The Cuban Patriotic Union
observed the one year anniversary of its
founding inside Cuba on August 24 suffering a massive crackdown its movement
by State Security in which key leaders of the Union were arrested. José Daniel Ferrer García
a key leader and founder of the Union had his home assaulted and was arrested
on August 23, 2012 and still remains detained as of this hour with scores of
other activists. In Santa Clara, Guillermo Fariñas was
detained three times in the span of one week. Former prisoner of
conscience Felix Navarro and his daughter Sayli Navarro were arrested
on Saturday and released later the same day but political police stole her
laptop.
Over the previous two days
Thursday, August 23rd and Friday, August 24th more than 60 Cuban dissidents
have been arrested reports
Hablemos Press and they are still receiving additional reports of
detentions. There is a crackdown underway in Cuba that began in the East of the
island and has spread westward through the rest of the island. Unfortunately, the
international media in Cuba are not reporting on this. Only El
Nuevo Herald based in Miami broke
the story on Friday interviewing dissidents on the island. Juan O. Tamayo
reported:
Cuban dissidents Friday reported a crackdown across the island, with
several activists detained to keep them from marking the monthly "Day of
Resistance" and the one-year anniversary of one of the most active
opposition groups.
Fourteen members of the Cuban
Patriotic Union were detained in Havana as they gathered for the
anniversary of the group, according to Pedro Arguelles, another member of the
Union.
Five other dissidents were reported detained in the central city of
Santa Clara during a vigil demanding the release of all political prisoners.
Another four were arrested in the eastern town of San Luis and three more in
the central town of Placetas.
Police told a dozen dissidents in eastern Camaguey province they would
be arrested if they left their homes to attend an opposition gathering, and
told seven others gathered in a Placetas home that they would be arrested if
they did not leave.
Another 11 Union members gathered in the eastern town of Palma Soriano
reported late Friday that they were headed outside to demand the release of all
the activists detained. There was no further word from them.
Dissident Osmani Cespedes said more than 30 signs with anti-government
slogans such as "Down with Raul" and "Raul Murderer"
appeared Friday morning in several spots around the eastern town of Palma
Soriano.
The Cuban Patriotic Union was founded a year ago by a group of
opposition activists that include Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, a peaceful
dissident who served eight years in prison and was freed last year. Based in
Palma Soriano, his hometown, the Union has been one of the most active
opposition groups in recent months.
Police detained Ferrer himself during a police raid of his home early
Thursday morning, and seized several documents, the Cuban Commission for Human
Rights and National Reconciliation noted Friday in an "urgent
communique."
Dissidents also have been marking the "Day of Resistance" on
the 24th of each month, recalling the Feb. 24, 2010, death of political
prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo after a lengthy hunger strike to demand an end
to prison abuses.
The dissident Ladies in White, meanwhile, urged democratic governments
and human rights organizations to "take urgent and coordinated action to
stop the violence unleashed by the Cuban regime" against the women and
other peaceful opposition figures.
Their statement alleged that the Raul Castro government "has
stepped up the intimidations, the arbitrary jailings and the cruelty against
all those who fight to install a democratic system in our country."
Read more here.
The failure of international news
bureaus based in Cuba to report on this news is
not new. It is also worthwhile to explore why this is taking place. In
addition to well
grounded fears that serious and tough reporting on the reality in Cuba
would lead to having
ones press credentials revoked and being expelled from the island there are
others that apparently have ideological affinities with the regime. The Calgary Sun's Ezra Levant
reported on one such correspondent by the name of Stephen Wicary of the Globe and Mail:
He’s condemning Cubans who want to flee to freedom — the freedom he
himself will presumably exercise one day, probably when he needs free health
care and doesn’t want to go to a filthy Cuban hospital. Stephen Wicary is the
Walter Duranty of our age. Duranty was a New York Times “reporter” in the 1930s
who, like Wicary, went to the Communist country of the U.S.S.R. He was the
Times’ bureau chief in Moscow from 1922 to 1936, a time of horrendous
massacres, including the man-made Ukrainian famine called the Holodomor, where
Stalin starved to death as many as 12 million souls.
What is disappointing is that
even when the dictatorship itself makes clear for example that the policy of
banning of musicians such as the late
Celia Cruz and their music will continue despite Cuba based reports from
international press stationed on the island. The reporters do not retract or
correct their story. Meanwhile, as they report on the non-story of the Castro
regime ending its censorship of musicians like Celia Cruz, Arturo
Sandoval and Olga Guillot (which the regime has stated explicitly that it
will not do) the Cuba based international journalists remain silent of the
island wide crackdown on dissidents.
This is troubling on a number of
levels. First this conduct raises not only questions of journalistic ethics but
if the best way to learn what is happening in Cuba is not to read the reporters
but the tweets from
dissidents and persecuted independent journalists on the island who are
breaking stories. Secondly, the failure of the international media to explain
what is actually happening on the island. The nature of the regime's repressive
apparatus and the rising discontent in the populace and the role of civic nonviolent
opposition in the island, in the short term, gives the regime a free pass
to repress and kill
more opposition leaders and in the long term sow the seeds either for
continued totalitarian rule or bloody change. A nonviolent movement
needs to be able to communicate
effectively with both the populace and the international community and the
facts on the ground need to be made known in order to properly inform policy
makers and Cubans on the island. This is also why independent news broadcasts
are needed to break through the regime's information monopoly and get the facts
out.
Waiting for Fidel Castro to die
in order to cover the story of his death and burial from inside the island at
the expense of covering the struggles and realities of the Cuban people is not
only short sighted and a disservice to Cubans. It is also bad journalism.
Like the recent death of Oswaldo Payá, and like the parliamentary machinations over freedom
to travel, this serves only to remind us that the American blockade of Cuba in turn
serves only to attract sympathy to a regime which does not deserve it. Cuba is the
country to which one ought to move if one wants a government which persecutes
homosexuality, and is perhaps most notable as the model for Britain’s impregnable
pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously
self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.
Now that there is no longer an Administration
full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama ought
to lift that blockade. He has already shown his indifference towards the Israel
Lobby that so damages American (and Israeli) interests. So he should have no
problem against the anti-American activities of vastly less numerous Cuban
pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time
they like, and who, far from being conservative, merely wish, I say again, to restore the
Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American
super-rich. Hence the refusal of Payá, of his Christian Liberation Movement
and of its Varela Project to have anything to do with them, and their refusal to
have anything to with that Project, or with that Movement, or with Payá.
Payá stands alongside the late Jorge Rossi
Chavarría, sometime Vice-President of Costa Rica, and co-founder of that
country’s National Liberation Party (PLN), the Costa Rican vehicle for social
democracy, affiliated to the Socialist International. A member of Opus Dei,
Rossi co-founded the PLN as an outgrowth of his work as legal advisor to the
Costa Rican Confederation of Workers of Rerum Novarum. Rerum Novarum is the 1891 founding text of Catholic Social Teaching with its very strong
critique of unbridled capitalism, a critique continued and expanded by every
Pope since.
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