul remains at the front of the political vanguard.” Diaz-Canel also vowed
to prevent the restoration of capitalism.
The last 59 years of Cuban history demonstrate that the government exists to serve the Castros’ desire
to advance communism. For years, Raul Castro fooled many into believing he was a
pragmatic reformer.
He pushed surface-level economic changes—enough to provide Cubans with cash, but not so much
as to risk
 inspiring political change. Restrictions were loosened for Cuban entrepreneurs, but only under
the strictest of conditions. A license was required for all commercial activity, including driving a cab
and repairing a mattress. Government dissidents were excluded for obvious reasons.
While regime apologists insisted Raul would open Cuba to the world, he was busy making other plans.
 Under his leadership, control of Cuba’s state-run economy was slowly transferred to Raul loyalists.
His ex-son-in-law, General Luis Alberto Lopez-Callejas, took over GAESA,
 the Armed Forces Business Enterprises Group. GAESA is run as a state-owned-and-operated holding
 company of over 50 business entities, from airlines to currency exchange services.
GAVIOTA, the military’s tourism company, is the crown jewel in the GAESA empire and the backbone
of the Cuban economy. National Review editor Rich Lowry compared the setup to the Pentagon
owning the Radisson, Marriott, and Hilton hotel chains. Throw in the auto rental industry, tour guides,
and other enterprises that make money off various travelers, and you get the idea.

Raul’s son, Alejandro Castro Espin, became a leading official in Cuba’s domestic intelligence services.

 Under his father’s direction, Alejandro shifted the mechanisms of political repression. 

The days of long-term political sentences are gone. In their place have come short-term imprisonments, augmented by the use of government-sponsored mobs to attack counterrevolutionary human-rights activists.
The regime arrested nearly 10,000 dissidents in 2016 alone, 498 of them during 

President Obama’s three-day trip to the island. Cuba’s long, sad history of repression 

will apparently continue under Diaz-Canel. He has lashed out against Cuba’s dissidents and 

the countries that support them, and he appears to be perfectly fine with censorship.
I grew up in Miami, the daughter and granddaughter of Cuban political refugees. 

They left during the Mariel boatlift of 1980, after hiding out at the Peruvian embassy in Cuba. 

My grandfather vividly recalled hearing Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s firing squads 

slaughtering counterrevolutionaries. Now, the firing squads have been replaced with subtler means, 

but the regime remains unalterably opposed to relaxing its iron grip on power. 

When anticipating the future of Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations under Diaz-Canel, 

it would be a safe bet to expect more of the same. Had Cuba wanted to signal to the U.S. 

and the international community at large that times are changing, 

the mid-April Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru, would have been the prime opportunity.
Instead, Cuba gave hopeful well-wishers a single-finger salute. 

The Castro regime brought its police state to a peaceful gathering in Lima. 

State-sponsored thugs shut down meetings critical of Cuba and their Venezuelan benefactors. 

Even on foreign soil, dissent is not tolerated.

In totalitarian systems, titles really do not matter. Diaz-Canel’s election to the presidency 

does not represent a new era in Cuba. Rather, it represents 

an evolution of the Castro regime—an act of self-perpetuation masquerading as change.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write t
o letters@theatlantic.com.

Ana Quintana is a senior policy analyst at
The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies.

As Criminalization of the Arts Intensifies

 in Cuba, Activists Organize

A Cuban decree seeks to censor artists to an unprecedented level, essentially regulating
any and all artistic and cultural activity in the country.

Jasmine WeberAugust 15, 2018

Sponsored

• The Herberger Institute Prioritizes Innovation for the Future of Art and Design

Cuban artists and activists organizing in opposition to the decree (image courtesy 

Yanelyz Nuñez Leyva)

Cuban artists are approaching a moment of reckoning as the country’s government takes a firm legal 

stance on “vulgar” audio and visual displays in the Republic. On April 20, newly instated president 

Miguel Díaz-Canel signed a proposal for a new regulation, Decree 349, surrounding artistic 

freedom and institutional censorship in the Republic. The vague parameters of the decree essentially 

regulate any and all artistic and cultural activity in Cuba.A group of Cuban visual artists and 

curators have taken a vehement stand against the government’s criminalization of the arts through a 

series of protests, performances, and even a rogue biennial. Their actions have amounted in a number 

of artists’ arrests.
Among those organizing are Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Yanelyz Nuñez Leyva, Amaury Pacheco,
Iris Ruiz, Soandry Del Rio, and José Ernesto Alonso, utilizing the rallying cries
#NOALDECRETOLEY349 (#NOTODECREELAW349) and #artelibre (#freeart) across social media
to spread awareness. Núñez Leyva, a curator and art critic, told Hyperallergic in an email interview
that she and the aforementioned artists have started formulating a legal demand against the decree,
processed with the help of Laritza Diverset, a lawyer and founder of human rights organization
Cubalex. They have been working in hopes of securing a meeting with the
Council of State and Ministers.

What Does Decree 349 Mean for Artists in Cuba?

The Decree 349 ruling is backed by legislation that is hard to work around, allowing governments
to shut down concerts, performances, galleries, and art and book sales if they do not comply
with the strict list of prohibited subject matter. It also restricts artists from commercializing their
work without government approval. The decree was published in Gaceta de Cuba on July 10 and
 is slated to go into effect on December 1 of this year.
The 1976 Constitution of the Republic of Cuba includes the phrase, “artistic creativity is free as
 long as its content is not contrary to the Revolution.” The institution of Decree 349 puts a severe
limitation on this definition of contrarian.
The decree essentially grants the Cuban Republic complete control over independent artistic
 production in the private sector. Banned content includes:

a) use of national symbols that contravene current legislation; b) pornography; c) violence;

d) sexist, vulgar and obscene language; e) discrimination due to skin color, gender,

sexual orientation, disability and any other harm to human dignity; f) that attempts against the

development of childhood and adolescence; g) any other that violates the legal provisions

that regulate the normal development of our society in cultural matters.

All performances, public or private, need to be contracted by the government, and any
artistic expression without adequate contracting (or found violating their contract, including getting
 too loud) are subject to penalizations including getting fined and “confiscation of instruments,
equipment, accessories and other assets.” This legislation is to be carried out by inspectors appointed
by the Cuban Ministry of Culture.

Yanelys Núñez Leyva told Hyperallergic in an email (translated from Spanish):

I think that the Cuban government knows that it is in a moment of total vulnerability …

So they turn their repressive actions toward the cultural circuit that has been empowered independently, that does not need the institutions to survive and that does not believe [its] hegemonic ideology.

She says artists have historically been leaders of change, but “with access to the internet, the change
 in president, the deep economic crisis, the support of independent journalism, the collaboration
between artists, [and more] have converted it into an even greater threat.”

Artists Respond 

Artists have been on their toes since the cancellation of the 13th Havana Biennial.
Following Hurricane Irma in 2016, the government postponed the biennial, and earlier this year
 it announced the biennial would be delayed for a second time — this time indefinitely. In protest,
artists including the well-known Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara took to social media for a call
to protest the decision and organized an alternative #00 Havana Biennial. The Havana Times reported
 that the Ministry of Culture targeted Cuban participants, threatening to revoke their accreditation
 to operate as independent artists in the country. Organizers were accused of “distorting
Cuba’s cultural policies.”
According to a July statement made to Cuban officials by artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara,
Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, Iris Ruiz, Amaury Pacheco, and Tania Bruguera, the #00 Biennial’s promotional materials and artwork were confiscated, organizer’s cell phones were tapped, international artists’ were made ineligible to enter the country with their
artworks being withheld in airport customs, and arrests were being made against artists and
activists involved.
Since the statement was released, Cuban artists have worked tirelessly in opposition to the decree
and the constraints it has set on Cuban artistry. Artists organized a protest performance on July 21,
where they intended to cover themselves in human excrement in front of the Cuban Capitol
as a symbol of artists’ treatment by the Cuban government.
Before the performance was set to begin, 14ymedio reports Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara,
Amaury Pacheco, Iris Ruiz, Soandry Del Rio, and José Ernesto Alonso were arrested by Cuban police
officials near the performance site. They were charged with public disorder and detained in Vivac,
a detention center in Calabazar, south of Havana. Nuñez Leyva went to assist, and when she arrived
and saw the participating artists had been arrested, she chose to carry out the performance herself.
During the protest she called out, “We are artists, we want respect, we ask to meet with the
Minister of Culture.”
Ruiz was the first to be released, followed soon after by the other detainees, though Otero Alcántara
 was held for an additional two days. “I was beaten from the Capitol to the unit and they t
old me I have to respect the police. They beat me as if they wanted to break my spine,”
said Otero Alcántara in a conversation with 14ymedio hours after his release.
They are not the only artists who have come under direct legal fire since the decree was passed.
 Iris Ruiz told Hyperallergic in an email that artist Gorky Águila, leader of the punk rock band
 Porno para Ricardo, was confronted by state security and the police, who confiscated his home
recording studio equipment used to perform his alternative radio show Cambio de Bola.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara told Hyperallergic:

Art has always been persecuted or used in all systems, both dictatorial and democratic,

because for the most part it is the echo of the sufferings and ills of societies, it serves as the

denouncement or visibility of them.
… For government systems, it is impossible to control art, because it is capable of being born

of the most unexpected places and situations. In these moments of such fragility and therefore

repression, art is a very powerful weapon and the system knows it.

Otero Alcántara recently advertised an artist-led open mic in opposition to the decree, set to be held on
August 11. He told 14ymedio that on the morning of the event, State Security and police surrounded
his home, arresting him and Yanelys Núñez Leyva.
Otero Alcántara says rapper and visual artist Yasser Castellanos, journalist Yania Suarez, and
Michel Matos were detained in the same unit as them. He told 14ymedio, “At the time of the arrest
they did not say anything to us, but being in the unit, State Security came for an interview and they
warned us that Cuba cannot become another Nicaragua, they are very worried.” The pair were
released at midnight on Sunday.
Ruiz told the newspaper that the artists interested in the open mic were prevented from entering
by police officials and were told they did not have the permission of the Ministry of Culture to host
the event.
“This is action number five but we will not stop until we overthrow that decree,” Ruiz told the
publication.
According to 14ymedio, music artist Soandry del Río; Ras Sandino of the group Estudiante
sin Semilla (Student without Seed); urban artist Karnal; and members of the group Conflicto Social
(Social Conflict) received police citations for their involvement.
Nuñez Leyva told Hyperallergic the artists have plans to organize hip-hop concerts and other events,
 which she says will be revealed in due time due to security reasons. The Facebook page
 “Artistas Cubanxs en Contra del Decreto 349” regularly posts updates about the ongoing controversy.

A Crackdown on Cuban Reggaeton 

For years, Cuban reggaeton music has thrived through underground concerts and subversive content
delivery services, under the radar of government censure and objection. Though the new decree
is not the Cuban Republic’s first attempt at silencing the national phenomenon of reggaeton, this effort
actualizes the government’s rejection of the genre through legal means. Activists organizing in
 opposition to the decree say that it is particularly aimed at reggaeton artists and rappers in the country.
The genre, marked by its heavy bass and infectious rhythm, was synthesized from a history
 rooted in Jamaican dancehall, hip-hop, rap, and electronic beats.
Reggaeton has a history of legal penalization for its often sexually explicit lyrics and prevalence
throughout Latinx youth culture. In the 1990s, Puerto Rican police confiscated reggaeton records from
store owners on the charge of “peddling obscenities.” In 2012, controversy erupted when a
Cuban official declared reggaeton would no longer play in public spaces and on the radio.

Photograph of “El Paquete Semanal” by Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban artist in opposition of the decree (image courtesy Ernesto Oroza)

Although the government, under the former President Raúl Castro, made efforts to stomp out 

the musical genre, reggaeton still spread rampantly through shows in private venues and small 

businesses. For years, reggaeton artists worked under the radar, unable to play in state-funded settings 

or on public radio. Instead, the music was passed around through makeshift subscription services 

like El Paquete, which delivered hard drives full of cultural content across the island and 

contained government-disapproved music, TV, and news for up to about $6.50 per week.

Popular reggaeton artists like Rubén Cuesta Palomo, aka Candyman, and Mucho Manolo have 

also voiced their discontent with the Cuban government and its censorship of the arts. In 2016, 

Candyman told the Miami Herald, “Because reggaeton is liberal, it says what it wants, what it thinks. 

Reggaeton does not keep its mouth shut. They know that culture, the arts, is the most 

dangerous weapon they can have in their own yard, because they can’t take an artist and beat

 him up for singing.”

Organizing the Next Steps

Iris Ruiz told Hyperallergic, “My goal as an activist is to help Cuban citizens recover civic will
to promote social and political changes.” She adds, “We will progressively actualize public actions
in the streets, in homes, and in social networks as well, every time adding more people until we reach
the necessary 10,000 people to repeal the decree, according to Cuban law.”
Activists have organized a petition that they invite supporters to sign.
The petition, published on Avaaz.org, is accompanied by a letter (written in Spanish and English)
signed by Tania Bruguera, Laritza Diversent, Coco Fusco, Yanelys Nuñez, and Enrique Risco.
They say:

Decree 349 empowers the Ministry of Culture to designate supervisors and inspectors

who can censor and suspend artistic presentations, impose fines and confiscate instruments,

equipment, the permit that allows artists to be self-employed, and even an artist’s home.

To us, this is a excessive measure that, in addition to generating an antagonistic relationship

between artists and the institutions that should serve their needs. It also lays the groundwork

for administrative corruption.
This decree violates the covenants that were lobbied for and signed by Cuba in the

 United Nations, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Declaration on Right to
 Freedom of Expression and Artistic Creation.

A culture can exist without a Ministry, but a Ministry of Culture or a nation cannot

exist without the creativity of its citizens. Decree 349 leads to the impoverishment of Cuban

culture.

Yanelys Nuñez Leyva elaborated over email with Hyperallergic, “It is also our intention as activists
to call the attention of as many people as possible, both national and international,
especially intellectuals who can help put pressure on the non-imposition of this law.”

https://hyperallergic.com

 

Cuban opposition leader 

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet released 

by Castro State Security after arrest

February 21, 2020 by Alberto de la Cruz

Socialist Cuba’s notorious State Security has released Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet after his arrest on
Thursday and detention for several hours.
Martí Noticias has the report (my translation):

Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet is released, receives a fine

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was released after several hours in custody at the San Miguel del Padron police station in Havana. A fine for 500 Cuban pesos was imposed upon him, said his wife Elsa Morejon to Radio Television Martí
“According to State Security, the fine is for ‘receiving stolen property,’ despite the fact that what they took from the house were personal items such as a computer, a cell phone, and literature,” said Morejon.
According to the activist, what took place on Thursday is another pretext by authorities to “continue intimidating the opposition and the voices advocating for liberty and democracy in Cuba.”She said Biscet was arrested without having taken his medication for hypertension and returned home “with a migraine” and the authorities will be responsible for “whatever happens to my husband.”
Morejon said the police returned her cell phone, which they had confiscated during the raid of their home to, as she explained, prevent her from publishing photos of what was happening.
She confirmed the police had erased the videos and tweets she published denouncing the incident.

https://babalublog.com

 

FROM PAGE # 13

The Untold Tale of Secret Foreign Policy

The invasion debacle led to the second phase, this time with the active participation of 
Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, who previously had
played no role in either Cuba policy. In an April 19, 1961, memo to the President the day the invasion
collapsed, he urged a renewed campaign against Castro. Another Cuba task force was
formed—headed by White House aide Richard Goodwin—to draft a new covert program.
President Kennedy approved it in November 1961. Codenamed Operation Mongoose, it brought
together all the relevant government agencies under a single umbrella.

Reflecting the distrust of both Kennedy brothers of the CIA following the Bay of Pigs,
President Kennedy named Brig. General Edward Lansdale, a flamboyant and eccentric
officer with a reputation gained earlier in the Philippines as a counter-insurgency expert.
But everybody involved knew Bobby Kennedy was the real Mongoose czar, making sure Cuba
became the Kennedy administration’s highest priority.
The overall objective of Mongoose, in Lansdale’s words, was “to bring about the revolt of the
Cuban people [that] will overthrow the Communist regime and institute a new government with
which the United States can live.” Under Lansdale’s programmed timetable for Mongoose,
Castro’s fall would come the following October, coincidentally just a month before
U.S. Congressional elections. Mongoose effectively ended in November 1962, not with the revolt
Lansdale had scheduled, but with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis Mongoose helped provoke
by signaling Moscow and Havana that a new Cuba invasion was likely.
Even without the missile crisis, it appears that Mongoose eventually would have floundered to an
unmourned end. It failed to achieve even minimal expectations, except for intelligence gathering.
Many of its participants, institutional and individual, had little enthusiasm for Mongoose.
There was, as well, a general antipathy among them for Lansdale and Bobby Kennedy, its two
leaders and principal proponents.
By the beginning of 1963, Mongoose was officially dead. The missile crisis had been resolved.
The remaining Bay of Pigs prisoners returned to the United States in exchange for a
$53 million ransom of food and medicines. The time had come for the Kennedy administration
to again revamp its Cuba policy, but one now constrained by Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge
given Moscow in return for the missile withdrawal.

So began phase three of the covert war, this time with the State Department in the
 coordinating role.President Kennedy made clear that “an assurance covering invasion does not
ban covert actions or economic blockade or tie our hands completely. We can’t give the impression
that Castro is home free.”

A cornerstone of the new Cuba policy, as suggested earlier by Ed Martin, the assistant secretary
of State for inter-American affairs, was to be a “program of ‘giving Cubans their heads’ in an
effort to affect the downfall [of Castro] from within.”
Although not officially approved by President Kennedy until June 1963, the new covert program
was well underway by early 1963, its rough outlines sketched by Bobby Kennedy to
invasion brigade leaders Manuel Artime and Erneido Oliva at his Hickory Hill, Virginia residence
within a month after their release from Cuban prisoners. As one component of the new effort,
the CIA would continue to externally mounted sabotage raids against Cuba, but the greater focus
was to be on two so-called “autonomous groups” of Cuban exiles, one headed by Artime and the
 other by Manolo Ray. Both were to receive CIA logistical and financial, but not tactical, assistance.
The autonomous program remains among the least known, least understood, most creative and
most controversial of all the U.S. covert activities targeting Cuba. At the same time
 President Kennedy named Oliva, the second in command and a hero of the invasion brigade,
as the official representative of all Cubans in the U.S. military, with the idea clearly being that he
would work in tandem with Artime.
Ray, an early cabinet minister under Castro and favorite of the Kennedy White House, but a man
who many Cuban exiles regarded negatively as a proponent of Fidelismo sin Fidel—Castroism
without Castro— had been a late addition to the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the exile
group organized by the CIA to front for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Artime, already a member
of the Council, was its representative to the Bay of Pigs Brigade and was captured at the time
of the invasion.
The “rules of engagement” for the Ray and Artime autonomous groups specified that all their
operations would be “mounted outside the territory of the United States” and that the
 “United States presence and direct participation in the operation would be kept to an
absolute minimum.”
Sam Halpern, a CIA official involved in Cuban covert activities at the time, put it most succinctly
 as the program got underway. “The next thing we knew,” said Halpern, “the word was,
 ‘let Cubans be Cubans.’ Let the Cubans do their own thing. But the Cubans didn’t have any money.
So the CIA’s got money. Give ‘em money. We gave them money. We told ‘em where to by arms,
ammunition. We didn’t give it to ‘em. They went out and bought their own. They decided what they
wanted. They picked their own targets, then told us what the targets were. We provided them
intelligence support…and we didn’t have anything to do with what they were up to.
They just told us what they were going to do and we said ‘fine. We’re not stopping you.’
And we didn’t.”
Artime set up camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, with full knowledge of both Central American
governments and Washington. After more than a year of preparation, his commandos carried
 out their first raid May 13, 1964, against a sugar mill in Cuba’s Oriente Province. By then,
President Kennedy had been assassinated, Lyndon Johnson was president and, with both the war
 in Vietnam heating up and Johnson’s personal antipathy towards Bobby Kennedy,
enthusiasm for the secret war against Cuba had begun to wane. The death knell sounded in
September 1964 when the Artime group fired on a Spanish ship en route to Havana,
 mistakenly thinking it was a Cuban freighter leaving Havana with a rice shipment to Japan.
Several Spanish crewmen were killed. A major diplomatic row ensued.
Ray, who claimed to have a major underground network in Cuba which he intended to exploit,
 accomplished even less, continuing to operate from Florida and Puerto Rico, despite pressure for him
 to move his operations outside U.S. territory. He set up a base in the Dominican Republic in late 1964,
but did nothing, although declassified documents show him receiving a monthly subsidy of $10,000.
By late spring 1965, U.S. funded and supported covert actions—apart from intelligence gathering
and propaganda—ended. The CIA’s new director, Adm. William Raborn, made an abortive
effort to resurrect the covert program in a June 26, 1965, memo to President Johnson.
It went nowhere. The only thing left was cleaning up the residue of six futile years aimed at
ousting Fidel.

Don Bohning is the author of a new book entitled The Castro Obsession: 
US Covert Activities Against Cuba, 1959- 1965. This essay is based on his book, published this 
spring by Potomac Books (formerly Brassey’s, Inc.) of Dulles, 
Virginia. Longtime Latin America editor for The Miami Herald, Bohning covered Cuba, 
Haiti and the rest of Latin America for many years.

‘The Government Gets to Decide Who Is 

an Artist’: Cuban Authorities Crack Down 

on Dissent as the Havana Biennial Opens

Multiple artists have been taken in by state officials, while others have been denied entry to the country.

Taylor Dafoe

Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara being arrested on April 11, 2019, just before

 the opening of the Havana Biennial.

 

Cuban-American artist Carlos Martiel stands inside his art project The Blood of Cain at the Malecon
 waterfront during the 13th Havana Biennial art fair, on April 14, 2019, in Havana, Cuba. Photo: 
Sven Creutzmann/Mambo  

In the days surrounding the start of the 13th Havana Biennial, which opened last Friday in the Cuban 

capital, government officials have been clamping down on artists and preventing visitors 
from entering the country.Today, Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was picked up by 
authorities after being release by them just yesterday following a four-day detention. 
Alcántara was initially arrested last Thursday outside his home after staging a performance
 in which he and two others wore American flags as capes.Another artist, Michel Matos, 
filmed the arrest and uploaded the footage to his personal Facebook page. The next day, 
he was taken from his home and questioned by authorities for more than 9 hours. In a separate event,
 poet and artist Amaury Pacheco was also apprehended by Cuban police before 
being released Alcántara and Matos are members of the San Isidro Group, a cohort of Cuban artists 
who have staged protests against the government and its enforcement of Decree 349, a new law 
that went into effect in December stipulating that all artistic activities must be pre-approved 
by the Ministry of Culture. The decree was signed by the country’s President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, 
shortly after he was sworn into office in April 2018.“The decree legalizes and formalizes 
methods that were already being used by the Cuban government against independent artists and 
journalists,” says Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco in an email to artnet News. 
“The government gets to decide who is or isn’t an artist and its inspectors can decide on the spot 
whether an event/show/studio should be shut down.”
Days before the Havana Biennial opening, Fusco herself was denied entry into the country. 
She arrived at Havana’s José Martí International Airport on Wednesday, April 10, only to be turned 
away by officials, who provided no reason for their actions. Fusco says is being targeted 
for her critical writings on art and cultural politics, her research, and her efforts to raise funds 
for the art projects in the country.
“State Security regularly threatens artists and cultural producers to try to extract information 
and intimidate them into obedience,” says the artist. “If you don’t cooperate, you are 
considered suspect.”

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara being arrested for a second time within a week. Photo:
Claudia Genlui Hidalgo.

Yesterday, fellow Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera, who has been particularly vocal
 in her opposition to state crackdowns and the enforcement of Decree 349,
 punished an essay on Hyperallergic attacking the state and explaining why she refused to visit 
the exhibition this year.
“Whether the Ministry of Culture provides material and promotional support for an artist’s project
 is determined not by the quality of that artist’s work but on his/her/their loyalty to the government 
and on the use that can be made of that artist to improve the international image from the country,”
 Bruguera wrote. “The objective of this biennial is not to promote Cuban artists 
(that will be up to each according to their possibilities) but to make everyone understand that 
decree-law 349 will be applied only to those who are independent and ask discomforting questions.”
Fusco largely agrees.
“The Biennial is not really about the local community, whatever that means,” she says.
 “It is a major cultural tourism event that brings in millions of dollars. The main goal is to show 
the world that Cuba is a cultural superpower and to dispel any concern about repression via 
the exhibition of lots of art. Most foreigners go away happy if they are wined and dined and 
charmed by biennial staff. They don’t ask questions and presume that if there is art to see, 
then the revolution is a great thing.”

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A jailed Cuban activist is in grave danger. 

He must be released.

Cuban opposition leader José Daniel Ferrer in Havana in May 2016. 

(Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images)

By Editorial Board

IN HIS many videos on social media. José Daniel Ferrer appears as a robust and determined activist
for democracy in Cuba, heading a group named the Patriotic Union of Cuba, or UNPACU.
But in a short prison visit on Thursday, more than a month after Mr. Ferrer was detained Oct. 1 by
 authorities, his family says they saw a broken man, hunched over, having lost half his weight,
 covered in bruises. He was barely able to speak but told them hastily he has been threatened
that he will not leave prison alive.

This horrific scene is cause for alarm, outrage and international protest. Mr. Ferrer is a leading
opposition voice to the Cuban regime. He previously served several years in prison after the
 2003 Black Spring” arrests of the followers of Oswaldo Payá, champion of the Varela Project,
a citizen initiative calling for a referendum on democracy in Cuba. Mr. Ferrer founded UNPACU
in his hometown of Santiago de Cuba after his release, and he has been tireless and
unrelenting in his pursuit of human rights and in his criticism of the authoritarian regime established
by Fidel Castro six decades ago.

After his arrest, along with several others in his movement, Mr. Ferrer was held incommunicado,
with no word about his situation. Then, in the past week, a handwritten letter appeared in which he
wrote that he had been beaten and tortured and his life was in grave danger. In a statement
Thursday, Mr. Ferrer’s family said he confirmed that he had written the letter and had it smuggled out.

In the brief meeting with his family, conducted in a prison office, Mr. Ferrer said he is on a
hunger strike and has repeatedly torn off his prison uniforms in protest, which were forcibly put back
on him. He showed his family bruises on his body. He was hunched over and could barely
embrace them. Mr. Ferrer reported that he is being held in a cell in chains with a common criminal
who has attacked him repeatedly.

No one should have any doubts why Mr. Ferrer is being punished: to silence his outspoken demands
for an end to despotism in Cuba, a system that is now run by Fidel’s brother Raúl, from the shadows,
and President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Mr. Ferrer’s family quoted him as saying he is now ready to die
for his principles, telling them, “Freedom, dignity or death.” He must be released and given medical
 treatment immediately — and his ideals must not be allowed to flicker out in a dank prison cell.

https://www.washingtonpost.com

Image: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara / Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara on Facebook

Cuba: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara 

arbitrarily detained again

26 January 2020: Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was released after police detained him
near his girlfriend Claudia Genlui Hidalgo’s home. Alcántara had planned to accompany Hidalgo
 to the José Marti Airport in La Habana as she intended to depart for a work trip, reported AND Cuba.
Hidalgo published a post on her Facebook page in which she reveals that Alcántara did not show up
 at their scheduled meeting point at the airport.
“Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara is missing. He was kidnapped by the political police,”
 said Hidalgo in her Facebook post.

After his release, the artist shared a statement via Hildago’s Facebook saying that “I was kidnapped
 at the corner of Claudia Genlui’s house when I was ready to accompany her to José Marti Airport
since she had to travel.”

Both Alcántara and Hidalgo are members of San Isidro Movement – a group repressed
 by the authorities for the group’s criticisms of state policy in cultural matters.

https://freemuse.org

 

Index joins show of solidarity with Cuba's jailed artists: 
"Art should not be criminalised"

BY RYAN MCCHRYSTAL

Update: All arrested artists have now been released, although they remain under police surveillance. 
Cuba’s vice minister of culture Fernando Rojas has declared to the Associated Press
 that changes will be made to Decree 349 but has not opened dialogue with the artists involved 
in the campaign against the decree.    

Index on Censorship joined others at the Tate Modern on 5 December in a show of solidarity
with those artists arrested in Cuba for peacefully protesting Decree 349, a law that will severely
limit artistic freedom in the country. Decree 349 will see all artists — including collectives,
musicians and performers — prohibited from operating in public places without prior approval
from the Ministry of Culture.
In all, 13 artists were arrested over 48 hours. Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Yanelys Nuñez Leyva,
members of the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award-winning Museum of Dissidence,
were arrested in Havana on 3 December. They are being held at Vivac prison on
the outskirts of Havana. The Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera, who was in residency at the
Tate Modern in October 2018, was arrested separately, released and re-arrested. Of all those arrested,
only Otero Alcantara, Nuñez Leyva and Bruguera remain in custody.

Index on Censorship’s Perla Hinojosa speaking at the Tate Modern.

Speaking at the Tate Modern, Index on Censorship’s fellowships and advocacy officer Perla Hinojosa,
who has had the pleasure of working with Otero Alcantara and Nuñez Leyva, said:
“We call on the Cuban government to let them know that we are watching them, we’re holding them
 accountable, and they must release artists who are in prison at this time and that they must drop Decree 349. Freedom of expression should not be criminalised. Art should not be criminalised. In the words of Luis Manuel, who emailed me on Sunday just before
he went to prison: ‘349 is the image of censorship and repression of Cuban art and culture,
and an example of the exercise of state control over its citizens’.”
Other speakers included Achim Borchardt-Hume, director of exhibitions at Tate, Jota Castro,
a Dublin-based Franco-Peruvian artist, Sofia Karim, a Lonon-based architect and niece of the jailed
Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam, Alistair Hudson, director of 
Manchester Art Gallery and The Whitworth, and Colette Bailey, Artistic director and chief executive 
of Metal, the Southend-on-Sea-based arts charity.
Some read from a joint statement: “We are here in London, able to speak freely without fear.
We must not take that for granted.”
It continued: “Following the recent detention of Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam along
with the recent murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, there us a global acceleration of censorship
and repression of artists, journalists and academics. During these intrinsically linked turbulent times,
we must join together to defend our right to debate, communicate and support one another.”
Castro read in Spanish from an open declaration for all artists campaigning against the Decree 349.
 It stated: “Art as a utilitarian artefact not only contravenes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(Cuba is an active member of the United Nations Organisation), but also the basic
principles of the United Nations for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO).”
It continued: “Freedom of creation, a basic human expression, is becoming a “problematic”
issue for many governments in the world. A degradation of fundamental rights is evident not only
 in the unfair detention of internationally recognised creatives, but mainly in attacking the fundamental
 rights of every single creator. Their strategy, based on the construction of a legal framework,
constrains basic fundamental human rights that are inalienable such as freedom of speech.
This problem occurs today on a global scale and should concern us all.”

Cuban artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, members of the Index-award
 winning Museum of Dissidence

Mohamed Sameh, from the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award-winning
Egypt Commission on Rights and Freedoms, offered these words of solidarity: “We are shocked
to know of Yanelys and Luis Manuels’s detention. Is this the best Cuba can do to these wonderful
 artists? What happened to Cuba that once stood together with Nelson Mandela? We call on and
ask the Cuban authorities to release Yanelys and Luis Manuel immediately. The Cuban authorities
shall be held responsible of any harm that may happen to them during this shameful detention.”

https://www.indexoncensorship.org

Cuban rapper 'Pupyto en Sy' sentenced 

to four years 

in prison

The opposition interpreter is sentenced for the alleged crimes of attack 

and resistance that he had pending since 2019.

Waldo Fernández Cuenca

Havana 19 Mar 2020 - 01:41 CET

A few days before the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was put behind bars by the Cuban Police 

and triggered an intense campaign in favor of his freedom, the relatives of the dissident rapper

 Lázaro Rodríguez Betancourt, better known as "Pupyto en Sy", met the sentence against 

the artist for the alleged crimes of attack and resistance that had been pending since last year.

The singer was finally sentenced to three years, of the six requested by the Prosecutor's Office.

The trial for these crimes was held at the beginning of the year in a room of the 

Municipal Court of Centro Habana. Pupyto's mother, Margot Betancourt, was present at the hearing, 

who told DIARIO DE CUBA that the "few witnesses the Prosecutor's Office could present 

told falsehoods against my son. Even one of the main witnesses (a police officer involved) 

admitted that he was pressured to make a statement against Pupyto. "

"All the time, because of the inconsistency of the statements of the prosecution witnesses 

and because Pupyto said that he considered himself innocent, the balance tipped in his favor. 

One of the witnesses said that he did not even know why he was in that room Because he 

could not contribute any element, because he did not even know my son 

and the police involved in the altercation, "said Betancourt.

This sentence is in addition to the one year that the singer had been imposed in November 2019, 

when he was arrested and processed for alleged "spread of epidemics", after refusing to allow 

Public Health inspectors to fumigate his home.

Finally, "Pupyto en Sy" must serve a joint sentence of four years in prison. In this last case, 

the political motivation of the process against the artist could be seen more clearly, 

since during the trial allusion was made all the time to the "slogans against the Government 

and its main leaders" that the interpreter uttered to refuse to fumigate his home. .

The rap singer had been jailed in October 2018 for publicly showing his opposition to Decree 349, 

at a concert alongside other artists. On that occasion, he spent ten months in prison, but after 

being released he only enjoyed a few months in freedom, since in mid-November 2019 

he was arrested again.

Traslated by : Print-Shop Lighthouse Publisher Press Team

OAS commission holds hearing on Cuba human rights abuses

by Michael K. Lavers

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Sept. 23, 2019, held a hearing on the

 continued persecution of journalists and human rights activists in Cuba. 

Carlos Alejandro Rodríguez Martínez, editor of Tremenda Nota, the

Washington Blade’s media partner in Cuba, is among those who testified. 

(Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Monday held a hearing that highlighted the 

persecution of journalists and human rights activists in Cuba.Carlos Alejandro Rodríguez Martínez, 

editor of Tremenda Nota, the Washington Blade’s media partner on the Communist island, is among 

those who testified at the hearing that took place in D.C.
Rodríguez noted Tremenda Nota’s website has been blocked in Cuba since Feb. 23, the day before
 a referendum on the country’s new constitution took place. Rodríguez also said he has been detained
several times while on assignment in Cuba.
“We know that it is impossible to work in Cuba as an independent journalist without exposing
oneself to confinement, torture and harassment,” he said.
Pablo Díaz, director of Diario de Cuba, a Madrid-based website that covers Cuba, said restricting
travel is among the ways the Cuban government punishes journalists and human rights activists.
Rodríguez noted Roberto Quiñones, a reporter for CubaNet, a Miami-based website
that covers Cuba, on Sept. 11 began to serve a year-long jail sentence after authorities in April arrested
 him while covering a trial in the city of Guantánamo in eastern Cuba. Díaz said 11 Cuban journalists
 are currently banned from leaving the country.
The Cuban government last month prevented Leandro Rodríguez García, director of the
Cuban Foundation for LGBTI Rights, an independent advocacy group, from traveling to the U.S.
in order to attend a months-long program at the Washington Center in D.C.
Cuban authorities on May 8 did not allow this reporter into the country after his flight
from Miami International Airport landed at Havana’s José Martí International Airport.
Cuban police three days later arrested several people who participated in an unsanctioned LGBTI
march in Havana. Several independent LGBTI activists were detained in order to prevent them
from attending the event, and several participants were later taken into custody.
Caitlin Kelly of the International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights noted Cuba’s
 “human rights situation remains the same” since President Miguel Díaz-Canel took office
in April 2018.
“There is a lack of respect for the rule of law, and a legal system that has many loopholes that permit
the criminalization of people who speak against the government — human rights defenders, journalists
and independent activists,” said Kelly.
Margarette May Macaulay, a member of the commission from Jamaica who said she first traveled
to Cuba in the late 1980s, described the human rights situation in the country as “particularly sad.”
“One would think from the late 80s to now one would have expected the powers to be to develop a
sense of justice and sensitivity of all people, that people’s voices are heard about how their country
is run and governed and how social policies are developed,” she said.
Laritza Diversent, executive director of Cubalex, an organization that promotes human rights in Cuba,
and Norberto Mesa Carbonnell, founder of Cofradía de la Negritud, a group that advocates
on behalf of Cubans of African descent, also testified alongside Luis Cino, a reporter for Cubanet,
 a Miami-based website that covers Cuba. Representatives of the Cuban government did not participate
 in the hearing.
“The situation is very concerning,” said Commissioner Antonia Urrejola, who is the commission’s
Cuba rapporteur.

Blade contributor from Cuba receives asylum in US

The Organization of American States created the commission in 1959 as a way to promote
human rights throughout the Western Hemisphere. The commission works closely with the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which the OAS created in 1979 to enforce provisions
of the American Convention on Human Rights.
Cuba is not a member of the OAS, even though it ratified the OAS Charter before Fidel Castro came
to power in the 1959 Cuban revolution.
“The state is not here,” noted Commissioner Esmeralda Arosemena de Troitiño at the
beginning of the hearing, referring to the Cuban government.
The hearing took place five days after Yariel Valdés González, a Blade contributor from Cuba
who suffered persecution because he is a journalist, won asylum in the U.S. Valdés remains in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Louisiana, and it is also unclear whether ICE will appeal the ruling in his case.

Yariel Valdés González photographs a portion of the fence that marks the Mexico-U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico, on Jan. 26, 2019. Valdés last week won asylum in the U.S. because of persecution he suffered as a journalist in his native Cuba. 

(Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

https://www.washingtonblade.com 

Alert and Recommendations: The Cuban regime has changed its repressive tactics

Dec 16, 2019

PRESS RELEASE
Alert and Recommendations:
The Cuban regime has changed
 its repressive tactics

The Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC) wishes to draw attention to the changes
 introduced by the Cuban regime to its repressive methodology and the need for international
 and civil society organizations monitoring it to adjust their own indicators so that they 
can adequately measure and keep track of the new tools of repression in Cuba.
 As a result of the fallout in terms of world rejection to the sentences given to 75 opponents and
members of the independent civil society during the crackdown known as the
Black Spring of 2003 —whose average was 20 years in prison—, repression has been readjusting
 in Cuba. For years it mainly consisted of thousands of brief, arbitrary detentions and long sanctions,
 while continuing to use threats, beatings, acts of repudiation and other forms of highly visible coercion.
The number of arrests, however, has decreased significantly: from 9,942 in 2016 to 2,873 in 2018,
 according to data compiled by the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation,
which the government refuses to legalize.
This reduction is not because the authorities have become more benevolent, but to the
greater effect of the reports of more and more citizens with access to digital technologies,
combined with the creation of databases abroad containing personal information on repressors,
which has already led to international convictions and sanctions, as well as to the deportation
of some of them who had settled in the US. The repressors and their party and State leaders
want to maintain the same level of repressive control, while attenuating their public exposure.
Under this pressure, the Cuban regime has introduced changes in its repressive methodology. 
What are its alternative methods?

1. Prohibiting activists to leave the country for conferences or training
2.  (the so-called “regulated”).
3. Strengthening administrative sanctions against citizens who are not members 
4. of opposition organizations, but who are considered critical.
5. Prohibiting activists to leave their homes, thus blocking their meetings and other actions.
6. Fabricating common criminal cases to justify prison sentences of opposition leaders
7.  or prominent figures of the independent civil society.
8. Presenting ultimatums to “uncomfortable” people to force them to leave the country, 
9. under penalty of greater repression if they stay.

FHRC urges governments, as well as NGOs and international organizations in 
charge of monitoring human rights violations to:
1. Establish adjustments and refinements to the methodology to collect and register 
human rights violations used by various organizations and governments for monitoring
repression in Cuba so that they also cover the new range of abuses by the State such as those
cited above.
In that regard it is suggested to focus on indicators —among many others— such as the following:

• Number of persons illegally and arbitrarily prohibited to leave their homes.
• Number of persons with movement restrictions in the national territory or prevented
•  from traveling abroad.
• Number of political or social protest cases that have been criminalized under alleged common
•  causes or by applying the so- called “pre-criminal social danger”.
• Number of administrative sanctions imposed on citizens due to their ideas and beliefs.
• Further facilitating access by the population and opponents to indications on how and 
• where they can denounce their repressors.

2. Establishing databases on repressors —such as those currently kept by the
Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba and other organizations— in order to collect and share
 information on Cuban repressors and their actions. These databases should include aspects such
as their identity, personal data, and accusations that have been made against them, whatever
their rank or hierarchy, whether military, police or administrative, when they practice, or are
 involved in, any type of repression (violent, administrative, human trafficking of professionals,
 repressive advice in other countries such as Venezuela).
3. Reporting these repressors and penalizing them and their close relatives internationally
 using methods such as visa refusal and the prohibition of receiving remittances.
4. Further facilitating telephone or internet access in a protected, cheap and simple
 way to citizens who wish to access the programs that currently exist for collecting
 complaints and personal information about the repressors, and similar ones that may be
created from now on by Governments and international organizations.

Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba

https://www.fhrcuba.org 

Aimara Nieto political prisoner transferred 

to Las Tunas prison  

Lady in White, UNPACU activist and promoter of Cuba Decide, Nieto Muñoz was detained

 in the Guatao prison in Havana .

 Katherine Mojena Hernández , CubaNet   

 Aimara Nieto Muñoz and her husband (Photo: Courtesy of the author) SANTIAGO, Cuba. 

- This week the political prisoner Aimara Nieto Muñoz was transferred to a women's prison in 

Las Tunas, who is currently serving a politically motivated sanction of four years of deprivation 

of liberty. Aimara Nieto, activist of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), Lady in White 

and promoter of Cuba Decide, was incarcerated in the Guatao prison, located in Havana. 

 The news was released by members of the opposition, such as former prisoner of conscience

 Ángel Moya, the leader of the Ladies in White, Berta Soler, and the coordinator of UNPACU 

and promoter of Cuba Decide Zaqueo Báez. Two days ago, through a brief phone call, 

Aimara Nieto confirmed her mother Griselda Muñoz, who had been transferred to

 the Manatí municipality prison, in the Las Tunas province, and that she is being held 

in a punishment cell to “try to bend it. ”  

The regime allowed Mrs. Griselda to visit her daughter

 in the Las Tunas penitentiary and the woman confirmed that the political prisoner is certainly 

in a punishment cell. She was taken there in retaliation because several prisoners held 

a riot in Guatao and burned some mattresses. Although Aimara claims not to have been related 

to the incident, she was taken directly to isolation, a punishment that will last a month.  

"This is more than 600 kilometers from Havana where his family lives. It is an abusive measure 

that they have taken against her, she has two girls, 7 and 12 years old, and this now increases

 transportation costs and will make it even more difficult for them to see her 

with the corresponding frequency, ”said Báez. 

“Now how often will Aymara see her daughters? 

What physical condition is she in? 

She suffers from high blood pressure and they never have medicines to treat her, 

now she is in extreme situations, in a punishment cell, and she was transferred in a bus

 despite the situation the country is going through with the issue of the coronavirus, 

"concluded Báez. Rosa María Payá, the main coordinator of the Cuba Decide 

initiative that also promotes the political prisoner, also made reference to this.  

Castroism is intrinsically misogynistic. 

After a year of unfair imprisonment of Aimara Nieto, Raúl Castro and Díaz-Canel send her

 to more than 500 km in the midst of the COVID -19 crisis, 

”sentenced the opposition leader. Aimara Nieto Muñoz was detained 

as she was leaving the headquarters of the Ladies in White, along with other colleagues, 

to try to march in favor of the freedom of political prisoners in 2018. 

Days later,

 she was sentenced in a trial manipulated by the Department of the State Security,

 where he received a four-year sentence of deprivation of liberty for the alleged crimes of attack,

 damage and contempt.Her husband Ismael Boris Reñi, coordinator of UNPACU 

and promoter of Cuba Decide, was also arrested in the same year and sentenced to 

two years in prison 

for the alleged crime of contempt.  

But this is not the only political sanction that the opposition marriage has suffered. 

Nieto and Reñi were already taken to prison in 2016,

 despite having young children, who have been witnesses and victims of the repression 

to which their parents have been subjected. In 2015 they were also part of the small group

 of activists who came to Pope Francis during his visit to Cuba,

 in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. 

This act cost Ismael Boris, 

Zaqueo Báez and María Acón more than 50 days in the Bivouac.  

While Nieto's sentence is in progress, the prison authorities in collusion with the political police 

have repeatedly violated his right to telephone calls to prevent complaints about 

the critical situation of the prison 

and the mistreatment of the jailers. 

Other times she has been confined to a punishment cell. 

Now it is sent to the other end of the country.  

Traslated by : Print-Shop Lighthouse Publisher Press Team 

The political prisoner Aimara Nieto, 

transferred from prison 600 kilometers 

from her daughters

The Cuban regime retaliates the activist days after

her husband, Ismael Boris Reñi, was released 

from prison.

DCC

Havana 24 Mar 2020 - 19:49 CET

Aimara Nieto with her daughters. UNPACU

Political prisoner Aimara Nieto Núñez, who is serving a four-year sentence in Cuban jails, 

was transferred by authorities from the Guatao prison, on the outskirts of Havana, 

to a women's prison in Manatí, Las Tunas.

The transfer occurred on March 11, and it would have been in retaliation for a riot that occurred 

in the detachment where Nieto Núñez is detained, but in which she would not have participated, 

the leader of the Ladies in White, Berta told DIARIO DE CUBA To usually do.

During the revolt, "several prisoners burned mattresses. Aymara was not involved, but they took her

 that day to Manatí, in Las Tunas, more than 600 kilometers from her home," Soler said.

Nieto Núñez referred to his daughter, who visited her last week in the new prison, who has placed 

her in a punishment cell there for a month, and that now her family visits will be every 30 days.

The political prisoner, who is a member of the Ladies in White, an activist of the 

Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and promoter of Cuba Decide, suffered this repressive act 

in retaliation because "the Cuban regime knows that on March 27 the husband de Aimara 

is released from prison for compliance with a two-year sanction. To pressure and punish 

the family, they move her further away, when she is missing two years from the four of her sanction,

 "said Soler.

"It is an abusive measure that they have taken against her. She has two girls of 7 and 12 years old

 and this now increases transportation costs and will make it even more difficult for them 

to see her with the corresponding frequency," Zaqueo Báez, coordinator of UNPACU told CubaNet. 

Havana.

"Now how often will Aymara see her daughters? In what physical condition is she? 

She suffers from high blood pressure and they never have medicine to treat her. 

Now she is in extreme situations, in a punishment cell, and she was transferred in a bus,

 despite the situation the country is going through with the coronavirus issue, "added Báez.

Aimara Nieto Muñoz was sentenced in 2018 to four years in prison for the alleged crimes of attack, 

damage and contempt. Her husband, also a UNPACU activist Ismael Boris Reñi, 

was sentenced that same year to two years in prison for the alleged crime of contempt.

Traslated by : Print-Shop Lighthouse Publisher Press Team   

 

Cuba is driving dissidents off island with threats of violence and jail, report finds

Thirty-five activists, journalists and artists have been forced to leave the island in two years,
human rights group says

Members of a dissident group, Ladies in White, march in Havana in 2016. Photograph: 

Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Reuters in Madrid

Published on Wed 19 Jun 2019 14.55 EDT

173

Cuba’s state security is pressuring dissidents to go into exile in its attempt to weaken opposition
on the communist-run island, according to a new report by a non-governmental human rights
organization.

The Madrid-based Cuban Prisoners Defenders released a 259-page report that named 35 activists,
independent journalists and artists whom authorities had forced to leave the country over the past
two years, telling them never to return.

State security threatened them with prison or bodily harm if they did not leave and harassed their
families, the NGO, which has links to Cuba’s largest opposition group, the Patriotic Union of Cuba
(Unpacu), said.

Cuba’s government, which did not reply to a request for comment, accuses dissidents of being
mercenaries paid by its longtime cold war foe, the United States, to undermine it and typically
dismisses such charges as attempts to tarnish its reputation.

Cuban Prisoners Defenders NGO, which formed late last year, said more than a third of the 26 activists
 who responded to its online survey said they were escorted to the airport by state security and
forced into exile.

Some were given boarding passes, typically for flights to Guyana, where Cubans can get a
tourist visa on arrival, and money for their first month, it said.

“We have found a variety of cases. Cases where the activist cannot be broken and is put on a plane,
cases where the activist has a weak point, through their child or mother, and they attack there hard,
leading the activist to give in and he goes to Guyana to beg,” the Cuban Prisoners Defenders
representative and Unpacu member Javier Larrondo told a news conference in Madrid.

The group said that during an eight-day survey period this month it identified 42 more people whom
state security forces were currently pressuring to leave and concluded there were probably
many more cases.

Larrondo said Cuban authorities had long encouraged some dissidents to leave but were becoming
more systematic and aggressive, partly to bring down the number of political prisoners in jails.

One of the activists mentioned in Wednesday’s report, Eliecer Góngora Izaguirre, told Reuters by
telephone from Costa Rica that state security had escorted him to the airport to board a
flight to Guyana in February, forcing him to leave behind his four children and wife.

“I intend to get to the United States because it is the country that most offers us security,”
the 37-year-old said.

Previously he had been imprisoned for six months and his family had faced continuous harassment
for his activism in Unpacu, he said. That included having their home expropriated and his children
being taunted at school, he said.

A Havana-based western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the state tended
to pressure little-known activists rather than high-profile figures, which would be more likely to spark
 international outcry.

Góngora Izaguirre said that from Guyana, he crossed the border to Brazil and Peru, from where
he started a perilous trek north on buses and by foot, through jungle and across rivers through Ecuador,
 Colombia and Panama to Costa Rica.

He knows finding refuge in the United States will be hard because the Trump administration
 has cracked down on asylum seekers.

“I’m not going to give up the fight,” he said. “I’ll only give it up when I’m dead.”

https://www.theguardian.com

  

 
      
              A man reads a Cuban newspaper in Havana on May 19, 2018. 
Cuba sentences journalist Roberto Quiñones to one-year prison term on 
August 7, 2019. (AFP/Yamil Lage)

Cuba sentences journalist Roberto Quiñones 

to one-year prison term

August 8, 2019 4:38 PM ET
 

Miami, August 8, 2019--A municipal court of the Cuban city of Guantánamo yesterday sentenced 

Roberto Jesús Quiñones, a contributor to the news website CubaNet, to one year in prison on charges

 of “resistance” and “disobedience,” according to advocacy group

 Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and of the Press and media reports.On April 22, 

Cuban police beat and detained Quiñones while he was covering a trial for CubaNet, as documented

 by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Upon his release five days later, Cuban authorities 

initiated new proceeding against him, alleging that his conduct during his detention constituted 

“resistance” and “disobedience,” for which they imposed a fine, according to CubaNet. Quiñones 

refused to pay the fine, and his sentence yesterday was the result of that refusal, CubaNet reported.

“The fact that Roberto Quiñones is sentenced to prison for failing to pay a fine, while the police agents

 who beat and detained him for days receive no punishment, is outrageous,”

 said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney in New York. “If authorities in Cuba want 

to convey an image of progress and openness to the international community, mistreating, jailing, 

and fining a journalist sends the wrong message.”
Quiñones plans to appeal the decision prior to the deadline of August 12, and was permitted
to remain at his home in the interim; however, he is prohibited from leaving the
province of Guantánamo, according to CubaNet.

https://cpj.org

  Cuba: 4 new Convicted of Conscience

PRISONERS DEFENDERS UPDATES ITS 

LIST OF POLITICAL PRISONERS…

• The September 1, 2019 list of Cuban Prisoners Defenders casts 125 political convicts 
• as opposed to the regime.
• 15 opponents of the list have already been named Prisoners of Conscience by 
• Amnesty International, 5 of them last August and another in September, 
• Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces.
•  
• More than 10,000 Cubans civilians, not affiliated with opposition organizations, are 
• currently convicted of “pre-criminal” accusations, without associated crime, 
• for their disaffection and critical status with the system.

1. Political prisoners recognized in opposition to the Castro regime: August 1, 2019

We recognize in CPD, as of October 1, 2019, 125 political convicts by opposition to the regime,
 in addition to another 10,000 convictions against civilians not belonging to opposition organizations
 for charges referred to in the Criminal Code as “pre-criminal”, about which we discuss in section
2 of this press release.
The 125 condemned among opposition organizations are divided into Convicts of Conscience,
Condemned of Conscience and Political Prisoners of other categories. The classification of
these is as follows:

• 74 Convicts of Conscience, that are prisoners deprived of liberty solely for reasons
•  of conscience, with accusations either completely and proven false or fabricated, or 
• of a non-criminal nature and absolutely of thought. 5 of them have been 
• named Prisoners of Conscience by Amnesty International on August 27, indicating this 
• organization that they have only issued an opinion on a sample of the 71 
• Convicts of Conscience of Prisoners Defenders, but giving credit that the rest could also 
• be given the result of the sample. The five are Josiel Guía Piloto (PRC), Mitsael Díaz Paseiro 
• (FNRC-OZT), Silverio Portal Contreras (previously linked to various organizations 
• but now independent), Edilberto Ronal Arzuaga Alcalá (UNPACU),  
• Eliécer Bandera Barreras (UNPACU) and Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces 
• (lawyer and independent journalist).

This month there were 4 convicts who entered prison:

• Glenda Lobaina Pérez (UNPACU), relocated in prison from home sanction, now is convicted 
•  again. She is yet another example that the Condemned of Conscience in the home regime live 
• the constant threat of returning to prison. Every month we find that people on that list become 
• Convicts, so that is the reason the Condemned of Conscience’s list is radically important 
• to be kept updated and reported.
• Ovidio Martin Castellanos (UNPACU). He is co-founder and leader of said organization since 
• its inception. On September 7, special forces, which only attend Raul Castro’s direct orders, 
• assaulted his house with great violence, stealing all kinds of personal objects for domestic use. 
• There they arrested Ovidio, Erlandys García, Sergio García González, 
• Duglas Favier Torres and Ricardo Martinez Cuevas, to prevent them from attending
•  the sunflowers demonstration, which has already become a symbol in Cuba since those days.
•  All violence was also been perpetrated in the presence of Ovidio’s wife, 
• Zenaida Rams Santana, pregnant in advanced state, and two young children, who suffered 
• from panic in the assault. Police officers took a printer and diverse documentation 
• related to the studies of political prisoners on the island, and pro-democracy brochures.
• Roberto de Jesùs Quiñones Haces, freelance journalist and lawyer. On September 11,
•  he was imprisoned for reporting on the
•  case of Ayda Expósito Leiva and Ramón Rigal Rodríguez, 
• a Christian marriage whose crime to be in prison sentenced to 2 years 
• and 1 year and a half, respectively, was to do homeschooling with their children 
• (give them primary studies in their homes avoiding state schools) to escape from
•  the indoctrination of Castro’s schools. For overwhelming evidence in his favor,  
• he was appointed Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International.
• Alexander Roll Gilbert, jailed “preventively” on September 6 for a false
•  accusation of firing with a firearm. The knowledge of the accusation to which 
• Prisoners Defenders has had access allows us to ensure that it is false. The sentence is pending.

Among those convicted of conscience are 4 inmates for whom the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has granted
Precautionary Measures of International Protection: Iván Amaro Hidalgo, Josiel Guía Piloto,  
Jesús Alfredo Pérez Rivas and Edilberto Ronal Arzuaga Alcalá. Another 2 Convicts of Conscience
and one Condemned of Conscience are being monitored and defended by the
 United Nations Arbitrary Detention Working Group. They are Iván Amaro Hidalgo,  
Josiel Guía Piloto, and the Condemned of Conscience who spent more than a year
in prison and is now under domicile under threats, Marbel Mendoza Reyes. Another
 6 cases are being processed to be worked by said Group, following the evidence of a repressive
 escalation in Cuba that stands out with respect to previous periods.

• 21 Condemned of Conscience, that they are condemned who suffer forced domiciliary work, 
• measures of limitation of freedom or parole under threats, and that the regime, in addition, 
• usually revokes and reinserts in prison if the activist does not cease in 
• his pro-democratic activity. Such is the case of the revocation and 
• deprivation of liberty of Cristian Pérez Carmenate last month, for example, 
• or Glenda Lobaina Pérez this September. We reiterate the threats that these condemned 
• activists suffer, which is why it is surprisingly common for them to go back to prison after obtaining extra-prison measures, unless they submit to the political and conscientious dictates of the authorities.
• 30 other political prisoners, not in the previous categories, in which there have been no releases or premature pardons, and among those are the highest sentences and prisoners with longer periods of sentences served in the jails of the Cuban regime.

THE COMPLETE LIST CAN BE OBTAINED  IN THIS LINK: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NNE80F2UmHp83_hRG9ZJjtAB5kbE9KC4

2. 10 thousand prisoners of conscience for convictions named in the Criminal Code as 

“pre-criminal”.

Prisoners Defenders also recognizes 10 thousand people who are 
Convicted or Condemned of Conscience for Pre-Criminal Security Measures, with penalties 
of 1 to 4 years. This figure was obtained by interpolation of two methods. On the one hand,
 two prisons have been censored and the percentage of these sentences established, and on the other
 hand the information has been confirmed with an internal source of the highest level of the regime.
“Nazi” measure, or fascist, that portrays the Castro regime
We reiterate that this measure of the Criminal Code of 1979 is fascist, not socialist, since it
originates from the fascist laws, in textual form, of the dictators Hitler and Franco.
Written down are the evidences:

• Pre-criminal convictions for antisocials are inspired by those present in Nazi Germany, 
• paragraph 42 of the Third Reich Criminal Code of 1937, calling offenders volksschädling 
• (antisocial), a categorization that included, among others, prostitutes, homosexuals,
•  beggars, mentally ill people, repeaters of jokes and comments against the Nazis, 
• but especially those they called “lazy.”
• The Cuban law is a copy, textual in terminologies, and exact extracted sentences,
•  to several Spanish laws, such as the “law of lazy people”, “La Gandula”, which was a law 
• of the Spanish Criminal Order of August 4, 1933 approved by the 
• Courts of the Second Republic, signed by Manuel Azaña as President of the 
• Council of Ministers, and which was highly reinforced by the dictator
•  Francisco Franco in 1954 and then in 1970 with the “law on dangerousness and 
• social rehabilitation”, where in all they establish the terms “social dangerousness”,
•  or “security measures”, exact terms and copied in the law of Cuba. 
• The dictator Franco had the initiative to include homosexuals in the law.

Previously in Cuba other measures were antecedents of the Criminal Code of 1979.
The evolution of the Nazi and fascist copy is evident. In Cuba, before the “law on danger
and social rehabilitation” the ” law of lazy people” was taken as a model to inspire the
“Cuban Vague Law”. Later in 1979, they took the terminologies of the “law on dangerousness
and social rehabilitation” from the dictator Franco.
Also the harassment of homosexuals was inspired by Cuba in the initiatives of the dictator Franco.
The Military Production Aid Units (UMAP), for example, were labor camps that existed in Cuba
between 1965 and 1968. There were about 25,000 men, basically young men of
military age who for various reasons refused to do military service mandatory (members
of some religions), were rejected in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba or, above all,
for their proven or alleged homosexuality “bourgeois”, and they had to be “re-educated”
 by the revolutionary government. Simply disgusting. As are the words of Raúl Castro,
then minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, in April 1966:

«In the first group of colleagues who have been part of the UMAP were included some

young people who had not had the best behavior in life, young people who had taken a wrong

 path to society because of the bad training and influence of the environment and had been
incorporated in order to help them find a successful path that allows them to join society fully»

Raúl Castro, April 1966, [1]

These words, together with the indescribable suffering of such people in these UMAPs, leave
no doubt about the deep sociopathic and fascist personality that Raúl Castro suffered since 1966.
The Law of the Vague, or “Law against laziness”, Law No. 1231 of March 16, 1971 published
 in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Cuba in its ordinary edition of March 26, 1971,
 was a law similar to the pre-criminal, in fact, was its predecessor, and was established to solve
 a problem inherent in the legal and labor vacuum created by the dictatorship itself at the beginning.
This law was repealed and replaced by the current Criminal Code of Cuba, which includes pre-criminal law, on February 15, 1979.
The Law of Vagrancy, or Law of the Vague, was born because the intervention of all private
businesses by the revolution abruptly changed the order of things. The intervening forces came
in the name of the “people” to appropriate the business and all its assets. The excuse was that business
 was left to the “people.” The problem was immediate: who would be responsible for
everything to continue to work? Who had the knowledge and commitment to do so with adequate
business knowledge and motivation?
Since nobody planned it, the results were catastrophic for productivity. Some of the workers kept jobs,
 which in number were diminishing day by day given the low productivity, but the owners
were immediately unemployed. What would this people do, used to leading projects, that had
 also been stripped of their work without even having the right to manifest without disagreement?
The State’s creative solution was that they had to work for the revolution or else they had
to be applied the “Law of the Lazy.” Thus, the former entrepreneurs became defined as “lazy”
if they refused to work in favor of the “revolutionary” State.
With coercive measures, therefore, the slavery of Cuban professionals began at the dawn of the
“revolution”, slavery that prevails in the Cuban medical missions, but also with all qualified Cuban
professionals on and off the island, including the artists who work on behalf of the State.
By this Law against laziness of 1971 thousands of people were forced to perform heavy manual
labor that none of them wanted to do. The composition of the group that the authorities considered
“lazy” was finally applied to a mass of very heterogeneous people. There were those who,
for various reasons, had been unemployed for a long time, such as the aforementioned entrepreneurs.
 Also affected were some who were caught in transit from one occupation to another, those who were
leaving the country, or those who had just finished Compulsory Military Service and had no work
location. It was the beginning of the 70s and Cuba already had a massive slavery law
 in a society that was just 10 years before of an entrepreneurial nature.
Once in the labor camps, the subjects were considered prisoners: anyone who left the place without authorization would be arrested, tried and sentenced to serve up to five years in prison.
The law fundamentally considers laziness as a pre-criminal state and so that state is clearly determined
. An interesting study of this Law, and from which we have taken some references, among many
other sources, can be read in this link.

Current situation
These measures, up to 4 years in prison, are applied through articles of the Criminal Code that are
infamous and violate the most basic principles of justice adopted by the entire International Community and explicitly prohibited in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These items are:
“ARTICLE 72. The special proclivity in which a person is found to commit crimes is considered
 a dangerous state, demonstrated by the behavior observed in manifest contradiction with the norms 
of socialist morality.
ARTICLE 76. 1. Security measures may be decreed to prevent the commission of crimes or 
on the occasion of their commission. In the first case they are called pre-criminal security measures, 
and in the second, post-criminal security measures.
…
ARTICLE 78. To the declared in dangerous state in the corresponding process, the pre-criminal 
security measure can be imposed
…
ARTICLE 80. 1. Reeducational measures are: a) internment in a specialized work or study 
establishment [prison]; b) delivery to a work group, for the control and orientation of the
 subject’s behavior in a dangerous state. 2. Reeducational measures apply to antisocial individuals.
 3. The term of these measures is one year minimum and four maximum. ”
The legitimacy for the application of the previous precepts is determined arbitrarily according
to the criteria of the judges and without ordinary criminal proceedings with the right to defense,
summarily, according to the provisions of the Law of Criminal Procedure of Cuba, in its
Article 404 and in its article 415, where it expressly indicates the summary process:
‘’ARTICLE 404. It is the responsibility of the Popular Municipal Courts to know the
 Pre-criminal Danger Indices and the imposition of security measures established in each case 
by the substantive Criminal Law. ’’
“ARTICLE 415. The declaration of the index of pre-criminal danger of antisocial conduct,
 is summarily decided …”
The police, without the intervention of the prosecutor, can arrest and imprison citizens. Subsequently,
the prosecutor can prolong the detention without the intervention of the judge many days.
When the judges intervene, the system does not improve in any way, otherwise there would
 be no more than 10,000 convicted in Cuba for the “Pre-criminal Security Measures”.
The judges, whose dependence on the government of the State is absolute, and without
judicial independence, are mere links in a chain of servitude that does not slow down the process at all, and rather dedicate themselves to judicially laundering this crime against humanity by arbitrary detentions.
Even Spanish Law, in its aberration also, was more “benevolent”, by introducing the
defendant’s audience factor with the judge before executing such “security measures
.” Castroism is more “Nazi”, or fascist, therefore, than the Franco’s background regarding this law.

3. Analysis on the duration and nature of the sentences

Regarding the duration of the sentences in force as of September 1, 2019, we see how  
the average of sentences in the Convicts of Conscience is located in the 3 years and 4 months,
 4 less than in the previous month, being the standard deviation of the series of sentences
of 1 year and 7 months.
The slightest pro-democratic activism in Cuba is being paid, therefore on average and usually, 
with sentences of 3 years and 4 months imprisonment:

As for political prisoners who cannot be considered conscientious (third section of the list of 

Prisoners Defenders) solely for having attended other circumstances in their acts (the purely political 

condemnation caused timely overlapped with another accusation of common type, usually of 

low criminal entity), 30 cases, the sentences are distributed in a more radical way, the most usual 

being life imprisonment:

More than 73% of the political convictions of this group of 30 prisoners, in which there has been 

an aggravating crime in the events of opposition to the system and that cannot be framed 

exclusively in the context of “conscience”, have penalties over 20 years.Knowledgeable of the 

application of these terrible sentences, that is why the opposition in Cuba is only peaceful and verbal. 

There is no possibility of obtaining sentences under 20 years when the activist makes the mistake 

of performing any act contrary to the criminal code on a crime considered common, and that is 

why the opposition is almost completely framed in a peaceful and conscientious action.Even so,  

along with Amnesty International, Prisoners Defenders has shown that the Cuban government

 imputes common crimes that are proven to be false to peaceful human rights activists.Therefore, 

PD is making human rights organizations validate as cases of conscience penalties in 

which the regime falsely attributes violent attitudes to prominent members of peaceful 

opposition organizations, since the causes, once analyzed, are unlikely and legally unsustainable.

4. Most representative pacific organizations

As for the organizations to which the convicted and/or condemned of conscience activists belong,
the most prominent group is the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), with 52 pacific activists
of conscience, convicted or condemned by belonging to that organization, [2] 55% of the total censored in Cuba by CPD, number that is higher in two persons more than last month for this organization and that continues to grow without appearing to have a roof: [3]

ABOUT CUBAN PRISONERS DEFENDERS

Cuban Prisoners Defenders is an independent group of analysis, study and action, with the
collaboration of all dissident groups on the island and the families of political prisoners to gather
 information and promote the freedom of all political prisoners, as well as to maintain the updated
weekly lists of Convicted of Conscience, Condemned of Conscience,, Political Prisoners and
 Long-lasting political prisoners imprisoned. Cuban Prisoners Defenders is part of the
 Prisoners Defenders International Network, a legally registered association based in Madrid,
Spain, and whose Internet address is www.prisonersdefenders.org.
The group from Cuba is coordinated by Iván Hernández Carrillo (ASIC),
Adolfo Fernández Sainz (FNCA) and Javier Larrondo (UNPACU), without these organizations
controlling to any degree, allowing a dedicated work to all political prisoners without distinctions
 and equally. In Madrid’s office, the legal reports have the contribution of another one of the founders
 of Cuban Prisoners Defenders, the international criminal lawyer Mr. Sebastián Rivero,
who, among other experiences, has been a collaborating jurist of the Permanent Ambassador of Spain
at the United Nations. The organization also has different patrons from all ideologies, among
others several deputies of the National Congress of Spain of different parties, as well as  
D. Blas Jesús Imbroda, president of the International Criminal Bar (ICB, elected in 2017)
and Dean of the Bar Association of Melilla, Spain.
The works of Cuban Prisoners Defenders are adopted by numerous institutions and are sent, among
others, to CANF, UNPACU, ASIC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States,
European Parliament, Congress and Senate of the United States, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain,
People In Need, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the UN for Latin America
and the Caribbean, Real Instituto Elcano, Fundación Transición Española,
International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights, FANTU, Party for
Democracy Pedro Luis Boitel, Independent Pedagogues College of Cuba, Freedom House,
Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL), FAES, Ladies in White y Citizen Movement Reflection and Reconciliation, among many other institutions and organizations.
REQUEST FOR REPORTS: Entities wishing to receive the work of
Cuban Prisoners Defenders (list of political prisoners and of conscience, legal studies of
political prisoners, legal studies on Cuba, studies on repression and prisons in Cuba, etc)
 please contact Cuban Prisoners Defenders at info@prisonersdefenders.org or by whatsapp or phone
at +34 647564741.
Our official Twitter, in addition, is @CubanDefenders. our facebook page
 is https://www.facebook.com/CubanDefenders, and our website is https://www.prisonersdefenders.org.

---

[1] Mapa de la homofobia. Cronología de la represión y censura a homosexuales, travestis
 y transexuales en la Isla, desde 1962 hasta la fecha:
https://www.cubaencuentro.com/cuba/articulos/mapa-de-la-homofobia-10736
[2] One of the activists convicted by belonging to UNPACU was expelled from this
organization for collaborating with the political police once inside the prison
[3] On the total of the Convicts of Conscience and the Condemned of Conscience censored.
That is, 95 = 71 + 24

https://www.prisonersdefenders.org

 

Cuban Pastor and Wife Sentenced to Jail for Homeschooling Their Children; Advocates Demand Asylum

By Brandon Showalter, CP Reporter | 

Will Estrada of the Home School Legal Defense Association speaks outside the 

Embassy of Cuba in Washington, D.C. May 17, 2017. | (Photo: The Christian Post)

WASHINGTON — A Cuban evangelical pastor was sentenced to prison because he removed his
kids from the state-run communist schools to homeschool them. Homeschooling advocates are
calling upon the Trump administration to grant them asylum in the United States.
A crowd of two dozen people protested outside the Embassy of Cuba in Washington in 95-degree
heat Wednesday in support of Pastor Ramon Rigal, who on April 25 was sentenced to one year
 in prison for the "crime" of homeschooling his own kids in the communist island nation. Rigal's wife,
Adya, was sentenced to a year of house arrest.
The group attempted to deliver a CitizenGo petition signed by nearly 31,000 people demanding
 better of the Cuban government. Embassy officials refused to receive them and turned them away.
Mike Donnelly, an attorney and director of global outreach for the Virginia-based
Home School Legal Defense Association, decried the Cuban government's actions.
The right to homeschool children is "a human right that is recognized around the world as
 a fundamental human right," Donnelly said.
"And Cuba has signed international treaties acknowledging this fact," he added, noting that
in 2008 the island nation signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which
 recognizes the role of parents having the ability to conform the education of their children to their
religious beliefs and philosophical convictions.
The Cuban government schools indoctrinate the nation's children in creeds fundamentally
opposed to the Christian faith, like atheism and Marxism.
Yet when the Rigal family took their kids out of the school they were harassed by the authorities
 and threatened. In February, the Rigals were arrested. In April, they were put on trial where
Ramon's witnesses were not allowed to give testimony.
Donnelly and his group called on the U.S. government for the Rigal's to be granted political asylum
in the United States, where homeschooling is a protected right.
Will Estrada, director of federal relations for HSLDA, said that if the Cuban government
continues to repress Christians the Trump administration should "tear-up the normalization of relations
 that the Obama administration did and change things."
"We should not be rewarding a communist country if they continue to crack down on
religious minorities," he said.
Though the Internet is highly restricted, Rigal somehow managed to make online contact with the
HSLDA and the group is now actively advocating for him.
Pastor Mario Lleonart, a Cuban pastor who very recently immigrated the United States shared
with the group in Spanish. In remarks translated by Frank Calzon, executive director of the
Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba, Lleonart recounted how Christian children in
Cuba are routinely mocked and mistreated for their faith. The government restricts churches from
opening education centers of their own.
When Lleonart was five years old he went to a government school. The principal came
to his class during the first week asked the class if any of the students were religious and believed
in God.
"The way he asked, it was as if he was asking 'who is drug addict, who is a thief?'" Lleonart said.
Lleonart, who now blogs regularly about religious freedom issues in Cuba at CubanoConfesante,
said he would so scared at the time to say he was a Christian but he felt like he had denied the
Lord like Peter did before Christ was crucified. The experience was so traumatizing for him that
he told himself he would never back down from his faith again.
The Cuban education system brainwashes children, he added, ordering them to chant political
slogans where they proclaim themselves to be "pioneers of communism" and "we will be like
Che Guevara."
"If the children refuse to say those things then they are bullied by other students and by their teachers,
" he said.
Pastor Rigal is one of the few who have been willing to stand up to the Raul Castro regime
and refuse to let his kids be indoctrinated.
Many of the families who leave Cuba are Christians who want to escape that system.
"But I understand that the answer is not to continue leaving Cuba but to remain in Cuba,"
he said, hoping that many other families and pastors take the same tack as the Rigal's and fight
for their rights.

Trump's new Cuba crackdown puts US at odds 

with Canada and Europe

US will allow lawsuits against firms using property nationalised by the revolution, cap remittances
 and restrict ‘non-family’ travel

David Smith in Washington

@smithinamerica 
 
Donald Trump has taken another step towards reversing
Barack Obama’s historic rapprochement with Cuba with a measure that earned swift criticism
from allies in Canada and Europe.
The US announced on Wednesday that it would enable lawsuits against foreign companies
 that use properties nationalised by the communist government after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.
The policy shift, which could draw hundreds of thousands of legal claims worth tens of billion
of dollars, aims to put pressure on Cuba at a moment when the US is demanding
an end to Havana’s support for Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolás Maduro.

It was condemned by Cuba as “an attack on international law” and by Canada and the 

European Union as “regrettable”, since their companies have significant investments in hotels, 

distilleries, tobacco factories and other properties on the island.Title III of the Helms-Burton Act 

 had been fully waived by every president over the past 23 years due to concerns from the 

international community and fears that it could overwhelm US courts with lawsuits.But Trump, 

who has made a habit of breaking from his predecessors, gave the go-ahead for it to be activated. 

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, said that, for the first time, US citizens will be able to 

bring lawsuits against individuals trafficking in property that was confiscated by the 

Cuban regime.Pompeo accused the Obama administration of playing a “game of footsy 

with the Castros’ junta” which did not deter it from targeting human rights activists. 

“Detente with the regime has failed,” the secretary told reporters.The issue has come to a 

head now as the US argues that Cuba’s security and intelligence support is crucial to Maduro’s grip 

on power amid Venezuela’s economic and political crisis.
Pompeo added: “Cuba’s behaviour in the western hemisphere undermines the security and
stability of countries throughout the region, which directly threatens United States national security
 interests. The Cuban regime has for years exported its tactics of intimidation, repression and violence.
“They’ve exported this to Venezuela in direct support of the former Maduro regime. Cuban military
intelligence and state security services today keep Maduro in power.”
The decision represents a blow to Cuba’s efforts to draw foreign investment. The foreign minister,
 Bruno Rodríguez, retorted on Twitter: “I strongly reject the announcement of State Secretary Pompeo.
This is an attack on international law and the sovereignty of Cuba and third states.
Aggressive escalation of USA against Cuba will fail.”
Numerous foreign companies have invested in Cuba since Obama eased restrictions.
A joint EU-Canada statement said the US move was “regrettable” and will have an
“important impact on legitimate EU and Canadian economic operators in Cuba”.
James Williams, president of the pressure group Engage Cuba said: “President Trump is doing this
for one reason, and one reason only: to appease fringe hardliners in South Florida ahead
of the 2020 election. The only way to get property claimants what they deserve is
through diplomatic negotiations, which President Trump just threw off the table.”
On Wednesday Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, also announced
a series of new sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela, including a new cap on the amount of money
that families in the US can send to relatives in Cuba.
Remittances from the United States have surged since Obama started easing restrictions on
them in 2009, becoming an important part of the Cuban economy and fueling the growth
of the private sector by providing startup capital.
He also said the United States would also further restrict “non-family” travel by Americans to Cuba,
though he offered no details.
In a speech to an association of veterans of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion,
Bolton said the US was adding five names linked to Cuba’s military and intelligence services
 to its sanctions blacklist. “Under this administration, we don’t throw dictators lifelines,
” Bolton said in Miami. “We take them away.”

Associated Press contributed to this report

 

Cuba: Stone  throwing  and videos against elite

 troops

Feb 17, 2020

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“When the black berets arrived (…) they threw themselves out of the car with the clubs in their hand,

 and handed out kicks and punches right and hard, even to minors. This created the discontent of 

those present, who left the rapist in the background and started shouting assassins at the guards and 

throwing stones at them. At first there were a few stones coming out of roofs and courtyards, 

but then anger became widespread, and everyone who found a piece of brick or stone threw it with 

hate at the guards.”Thus described one of the participants to Diario de Cuba a spontaneous 

demonstration in Santiago de Cuba that led, from popular outrage against the rapist of an

 eight-year-old girl, to the improvised riposte against the gratuitous violence of special forces designed 

to stifling any spontaneous mass act.
The creation of this elite repressive body – its official name is MININT’s National Special Brigade – it
 goes right back to a spontaneous mass act that got out of Fidel Castro’s hands: the three-day
admission of 10,800 Cubans to the Peruvian Embassy in Open 1980 . The main task of black berets,
according to the Ministry of the Interior, is therefore to “face far-reaching and dangerous criminal,
marginal and antisocial activities, particularly in the city of Havana.”
That is, dissolving any agglomeration of Cubans where the spark of a protest may fall and
compromise the stability of the regime, which is increasingly volatile in these days of deepening
the crisis.
Since its inception, black berets have been dispatched to control everything from a scuffle in a stadium,
 a street conga, or a possible protest over the government’s neglect after the passage of a hurricane,
to a real protest by Pakistani students in Matanzas, where they came with puffed bayonets.
And they are behaving more and more violently, or that’s what images are filmed by the population
a few days ago in the humble Nuevo Vista Alegre neighborhood in Santiago de Cuba, and weeks ago in Zulueta, Remedios, in the center of the island. (Their commander, Brigadier General José Luis Mesa Delgado, already has a record in process
at FHRC’s RepresoresCubanos.com site)
As on other occasions, it has been announced that not the repressors who initiated the violence
in the Nuevo Vista Alegre neighborhood of Santiago will be prosecuted, but the citizens
who responded to the batons, kicked and even shot at the stone aggressors or whatever
they found by hand.
The government also intends to wipe out the awkward witnesses who released the facts:
the spontaneous citizen reporters in which the more than four million smartphone users on the island
can become in the face of repression.
They would also apply decree-law 370, which authorizes fines and confiscation of phones to those
who capture such images and upload them to social media.
But these seem like desperate measures when they are compared to the new attitude of the Cubans
on foot, glaged to stand idly by. Today the same spreads at night a pan or blocks a street in water claim, they make performances and tweets against an attempt to chain art or information, which carriers respond by joining in a strike against provisions unfair,
that people defend themselves to clean stone from MININT gorillas.
Castroist better understand that these 2020s are not Cubans from 1959; that 61 years of oppression,
abandonment and hollow promises have changed them, possibly beyond the point of no return.

https://www.fhrcuba.org

HERE