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Ask the People
An auto-transition from Power to Power is being contrived despite the will of Cubans and their exile
by Rosa María Payá Acevedo
Although the current Summit of the Americas in Panama has been a blackboard where the peoples of the Americas have been forced – once again – to choke on the barbarian mouthful of that old subject that is Cuban totalitarianism, hope is renewed by the attitude of consistency and solidarity assumed by the diverse civil society of the Americas.
Today in Cuba, a auto-transition from Power to Power is being cooked up, which tries to ignore the will of the Cuban people and their exile, while enthroning the military elite after a masquerade of reforms which decriminalize certain economic concessions but continues to maintain hijacked all the rights of the citizenry.
Since landing in the sister nation of Panama, I have re-experienced firsthand repression in the style of the Cuban regime. The sincere apologies of the Panamanian Foreign Ministry lose force in the face of all the abuses it permitted later to take place against Cuban independent civil society and all of America.
Only Cuban civil society activists and the foreigners who work with us were threatened and detained in Panama. More so there were no consequences for the officials of Cuban State Security – such as Alexis Alfonso Frutos Weeden – who beat their peaceful countrymen openly in the street, simply for thinking that our beloved Cuba deserves, after more than half a century without multiparty elections, an alternative to totalitarianism. Similarly, these agents boycotted the discussion tables of civil society and beat accredited foreigners.
As in the Island, also in Panama the Cuban opposition has been found a priori guilty in the eyes of the authorities. The marvelous-real thus turned the isthmus into the magically-repressive. From there civil society members elevate our demand for democracy in Latin America to the Organization of American States, in the hopes of catching less indolent ears than those of the OAS’s outgoing secretary general.
However, the documents read in the plenary session at the end were indeed the consensus of the civil society of all of America. The regime’s rudeness little served it, as before the intolerant cry of “There will be no Forum,” the consistent voice of Latin American civil society was raised, supporting the implementation of “binding mechanisms for consulting the citizenry, such as plebiscites and referendums.”
Civil society forged networks to demand a life in truth. We young Latin Americans refuse to be subjects of alliances and hegemonies that with a more or less revolutionary rhetoric, claim the lives of Venezuelan or Mexican students, gag the press in Nicaragua or in Ecuador, and condemn Cubans to a dynastic totalitarianism in perpetuity.
As my father Oswaldo Payá said so many times before his extrajudicial execution in Cuba on Sunday, 22 July 2012, dictatorships are not of the left or of the right, they are only dictatorships. Because rights have no political color, no race, no culture. Because the dignity of the human person is an inalienable gift far beyond the markets and the State.
For this reason we are now working on the citizen initiative Cuba Decide, which proposes holding a plebiscite, which we presented in the parallel summits and in the Civil Society Forum in Panama. After decades of dictatorship, the Cuban government does not represent the people. Nor do we pretend to speak for all Cubans, but we do want the Cuban people to have a voice.
The democracies of the world have the opportunity today to pay less media homage to handshakes between the elected president of the White House and the hereditary general of the Plaza of the Revolution, and to prioritize the agenda of accompanying Cubans in our liberation, asking the people in a plebiscite that returns to us our sovereignty.
Original text in Spanish
Ask the People
An auto-transition from Power to Power is being contrived despite the will of Cubans and their exile
by Rosa María Payá Acevedo
Although the current Summit of the Americas in Panama has been a blackboard where the peoples of the Americas have been forced – once again – to choke on the barbarian mouthful of that old subject that is Cuban totalitarianism, hope is renewed by the attitude of consistency and solidarity assumed by the diverse civil society of the Americas.
Today in Cuba, a auto-transition from Power to Power is being cooked up, which tries to ignore the will of the Cuban people and their exile, while enthroning the military elite after a masquerade of reforms which decriminalize certain economic concessions but continues to maintain hijacked all the rights of the citizenry.
Since landing in the sister nation of Panama, I have re-experienced firsthand repression in the style of the Cuban regime. The sincere apologies of the Panamanian Foreign Ministry lose force in the face of all the abuses it permitted later to take place against Cuban independent civil society and all of America.
Only Cuban civil society activists and the foreigners who work with us were threatened and detained in Panama. More so there were no consequences for the officials of Cuban State Security – such as Alexis Alfonso Frutos Weeden – who beat their peaceful countrymen openly in the street, simply for thinking that our beloved Cuba deserves, after more than half a century without multiparty elections, an alternative to totalitarianism. Similarly, these agents boycotted the discussion tables of civil society and beat accredited foreigners.
As in the Island, also in Panama the Cuban opposition has been found a priori guilty in the eyes of the authorities. The marvelous-real thus turned the isthmus into the magically-repressive. From there civil society members elevate our demand for democracy in Latin America to the Organization of American States, in the hopes of catching less indolent ears than those of the OAS’s outgoing secretary general.
However, the documents read in the plenary session at the end were indeed the consensus of the civil society of all of America. The regime’s rudeness little served it, as before the intolerant cry of “There will be no Forum,” the consistent voice of Latin American civil society was raised, supporting the implementation of “binding mechanisms for consulting the citizenry, such as plebiscites and referendums.”
Civil society forged networks to demand a life in truth. We young Latin Americans refuse to be subjects of alliances and hegemonies that with a more or less revolutionary rhetoric, claim the lives of Venezuelan or Mexican students, gag the press in Nicaragua or in Ecuador, and condemn Cubans to a dynastic totalitarianism in perpetuity.
As my father Oswaldo Payá said so many times before his extrajudicial execution in Cuba on Sunday, 22 July 2012, dictatorships are not of the left or of the right, they are only dictatorships. Because rights have no political color, no race, no culture. Because the dignity of the human person is an inalienable gift far beyond the markets and the State.
For this reason we are now working on the citizen initiative Cuba Decide, which proposes holding a plebiscite, which we presented in the parallel summits and in the Civil Society Forum in Panama. After decades of dictatorship, the Cuban government does not represent the people. Nor do we pretend to speak for all Cubans, but we do want the Cuban people to have a voice.
The democracies of the world have the opportunity today to pay less media homage to handshakes between the elected president of the White House and the hereditary general of the Plaza of the Revolution, and to prioritize the agenda of accompanying Cubans in our liberation, asking the people in a plebiscite that returns to us our sovereignty.
Original text in Spanish
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