Exposing Reese Erlich's biased reporting on political prisoner Denis Solis and the San Isidro Movement

Call to Free Denis Solis and in defense of the San Isidro Movement 

Journalist and adjunct professor in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, Reese Erlich, has a track record of reporting on Cuba that at best can be described as having a pro-regime slant, and at worse being an agent of influence on the level of a Walter Duranty. He is at it again in his December 18th essay smearing the San Isidro Movement, and the dissident movement generally. 

He targets Denis Solís González's language while the young dissident confronted a police man illegally entering his home, and fails to provide the Cuban context. A society where there is no independent mass media, and local, national, and international news are provided to Cubans with a slant dictated by the Castro regime. 

It is also interesting that the language used by Denis Solis, that the dissident later apologized for, was used by Fidel Castro when Miami DJs tricked him into thinking he was talking to Hugo Chavez, the Cuban dictator shouted the same anti-gay slurs over the phone in 2003. Unlike Mr. Solis, the late Cuban dictator had a decades long record of persecuting Gays and Lesbians. Mr. Erlich fails to mention this history.

Political prisoners Denis Solís González

Hostility to Gays began early in the Revolution. On March 13, 1963 Fidel Castro gave a speech were he openly attacked “long-haired layabouts, the children of bourgeois families,” roaming the streets wearing “trousers that are too tight,” carrying guitars to look like Elvis Presley, who took “their licentious behavior to the extreme” of organizing “effeminate shows” in public places. The Cuban dictator warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degenerates.”

In 1964 the Cuban government began rounding up Gays and sending them to Military Units to Aid Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). These forced labor camps were for those suspected of or found guilty of "improper conduct."  Persons with effeminate mannerisms, what the Cuban government called "extravagant behavior," were taken to these camps.

 Fidel Castro declared in 1965 that “[w]e would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” 

Cuban government officials inoculated him with HIV in 2018.

Cuban biologist, environmental activist, and Gay man, Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, documented his case to the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) in Frankfurt, Germany, where he denounced how agents of the Castro regime purposefully infected him with HIV in 2018.

After a staged assault of two policemen Ariel Ruiz Urquiola was arrested on May 3rd, 2018 and sentenced to prison for twelve months by a kangaroo tribunal. He was remanded in jail on May 8th, 2018 and protested from June 16th to July 2nd with a successful hunger strike which led to an early release from prison on July 3rd, 2018. On June 16th, 2019 he got informed that he is HIV positive. He eliminates a natural infection strictly. He believes that he had been infected with the HI virus on purpose in prison.

According to a statement of Dr. Ruiz Urquiola the doctor’s reports show that he got infected during his imprisonment. The lab results also confirm an infection on purpose. That’s how the short time between hospitalization and illness with a high inoculum (infective material or one as an antigen acting part of a germ), e.g. from a lab virus, can be explained.

Castro apologists claimed that the Cuban dictatorship had changed since then, but on May 11, 2019 when Gay activists began their Pride March it was violently shut down by Castro regime regime agents.

The foreign correspondent did not provide any of this context and also failed to mention that Gay Cubans were participating in the hunger strike in San Isidro. 

Reese Erlich repeated this practice of omission  on June 18, 2020 in his article titled "Foreign Correspondent: Police Lessons From Cuba" where he claimed that "Contrary to the image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States."This blog set the record straight at the time.

Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano killed at age 27

Mr Reese failed to report that Castro's Revolutionary National Police shot a black man, Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano (age 27), in the back on June 24, 2020, but there was little or no protest outside of dissidents in Cuba, who were rounded up and roughed up for attempting to protest the killing.

Police send thug with hammer to attack artists under seige and on hunger strike

“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.” -  Frederick Douglass

 

Luis M. Alcantara attacked with a hammer

  

Just learned that Luis Manuel Alcantara, a visual artist and human rights activist, was attacked with a hammer by an unidentified man who broke into the San Isidro Movement's headquarters tonight. This is particularly suspicious because the secret police have blocked neighbors, friends, and family members from reaching them since November 18th.

#ATENCIÓN | Ataque a la sede del Movimiento San Isidro.
Un hombre no identificado, rompió la puerta de la sede y con un martillo hirió en el rostro a @LMOAlcantara La seguridad del estado y la policía uniformada que estaban presentes, no hicieron nada por evitar el ataque. pic.twitter.com/evYPC6ckCS

— Movimiento San Isidro (@Mov_sanisidro) November 22, 2020

A group of artists and intellectuals have been surrounded by the secret police in Havana at the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement since November 15, 2020. They were protesting the arrest on November 9th, and summary trial on  November 11th of their colleague Denis Solís González who was sentenced to eight months in prison for “contempt” (desacato), for speaking critically of a police officer searching his home. Denis is now serving his sentence at Valle Grande, a maximum-security prison just  outside Havana.” Below is a 2018 music video that contains political themes.

On November 18th when it became clear that officials would not allow anyone to deliver them food, and in the early morning hours of that day had used a chemical agent to poison their water supply that nine of them decided to go on hunger strike, and four of them took the additional step to also start a thirst strike. This was done to conserve food and water for those among them in a more vulnerable situation.

Cuban artist Coco Fusco has written an important essay titled "The Sound of Silence" (in Spanish) that asks the critical question: "Where are the Reuters and Associated Press journalists? Why do foreign correspondents seem to ignore the situation?" She adds that "these are extremely relevant questions that deserve serious consideration, and it is high time Cubans asked them publicly."

The San Isidro Movement is a collective of artists created in Old Havana in 2018 in reaction to Decree 349 that obliged artists to formally affiliate with the Ministry of Culture, and to obtain government permission for any of their activities.

Decree 349, signed into law in 2018, further censors artistic expression and according to Cuban artists Tania Bruguera, Coco Fusco, Enrique Risco, Yanelys Nuñez  and human rights defender Laritza Diversent in an open letter restricts "the creativity of the Cuban people and criminalizes independently produced art, limiting the ability to determine who can be an artist to a state institution." Amnesty International issued a report that described this new law as "dystopian."

This blog post closes with a recent music video by one of the hunger strikers and a former prisoner of conscience Maykel "Osorbo" Castillo that translates into English as "What are they going to talk to me about." Indeed, what are the agents of the Castro regime going to talk about when they send in a thug with a hammer to attack an artist on a hunger strike?