"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Will Cuba's dictatorship be the first communist regime to not survive beyond the founding generation?
A conversation with Professors Jaime Suchlicki and Carlos Eire
Transition is understood as the gradual replacement of
an autocratic regime by a democratic political order.
Succession denotes changes of power within the
boundaries of a given regime.
Communist Cuba is still ruled by leadership of the founding generation of the Castro dictatorship.
Communist regimes around the world have continued beyond first generation leadership. Will Cuba's regime be different?
Professor Carlos Eire
A Yale University scholar, writes often about Cuban politics and culture. His memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the author of several other books, including A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton University Press, 2010), and Reformations: The Early Modern World (Yale University Press, 2016).
Professor Jaime Suchlicki
The Director of the Cuban Studies Institute. Has written many articles and several books, including Cuba: From Columbus to Castro and Beyond (Potomac Books). Dr. Suchlicki
is often interviewed by TV, radio, and printed media on Cuba and Latin
American politics. One of his latest reports is Doing Business in Cuba:
Investors Beware.
Below is a copy of the advertisement circulated for the May 27, 2021 event with these two scholars.
"To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night
Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on hunger strike on August 7, 2020
Long time Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on Friday, August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike. He had been jailed on false charges in the Kilo 8 prison of Camagüey. His body was quickly cremated by the dictatorship.
Yale professor and author Carlos Eire writing in Babalu Blog highlighted Yosvany's untimely passing and placed it in context:
It’s happened again. Another Cuban dissident has died in prison. Strangely, unlike previous hunger-striking political prisoners who
received international attention, Yosvany Arostegui was barely noticed
in social media and totally ignored by the world’s news outlets. He joins a long list of hunger-strikers who have been pushed to their deaths by the Castro regime. May his self-immolation in prison be the last, and may he rest in peace and eternal freedom.
Exiled Cuban lawyer and human rights defender Laritza Diversent over Facebook wrote:
I feel deep sadness and pain.I imagine how lonely he felt and how convinced he was that he preferred to exhaust his body until it was turned off.His death reminds me of the thousands of people who, in Cuban prisons, use their body to protest against unjust criminal proceedings.It makes me more aware of all the activists who, like Silverio Portal, are locked up as punishment for exercising their rights to free expression, criticize, protest, meet and associate.
Particulars about Yovany's case are now emerging and being reported on, but it is important to remember that the Castro regime's repressive practices have led to several hunger strike deaths over the years along with efforts to slander the dead, and cover up what happened.
However there are two cases that the Castro regime failed to silence that aroused international attention and concern within the Cuban diaspora.
Pedro Luis Boitel was a student leader who fought by Fidel Castro's side to bring an end to the Batista
dictatorship and restore Cuban democracy. However as Castro came to
impose a communist regime on Cuba and abolished academic freedom and independent student activism at the University of Havana dissidents emerged. One of the most well known
and popular among students opposing the new regime was Pedro Luis and he was sent to prison for 11 years in 1961. He
served his sentence, but the dictatorship refused to free him. This
drove Pedro to start a hunger strike that ended in his death on May 25,1972 after 53 days.
"My
dear brothers in the internal opposition in Cuba. I have many things to
say to you, but I did not want to do it with paper and ink, because I
hope to go to you one day when our country is free without the Castro
dictatorship. Long live human rights, with my blood I wrote to you so
that this be saved as evidence of the savagery we of the Pedro Luis Boitel political prisoners [movement] are subjected to and
are victims of."*
On May 18, 2004
Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Virgilio Marante Güelmes, and Raúl Arencibia
Fajardo were each sentenced to three years in prison for contempt for authority, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in a one-day trial. This did not silence him. When prison officials chose to attack his
human dignity, and engaged in acts of physical and psychological
torture, Orlando Zapata would respond with nonviolent defiance. He
carried out hunger strikes within the prisons he was transferred to. The
regime's response to his nonviolent defiance was to pile on prison
years to his sentence. Between May 2004 and December 2009 they carried
out nine trials without due process guarantees for a total sentence of
25 years and six months.
Cuban human rights defender Orlando Zapata Tamayo's hunger strike in 2009-2010 placed a national and international focus on human rights in Cuba that within two years led to the release of 75 other Cuban prisoners of conscience arrested along with him in March of 2003. Efforts by the Castro dictatorship to slander the martyred prisoner of conscience failed.
Wilman Villar Mendoza was arrested on November14, 2011 during a violent
crackdown by the political police on nonviolent Cuban democrats. Wilman
and the others had engaged in a public protest in the town of Contramaestre in Santiago, Cuba on November 2, 2011.
Ten days later in a closed-door, one day sham trial on November 24
Wilman was sentenced to four years in prison for disobedience,
resisting arrest and contempt and was sent to Aguadores prison.
Outraged
at the injustice committed against him Wilman launched a hunger strike
on November 25, 2011 and refused to wear the uniform of a common
prisoner. There was little press coverage or official protests
regarding his plight until his death appeared imminent.
Ladies
in White and other opposition activists marched and demonstrated on his
behalf suffering brutal beatings and detentions but the international
press remained silent. Now that he has died, as was done in the case of
Orlando Zapata Tamayo in 2010, some in the internationalmedia reported on it, but not to the degree that hey had with Orlando's case.
Plaque in memory of Roberto López Chávez
The Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights has documented other Cuban political prisoners who
have died on hunger strike on Cuba that little to nothing is known about:
Roberto López Chávez, 25 years old, died on December 11, 1966 in Isla de Pinos prison on hunger strike without medical assistance.Armando Valladares, in his prison memoir, Against All Hope described the
circumstances surrounding his death: “When Roberto López Chávez, went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in
the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became
delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink.
[...] He died the next day.”
Olegario Charlot Pileta, died in the infamous "Escaleras" (staircase) of the Boniato prison, in of January 1973 during a hunger strike, without medical assistance and is described in documents as a “black youth.”
Enrique García Cuevasdied on a hunger strike, without receiving medical care, in cell No. 4 of the new Provincial Jail of Santa Clara, on June 24, 1973.
Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros joins a long list known and unknown of dissidents who have died on hunger strike protesting their unjust imprisonment and terrible prison conditions.
Keilylli de la Mora Valle: Life in danger in Cuba
There is also continuing great concern for a young activist and political prisoner Keilylli de la Mora Valle who has been on and off hunger strikes protesting her unjust imprisonment and terrible conditions.
Silverio Portal, prisoner of conscience, going blind in a Cuban prison
We are also concerned for the life of Silverio Portal, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience who is losing his eye sight and is in poor health.
These cases need to be looked at within the larger context of the prison system in Cuba today. Cuba in 2020: World's largest per capita prison population.
Cuba, under the Castros, continues to be the one country in the
Americas that has not allowed the Red Cross in to inspect its prisons since 1989, and Amnesty International is barred by the dictatorship from visiting the island.
There is one spot in Cuba that has not escaped scrutiny, but that is because it is a U.S. military base.
The world knows of the human rights situation in the prisons at the U.S.
Guantanamo Naval Base because access has been granted. The reason that so much is known and documented is because the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times since 2001 when the United States government began housing detainees.
Over
that time there have been zero visits by the International Red Cross to
Cubans prisons, and what we do know is limited and incomplete, but
should arouse deep concern.
According to a January 13, 2020 report in The New York Times
a former high-ranking judge in Cuba
provided
documents which "showed that approximately 92
percent of those accused in the more than 32,000 cases that go to trial
in Cuba every year are found guilty. Nearly 4,000 people every year are
accused of being “antisocial” or “dangerous,” terms the Cuban government
uses to jail people who pose a risk to the status quo, without having
committed a crime." Furthermore, the article says that "records show
that Cuba’s prison system holds more than 90,000 prisoners. The Cuban
government has only publicly released the figure once, in 2012, when it claimed that 57,000 people were jailed."
There is cause for great international concern. Consider that there are: no legal guarantees to a fair trial, fundamental rights trampled upon, no outside scrutiny from the Red Cross and a communist dictatorship along with a huge prison population and political prisoners have been dying on hunger strikes for decades.
Let us hope that the untimely death of Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros draws calls for the International Committee of the Red Cross to be given access to all prisons in Cuba.
Below is a video in Spanish of Cuban dissident Jose Daniel Ferrer announcing the death of Yosvany, and denouncing the slanders of the regime.
“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night
Carlos Eire speaking at FIU in the Graham Center on November 21, 2011
Dr. Eire continued with the theme of bearing witness stating: "When someone is an eyewitness to history and that history involves some great injustice and you don't bear witness to that injustice then you are allowing evil to triumph. Not only at the event but forever." He went on to say, "If you don't set it straight you are an accomplice." You can hear him state this in the above video beginning at 1 minute 42 seconds.
He closed his lecture with a powerful observation and call to action stating: "The best history of all. The history that we each have to tell - our own lives. Especially if that history has been misshapen by others." Video excerpt is embedded below.
The main points of today's lecture were similar to a talk that the professor gave at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio on April 21, 2011 as part of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions. That speech was entitled "Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Wayward Historian." In it he stated that in the process"[t]o bear eyewitness to an injustice you might bring it down." The entire lecture is available online.
Carlos Eire is calling on everyone, but especially victims of injustice, to tell their story. To describe the sliver of truth that they carry within themselves and to share it with others. It is a call to action and it is a call to remembrance.
Another example from November 18, 2011 is the resignation of former prisoner of conscience and independent journalist Manuel Vazquez Portal from Radio Marti. In his letter of resignation, available on his blog, he speaks truth to power citing the reasons for his departure. The original Spanish text is available here.
It is important for as many voices as possible to speak out and document their experience - their truth contributing to the sum total that informs what actually took place. During his lecture, Carlos Eire made reference to an interview on National Public Radio titled "Children of Cuba Remember Their Flight to America" and to read the comments sections to see the efforts by some to distort the historical record. The best way to combat untruth is with truth. The more of it the better. As Mohandas Gandhi once observed, "Truth never damages a cause that is just."
Carlos Eire, Yale University professor, Cuban exile and award winning author wrote this for Babalú readers which offers an excellent summary of what the former Cuban prisoners of conscience are now experiencing and calls us to action to keep them together and improve their conditions. It is being reproduced here in an effort to get the word out.
When it comes to news from Castrolandia, which always stinks to high heaven, the deeper one digs beneath the surface, the worse the stench becomes. In the case of the recently released prisoners, the rottenness of the deal struck by Raul Castro and Miguel Angel de Moratinos and the stench generated by it, have reached toxic levels, enough to qualify as poison gas.
The Spanish newspaper ABC has revealed in a recent string of articles that the ex-prisoners are being harassed in a number of ways, almost as if the hand of the Castro regime were still pulling the strings. None of this information has surfaced yet in English-language reports.
The most significant points are these:
The Spanish government has lodged the released prisoners on the outskirts of Madrid, in Vallecas, at the very remote and prison-like Welcome Hostel, which Spanish authorities use as a shelter for illegal aliens.Their isolation is easy to detect on Google Maps, which allows you to view the entire neighborhood at street level. It is a largely industrial area, and the hostel is completely surrounded by warehouses, other large industrial buildings, and vacant lots. Getting back and forth from this remote location is extremely difficult. In one of the articles, one of the wives complains about how isolated they are. Central Madrid is full of cheap hostels which cost less than the one they've been sent to. (Rooms rates at the Welcome Hostel)Come to think of it, this is double exile — not in Cuba, not really in Madrid either.
The hostel at Vallecas has no private bathrooms. One of the prisoners is suffering from chronic diarrhea and has to use the bathroom constantly. He had this to say: “I don’t have the privacy that I need after being tortured for seven years in Castro’s prisons… It is very hard for me to share a collective bathroom with others, given my illness… We are not asking for a five-star hotel, only for something that meets our most basic needs.”
Some will be sent to Valencia, others to Malaga. And you can bet they will not lodge them in a central location. At Malaga, they will be housed at a shelter for illegal African immigrants. In Valencia, they will also be housed at a public shelter (centro de acogida). Julio César Galvez, one of the prisoners, had this to say: “All of us want to stay together, but I have no say about my own fate here in Spain. I am in a prison without bars.”
The Spanish government has only committed to offering aid to the prisoners for 24 months. Spain has unemployment rates of over 20%. Buena suerte ...adiós.
The ex-prisoners are painfully aware of the fact that they are in a “legal limbo” of sorts, since the Minister of Exterior Affairs, Miguel Angel Moratinos has classified them as “immigrants” rather than refugees. Yesterday, July 15, they asked at a news conference to be treated with more dignity. One of them, Ricardo González, said : “It is obvious that we are not criminals and that we didn’t come here because of poor economic conditions in our country; we are being persecuted for our ideas.”Another ex-prisoner, Normando Hernandez Gonzalez, said: “If the Zapatero administration has agreed to receive us in Spain, I think that they should at least have the decency of granting us the status and the living conditions that we deserve.”
So, things are really far from hunky-dory. All of these items indicate that the Spanish authorities are complicit in a very heavy-handed attempt to dilute their presence and their impact abroad, and to demoralize them and keep them out of the public eye.
Carlos Herrero at ABC apologizes to the ex-prisoners for the deal struck between Moratinos and Castrolandia, and for the way in which they have been forced into exile. Herrero points out that none of the leading lights of the Left in Spain have come forward to greet the ex-prisoners, even though they are always grandstanding about “prisoners of conscience” elsewhere. He sums up the whole deal by saying: “Welcome to Spain, anyway, and enjoy the sacred right of freedom. Our government is full of cretins, but here, at least, you can’t be thrown in jail for saying that.”
This information needs to be broadcast far and wide.
And... an international campaign needs to be mounted so the freed prisoners can all stay together.
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