Remembering the Messenger of Truth 40 Years Later: Father Jerzy Popiełuszko

 "A man who tells the Truth is a free man despite external slavery, imprisonment or custody." -  Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, Sermon,  October 31, 1982  

 

Father Jerzy Popiełuszko ( September 14, 1947 - October 19, 1984)

At the Mass celebrated on the 40th anniversary of the death of Solidarity's chaplain in the Church of St. Stanisław Kostka, President Andrzej Duda, representatives of the PiS leadership (Jarosław Kaczyński and Przemysław Czarnek), family of the priest Jerzy Popielłuszki, representatives of Solidarity, clergy of the Archdiocese of Warsaw, and numerous faithful gathered.

Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz's homily underscored that Cardinal Jerzy Popiełuszko was a "witness to the gospel of love and a defender of human dignity who taught to us to overcome evil with good."

Forty years ago today on October 19, 1984 the communist regime in Poland murdered a saint in the expectation that they could hang on to power. They had murdered Father Jerzy Popiełuszko for being the chaplain to the fledgling Solidarity Movement.

The Institute of National Remembrance tweeted what is known about the extrajudicial killing of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko by agents of the communist dictatorship in Poland.

"After a Holy Mass in the Parish of the Holy Polish Martyr Brothers in Bydgoszcz, on their way to Warsaw, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko and Waldemar Chrostowski, the driver of Volkswagen Golf, were pulled over and kidnapped in Górsk by three security service officers (Grzegorz Piotrowski, Leszek Pękala and Waldemar Chmielewski) who were dressed as policemen. The agents operated under Independent Group "D" (disintegration) from the 4th Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. At that point the trail ends. Nobody knows what really happened to Father Popiełuszko."

They had thought killing a symbol of freedom and terrorizing the Polish people would silence the opposition. They counted wrong. Less than five years later on June 4, 1989 Poland would be the first country in Eastern Europe to hold free elections and sweep the communists from power nonviolently. 

This was due in no small part to the teachings of the martyred priest Jerzy Popieluszko who called for an authentic reconciliation:

"Our Fatherland and respect of human dignity must be the common objective for reconciliation. You must unite in reconciliation in the spirit of love, but also in the spirit of justice. As the Holy Father said five years ago, no love exists without justice. Love is greater than justice and at the same time finds reassurance in justice."

Father Popiełuszko has been recognized as a martyr by the Catholic Church, and was beatified on Sunday, June 6, 2010 in Warsaw with more than 150,000 in attendance.

 Beatification is an act of the Pope who declares that a deceased person lived a holy life and is worthy of public veneration. It is a first step toward canonization. The video above shows Poles marching with relics of the now beatified priest on their way to the main ceremony.

The following fragments, which may provide a better insight into the thinking of this moral exemplar,were taken in 2010 from a page dedicated to him by two Polish organizations - The Institute of National Remembrance and The National Centre for Culture, but is no longer up and running.

A fragment from the Sermon of 28 February 1982

"The church always stands on the side of truth. The church always stands on the side of people who are victimized. Today the church stands on the side of those who have lost their freedom, whose conscience is being broken. Today the church stands on the side of the Solidarity, on the side of the working people, who are often placed in one line along with common criminals.

Dedication to freedom is tightly knit with human nature and with mature national awareness. This dedication is intertwined with the law and duty. It is intertwined with the law, and thus every man and every nation must experience the suppression of freedom as painful and unjust."

A fragment from the Sermon of 27 March 1983

 
"Our Fatherland and respect of human dignity must be the common objective for reconciliation. You must unite in reconciliation in the spirit of love, but also in the spirit of justice. As the Holy Father said five years ago, no love exists without justice. Love is greater than justice and at the same time finds reassurance in justice.

And for you, brothers, who carry in your hearts paid-for hatred, let it be a time of reflection that violence is not victorious, though it may triumph for a while. We have a proof of that standing underneath the Cross. There too was violence and hatred for truth. But the violence and hatred were defeated by the active love of Christ."

A fragment from the Sermon of 4 December 1983

"Work, especially hard work, shapes love and social justice. It happens only when work is ruled by the proper moral order. If there is no moral order at work, in place of justice creeps hurt, and in place of love - hate. That is why those who in recent decades have destroyed and are still destroying the moral order do such harm to the working people and the whole society. 

When they want to replace Christian morality, rooted in a thousand years of tradition, against the will of all with so-called secular morality, in a Christian country there will always be a purulent wound. They do harm when they exclude God from the workplace, and believers are discriminated and usually can not occupy high positions. The workers of August 1980 called more for moral order than for higher wages. 

The world opinion was struck by the fact that the events of August were free of aggression, violence, that nobody was injured or died, that they bore the clear stamp of religion. The Holy Father, John Paul II, spoke of this in Katowice."

A fragment from the Sermon of 24 June 1984

"A condition for peace of conscience, peace in the family, peace in the Homeland and the world is justice based on love.(…)

(…) Justice dictates each to be granted the rights they are due. And so the right to work in accordance with your profession and not be thrown out of work for your beliefs. The Primate of Poland spoke of this on 2 January 1982 in the following words: 'There is one matter which lies heavy on the heart of the Church. It is the matter of the dismissals of those who do not want to resign from the Solidarity trade union. And we stand against this injustice which is an abuse of human rights'...”. 

Let us celebrate and remember how Father Jerzy Popiełuszko and the message he shared with us.

He was a messenger of truth.

A Christmas Message from the Christian Liberation Movement

Ten years ago following the murder of their national coordinator and youth leader by Castro's secret police, the Christian Liberation Movement re-released this Christmas message by Oswaldo Payá.

 

 Happy New Year 2023 to all Cubans. Year of Liberation 

 The MCL Coordinating Council has decided to re-release the Christmas message of 1990, which our national coordinator Oswaldo Payá wrote on behalf of our Movement. Reading it we found that its contents, twenty one Christmases later remains equally beautiful and appreciated. Today, on behalf of your people, we say to you: Thank you for this gift Oswaldo. Hopefully Cubans today will start making this utopia possible. 

It is is our hope that it will be so: 

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas wrote MCL's 1990 Christmas Message

  

Christmas Message 1990

The rifles will be buried face down, the words of hatred will vanish in the heart without reaching the lips, we'll go out into the street and all of us will see in the other a brother, let us look to the future with the peace of he that knows that he forgave and he that has been forgiven. Let there be no blood to clean or dead to bury, the shadow of fear and of catastrophe will give way to the reconciliatory light, and Cuba will be reborn in every heart, in a miracle of love made by God and us.

That will be the Liberation, it will be the new life and all of us will have the sensation that we are all good and want to be good, that everyone wants the other to be happy, it will be like that special time, and it will be like Christmas, that same Christmas when Jesus arrives.

Cubans!, that this hope not die, let us not be discouraged. We believe it is possible and we work and struggle with all our hearts, to make this, that many call utopia, possible and for which, if necessary, we will give our lives without claiming the lives of others.

That those who hold power and for a long time have had great privileges and have lived as the rich in the midst of a poor people reflect on it.

The people have no voice and want to express themselves. The nation disintegrates and Cubans want to save her, save Cuba for all, Cuba is greater than the power of a few and those that have that power that do not feel attacked, because the people awake, do not abuse the nobility of the Cuban people. Come on men of power! For you to there is a place among the people if you descend from the stands, and that is better than power.

Let all within Cuba and outside Cuba reflect. Let us act with great courage, but with a lot of responsibility, with great firmness but especially with much love.

Let us not turn to violence and force, but we will not submit or allow ourselves to be intimidated by them. Yes, we want change, changes in all of society, because the heart of Cuba has already changed, and we have renovated it in hope, work, suffering and sorrow. We have renovated ourselves and do not want Cuba to sink and our children with her. That violence not explode, that repression not explode, that the truth break out, and let there be an outbreak of Peace and Freedom.

No one in Cuba wants to submit to a foreign power, or return to other forms of injustice. Let us not fool ourselves any more, Cubans know what we want: we want reconciliation among all, we want a reunion with our distant brothers in exile, we want to work for our Country and our families, with boundless generosity to our hard work and positive creativity, we want dialogue, we want to solve this juncture of our history together, with love, we want freedom. We know it is possible and we will achieve it, it will be everyone’s victory.

Yes, Jesus is coming, he who was also a victim of violence, victim of the mob and its repudiation, victim of the pride of the powerful and of the slaves of the lie. Jesus is coming and he brings the victory of life over death, of love over hatred. He is the only one who brings true Liberation. That is Christmas.

The Christian Liberation Movement wishes you a Merry Christmas!

December 2012

The original Spanish text is available here.

For Freedom, Life and Love: Lighting candles to challenge the darkness of the Castro dictatorship in Cuba

"The nonviolent struggle continues. The regime with its violence and we with our nonviolent art will achieve the desired freedom." - Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, December 8, 2020 over Twitter

These are difficult times around the world, and a time of reckoning. Too many sought short term profits over principle and morality, and abandoned responsibility. Over the past 50 years the West engaged with a communist dictatorship in China that killed 45 million of its own people. 30 years ago it made the right noises following the June 1989 massacre of students in Beijing, but doubled down and continued trading with and subsidizing a blood thirsty dictatorship with no regard for human rights. Today, the world is suffering under the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economy has lost trillions of dollars thanks to that same communist regime in Beijing.  

These are dark times, but in the midst of the darkness there are only two options succumb to despair or resist it. However, resistance can take many forms with some more constructive than others. The phrase, "Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness," was first spoken in "The Invincible Strategy", a public sermon, published by William L. Watkinson, a Methodist Minister, in 1907.

The following excerpt taken from pg 218-219 of The Invincible Strategy, A Sermon should be required reading by everyone, but especially activists or anyone involved in public service:

Evil is not overcome by denunciation. It is surprising how much efficacy is supposed to go with denunciation. Real, constructive, aggressive good is of far greater significance than eloquent invective; such invective has its place, but it must be accompanied by active practical effort, or it effects little more than summer lightning. Carlyle, in his review of Elliott the Corn-Law Rhymer, has a most instructive passage. "We could truly wish to see such a mind as his engaged rather in considering what, in his own sphere, could be done, than what, in his own or other spheres,ought to be destroyed; rather in producing or preserving the True, than in mangling and slashing asunder the False." But denunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves a popular temptation. Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness. What this world awaits is personal, positive, constructive goodness. Not by law, legislation, and rhetoric shall we prevail, but by practical righteousness, noble philanthropy, intellectual and spiritual education; by the positive remedy of superior character,action, and institutions do we make it difficult for evil to survive.

The early years of the 20th Century, prior to the catastrophe of World War I, was a culminating point for Western Civilization and the ideas that were circulating in that first decade of the 20th Century reverberate for good or ill to the present day.

On September 11, 1906 in South Africa, as part of a contest, the nonviolent Indian independence leader, Mohandas Gandhi coined the term Satyagraha which translates into English literally as "holding firmly to truth."

 Less than a year later a Methodist minister was embracing an outlook that is profoundly Christian and complements Gandhi's teachings on the relationship between truth, nonviolence and resisting evil with a constructive program, and 40 years later following another terrible conflagration, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Cuban diplomats, representing a democratic republic in Cuba, lobbied with other Latin American diplomats the inclusion of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a human rights focus in the newly created United Nations. 

 Cuban diplomats meet with Churchill in December 1945 to lobby for human rights covenant

Bishop Agustín Román on December 16, 2006 spoke of this chapter in Cuban history and "the important role the delegation of the Republic of Cuba to the United Nations in 1948 in the drafting and promulgation of the Universal Charter, particularly by Drs. Dihigo Ernesto, Guillermo Belt, and Guy Pérez-Cisneros is a historical fact."

The final draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was recognized by these Cuban diplomats as one that would have been “accepted by that generous spirit who was the apostle of our independence: Jose Marti, the hero who -- as he turned his homeland into a nation -- gave us forever this generous rule: ‘With everyone and for the good of everyone.’”

On December 10, 2017 letters to the editor section of in The Miami Herald, Pablo Pérez-Cisneros Barreto, the son of Guy Pérez-Cisneros y Bonnel, wrote of this family and national legacy that is bound up in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    My late father believed that the declaration is the fruit of the great efforts of our civilization and human progress, a unique moment in which humanity came of age in its civic education; that it is also a source of inspiration for the formation of today’s citizens, and not cause for divisions among them. [...] Cuba had the distinction of being the country that proposed the finished declaration be put up for its final UN vote on Dec. 10, 1948. Hard to believe now but Cuba was once a leader when it came to human rights. And it is important to note that nine initiatives proposed in 1945’s Cuba became part of the final declaration, and that Cuba was the country that entrusted the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in San Francisco to prepare the declaration as early as 1946. The third preamble of the declaration is a copy of one of the articles of the famed 1940 Cuban Constitution, and Cuba had the initiative to include in the declaration the right to honor one’s human rights and reputation, as well as protect citizens against arbitrary government interference in their private lives.  Cuba presented the first amendment to the draft declaration which was accepted, adding the right of citizens of any member country to follow the vocation they choose. Cuba presented a second amendment which was also accepted — the right of every worker to receive an equitable and satisfactory payment for their work.

 This democratic Cuba was overthrown on March 10, 1952 by Fulgencio Batista and hopes of a democratic restoration frustrated by the Castro brothers in 1959.

Guy Pérez-Cisneros died of a stroke in 1953.

Ernesto Dihigo, like Pérez-Cisneros, left the diplomatic corps following the 1952 coup, but returned as Cuba’s Ambassador to the United States in January of 1959 retiring in 1960. He left Cuba in 1989 and died in Miami in 1991.

Darkness came to Cuba in 1952, and it grew darker and more bleak after 1959. Mass executions, neighbors spying on neighbors, work camps, and thousands of prisoners of conscience became new realities in the tropical island.

Acts of repudiation were first seen on a systematic level in 1980 during the Mariel crisis when Cubans who simply wanted to leave the country were brutally assaulted and forty lost their lives in lynchings. A refugee at the time of Mariel Mirta Ojito, now a journalist and author, described what she had seen and experienced in an opinion piece for the New York Times:

"Mariel marked the first time socialist Cuba turned against itself. The government staged riots called actos de repudio -- street rallies in which neighbors turned against neighbors, harassing and tormenting those who wanted to leave the country. The victims were often pelted with rocks, tomatoes and eggs. Windows were shattered. Doors were knocked down. Some people were killed, dragged through the streets as trophies to intolerance and hate. Sometimes people trapped inside their homes chose to kill themselves rather than face their tormentors."

Amnesty International recognized that officials were organizing these riots that sometimes crossed the line into lynchings and defined this form of state sponsored intimidation as follows:

Acts of repudiation [Actos de repudio] these are meetings or demonstrations organized by government officials or mass organizations supporting the government at which the person or persons concerned are
subjected to criticism and abuse, sometimes physical, because of their so-called counter-revolutionary views or activities.

Granma, the Communist Party’s daily paper, compiled a list of 100 insults to scream at those who wanted to leave. Meanwhile Fidel Castro prepared to associate these refugees with the worse of the worse. 

Act of repudiation in Cuba 1980

Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Fidel Castro's former bodyguard, wrote a tell all book published in May 2014 of his time with the dictator titled, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo that included a remarkable passage on the events of Mariel.

Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and academic at the University of Miami, in a June 8, 2015 op-ed in The Miami Herald reviewing the above book touched on how Castro dealt with the Mariel boatlift during the Carter presidency:

For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives and to make the crossing to South Florida.

But many of the boats were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded few with his denials of any role in the incident. Yet Sánchez adds an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to bring him prisoner records.

Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.

“I was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen designated which ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the revolution.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.

A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.

This is dark business and for those of the Christian faith this darkness has a name: evil.  Some believe that the best way to confront evil is with evil. Hatred with hate, but the Christian Bible declares: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

Over six decades many Cubans resisted this darkness, and through their courageous actions became living candles rejecting despair and inspiring hope. Many were martyred, but their friends and loved ones continued their good works. We know their names: Alberto, Virgilio, Ramón, Armando, Carlos, Mario, Pablo, Pedro, Orlando, Laura, Oswaldo, Harold, and many more but they cannot all be listed here. It is a long list that would take up the entire page.

Others have survived and spent a lifetime defending human dignity and human rights.  Eight years ago, a young woman mourned her father's and friend's murders, but she did not despair or confront hatred with hate but embraced freedom and life and wrote an essay for Cuba's freedom.

“Today, December 10th 2012, Human Rights Day, I want to draw attention to the Cuban people, who currently suffer from not having those same rights." ... "Today, we want to remind the Cuban government and the world that Cubans also have the right to have rights because we are human beings, and we will not rest until we get them." 

The essay closed with the phrase "Freedom and Life” and it was an explicit rejection of the dictatorship's slogan of "Homeland or Death."  More importantly it is an affirmation of that which is good.

Eight years later, Rosa María Payá continues to light candles against the darkness. On International Human Rights Day she is calling for nonviolent protests: "This December 10: Demonstrations for Cubans to have the "right to have rights" and in protest at the presence of the Cuban dictatorship on the United Nations Human Rights Council."

Both Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Rosa María Payá are right we must celebrate love, freedom, and life while at the same time not being afraid to call out the existing dictatorship and the terror it seeks to impose on those that dare light candles in the darkness.

Miami:

Unidos en Solidaridad
Este 10 de diciembre a las 5:00 PM (Hora de Miami) en la Torre de La Libertad Procesión por el derecho a los DERECHOS. Libertad y Vida para Cuba pic.twitter.com/onwWNnYwss

— CUBADECIDE (@CUBADECIDE) December 7, 2020

Washington DC:  

“Manifestación por el Derecho a los Derechos: Libertad y Vida para Cuba” Embassy of Cuba, Washington, DC
10 de diciembre de 2020 3:00pm - 5:00pm. Convocado por @CubaDecide #EstamosConectados #SomosSanIsidro pic.twitter.com/4QP3c7bXoq

— Human Rights Violations in Cuba (@freecubafndtn) December 9, 2020

 

Martin Luther King Jr. and his constant commitment to nonviolence as a method of struggle

"Before the victory's won, even some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing shall be more redemptive." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., We Shall Overcome, June 17, 1966

Martin Luther King Jr. Photograph (c) Bernard J. Kleina (1966)

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was born 87 years ago today on January 15, 1929. Although a day has been set aside in recognition of his impact on American history his nonviolent legacy is not fully understood but remains relevant and important for the future of human civilization. This was a man who came to national prominence leading a bus boycott in the nonviolent defense of Rosa Parks who had been arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white man on December 1, 1955. Before the boycott was successfully ended, Martin Luther King Jr.'s home was bombed on January 30, 1956.

This southern baptist minister was considered so dangerous that both the FBI and the KGB targeted him in campaigns to discredit him because they could not control him and the civil rights movement under his leadership achieved concrete successes that challenged established structures of power. Reverend King advocated standing up and being aggressive but with "understanding, good will and with a sense of discipline," that was also "a demanding love" that rejected hatred. His ideas and example deserve a closer examination.

50 years ago in Hollywood, Florida on May 18, 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. discussed in great detail, at a time when other voices were counseling revolutionary violence, the nonviolent alternative in which he first described how a nonviolent movement must mobilize oppressed people for nonviolent resistance to injustice:

People are huddled in ghettos, living in the most crowded and depressing conditions. They need some outlet; some way to express their legitimate discontent. What is a better way than to provide non-violent channels through which they can do it? If this isn't provided they are going to find it through more irrational, misguided means. So the non-violent movement has a job to do, in providing the non-violent channels through which those who are caught in these conditions can express their discontent and frustration. 

Martin Luther King Jr. reaffirmed his commitment to non-violence while recognizing the consequences of such a position: 

Now let me say that I'm still convinced that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and human dignity. And I'd like to say just a word about this philosophy since it has been the underlying philosophy of our movement. It has power because it has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses, it weakens his morale. And at the same time it works on his heart and on his conscience, and he just doesn't know what to do. If he doesn't hit you, wonderful. If he hits you you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn't put you in jail, that's very nice, nobody with any sense loves to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame into a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for. If a man has not discovered some thing that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. 

Reverend King understood, as did Mohandas Gandhi, that Machiavelli was wrong, the ends do not justify the means:

 There's another good thing about non-violence: through it a person can use moral means to procure moral ends. There are still those who sincerely believe that the end justifies the means, no matter what the means happen to be. No matter how violent or how deceptive or anything else they are. Non-violence at its best would break with the system that argues that. Non-violence would say that the morality of the ends is implicit in the means, and that in the long-run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. So since we are working toward a just society in this movement, we should use just methods to get there. Since we are working for the end of a non-violent society in this movement, we must use non-violent means and methods to get there.

Martin Luther King, Jr. would've been 87 years old today but never saw 40 because an assassin shot the 39 year old Baptist minister in the head on April 4, 1968 at 6:01pm in the midst of the final campaign before his death: the support of a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. King's legacy lives on not only in the United States but inspired Cuban democrats such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas who have also been martyred in the struggle for justice, freedom and human dignity.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence will succeed today and tomorrow

"The tragedy was not the clamor of the bad people, but the silence of the good people." - Martin Luther King Jr.

Mugshot of MLK Jr. taken in 1963 in Birmingham Alabama

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was born 86 years ago today on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia and he was assassinated on April 4, 1968 when he was just 39 years old, but he packed more life in those 39 years than many do in 86. He was a baptist minister and an apostle of nonviolence that followed that retraced the path taken by Mohandas Gandhi thirty years earlier into martyrdom as he embraced the Christian ethic of radical love and nonviolence.

The next few days have over the past eight years been days of reflection on the significance of Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent legacy. However the events of 2014 and the ongoing conversation bring new urgency prompting engaging in a public dialogue.

First the essay by Frank Harris III,  a professor of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, published in the Hartford Courant asked the question: "Would Martin Luther King Jr.'s Nonviolence Succeed Today?" I did not agree with professor Harris's conclusion that: "[t]he strategy of nonviolence in a violent world works only if those who are acting violently have some ember of a conscience."

The percentage of a population without a conscience is always minority and is clinically described as a syndrome called malignant narcissism or more commonly known as sociopaths and comprise 4% of the population. The trouble is that a clever sociopath in a position of authority can institute policies that dehumanize and demonize targeted populations that the non-sociopathic majority then set out to destroy. Sadly we have seen these dynamics in cultures and races all over the world targeting people based on their race, class or religion just to mention three categories.

The objective of nonviolence is to re-humanize both the non-sociopathic majority driven to inhumane acts and at the same time empowering and rehumanizing those targeted by exercising the healing power of nonviolence. Although this will not convert those without "some ember of conscience" they would no longer be in power.

Secondly, even in a powerful and well made film such as Selma now in theaters this dynamic is missing. Michael Nagler and Mercedes Mack of the Metta Center in their review of the film cite the southern writer Marshal Frady:     

". . . in the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, when an oppressor’s violence is met with a forgiving love, he can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience toward compassion and justice." 

Nagler and Mack go on to explain that "[i]n the field of nonviolence this is known as a 'nonviolent moment.'  This is the transformative power of nonviolence on display that for whatever reason has not been reproduced or captured in a major film.

Thirdly, Cornel West in an interview on 'The Radical King' outlines Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s radical nature:

 "King was about militant nonviolence. It goes back to radical love: You don't begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you, because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world. And you're right: It takes unbelievable spiritual courage, moral fortitude, to engage in militant nonviolence. To put it another way, Martin King was an extremist of love. We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head."

However, at the same time that Martin Luther King Jr. was militantly nonviolent he did not abandon anger but harnessed it explaining in Freedomways magazine in 1968, "The supreme task [of a leader] is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force." He was also not a fan of moderation and in his letter to his fellow clergymen written from a Birmingham jail he explained why:

"I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."

 There is much to be learned from the life of Martin Luther King Jr., for any activist seeking to aggressively bring an end to an unjust system. The first lesson is profoundly Christian and it is to harness the anger against injustice without allowing to contaminate your love for your enemy.  Reverend King in St. Augustine in 1964 also explained exactly what kind of love this is:

"Its difficult advice and in some quarters it isn't too popular to say it...Let us recognize that violence is not the answer. I must say to you tonight that violence is impractical...We have another method that is much more powerful and much more effective than the weapon of violence...Hate isn't our weapon either...I am not talking now about a weak love it would be nonsense for an oppressed people to love their oppressor in an affectionate sense I'm not talking about that too many people confuse the meaning of love when they go to criticizing the love ethic. ...I am talking about a love that is so strong that it becomes a demanding love. A love that is so strong that it organizes itself into a mass movement and says somehow I am my brothers keeper and he is so wrong that I am willing to suffer and die to get him right and to see that he is on the wrong road."

This idea is so powerful that both the FBI and KGB targeted Martin Luther King Jr trying to discredit and destroy him, but despite this the nonviolent action he practiced fundamentally transformed the United States of America.

Christmas, Liu Xiaobo, Oswaldo Payá and the power of small moral actions

"It's up to all of us to try, and those that say that individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses." - Vaclav Havel, Interview with Amnesty International in 2011

Oswaldo Payá and Liu Xiaobo and the power of moral actions

Five years ago on Christmas morning in Beijing the nonviolent dissident, scholar and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison for the crime of speaking. He had already been jailed for more than a year for being one of the authors of Charter 08 that sought to gather signatures in a petition calling on the Chinese regime to gradually shift toward democracy.
The speech he delivered at his trial on December 23, 2009 is one that remains extremely relevant today and more so on Christmas. In a key passage of his final statement Liu Xiaobo said the following:

But I still want to say to this regime, which is depriving me of my freedom, that I stand by the convictions I expressed in my "June Second Hunger Strike Declaration" twenty years ago ‑ I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies. Although there is no way I can accept your monitoring, arrests, indictments, and verdicts, I respect your professions and your integrity, including those of the two prosecutors, Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing, who are now bringing charges against me on behalf of the prosecution. During interrogation on December 3, I could sense your respect and your good faith.

Hatred can rot away at a person's intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation's progress toward freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation's development and social change, to counter the regime's hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.

 This decision to bust up hatred with love combined with the firmness and courage at the same time to reject and defy the injustices committed is not only a core principle of nonviolence but also of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Jesus commands us to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. When one says the Lord's prayer how many understand and internalize that "If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions." Liu Xiaobo in the statement above is doing just that.

In a Christmas Message delivered by the Christian Liberation Movement in 1990 and written by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas although 19 years earlier and separated by great distance and different cultures the same message is found:

Let us not turn to violence and force, but we will not submit or allow ourselves to be intimidated by them. Yes, we want change, changes in all of society, because the heart of Cuba has already changed, and we have renovated it in hope, work, suffering and sorrow. We have renovated ourselves and do not want Cuba to sink and our children with her. That violence not explode, that repression not explode, that the truth break out, and let there be an outbreak of Peace and Freedom.

No one in Cuba wants to submit to a foreign power, or return to other forms of injustice. Let us not fool ourselves any more, Cubans know what we want: we want reconciliation among all, we want a reunion with our distant brothers in exile, we want to work for our Country and our families, with boundless generosity to our hard work and positive creativity, we want dialogue, we want to solve this juncture of our history together, with love, we want freedom. We know it is possible and we will achieve it, it will be everyone’s victory.

Oswaldo Payá was murdered by the Cuban regime's state security agents on July 22, 2014 but he lived the above creed until the end, and the movement, he helped to found, continues to embrace these nonviolent principled. On December 28, 2014  Liu Xiaobo will be observing his 59th birthday and his sixth behind bars in a Chinese prison. He is a prisoner of conscience imprisoned in 2008 for his participation in the drafting of Charter 08. His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest since 2010 when her husband won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Norway was threatened by Communist China not to award the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo but courageously went ahead and did so. Relations between the two countries have not been the same since then. In addition the Chinese regime initiated its own "Peace Prize" in 2010 to counter Nobel's and Fidel Castro is the 2014 winner.  Human rights activists in 2014 organized a Christmas card writing campaign in solidarity with imprisoned Chinese  dissidents to mark the five years that have passed since the trial of Liu Xiaobo where he was found "guilty" of "incitement to subvert state power." 

Imagine for a moment that Norway with a population of five million shook up Communist China with a population of over 1.3 billion and the largest economy on the planet with a simple moral and courageous stand by recognizing one Chinese human rights defender who nonviolently advocates for a peaceful transition in China. This demonstrates how small moral actions can have huge consequences, and why sending Christmas cards to imprisoned dissidents is of such great importance.

Action not reaction: The politics of love in Cuba and Miami

"Action not reaction." - David D. Omni

Eskuadron Patriota and David D. Omni headlined a concert tonight in Miami at Art Walk on Bird Road.

 Their messages of resistance to tyranny in all its manifestations, love and unity of Cubans serve as a dissolving agent against tyranny while at the same time healing divisions provoked and promoted by the dictatorship.

In the song below "Monologue", Eskuadron Patriota carries out a dialogue with an official who warns him of the consequences of his actions. The Cuban rapper thanks him for his concerns and goes on to denounce the culture of fear that the dictatorship relies on to maintain power.


These Cuban artists will be playing venues in Miami over the following weeks. Raudell Collazo (Escuadrón Patriota) will hold a concert at CubaOcho Art & Research Center on May 24. 

A Christmas Message from the Christian Liberation Movement

Happy New Year 2013 to all Cubans. Year of Liberation 

 The MCL Coordinating Council has decided to re-release the Christmas message of 1990, which our national coordinator Oswaldo Payá wrote on behalf of our Movement. Reading it we found that its contents, twenty one Christmases later remains equally beautiful and appreciated. Today, on behalf of your people, we say to you: Thank you for this gift Oswaldo. Hopefully Cubans today will start making this utopia possible. 

It is is our hope that it will be so: 

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas wrote MCL's 1990 Christmas Message

Christmas Message 1990

The rifles will be buried face down, the words of hatred will vanish in the heart without reaching the lips, we'll go out into the street and all of us will see in the other a brother, let us look to the future with the peace of he that knows that he forgave and he that has been forgiven. Let there be no blood to clean or dead to bury, the shadow of fear and of catastrophe will give way to the reconciliatory light, and Cuba will be reborn in every heart, in a miracle of love made by God and us.

That will be the Liberation, it will be the new life and all of us will have the sensation that we are all good and want to be good, that everyone wants the other to be happy, it will be like that special time, and it will be like Christmas, that same Christmas when Jesus arrives.

Cubans!, that this hope not die, let us not be discouraged. We believe it is possible and we work and struggle with all our hearts, to make this, that many call utopia, possible and for which, if necessary, we will give our lives without claiming the lives of others.

That those who hold power and for a long time have had great privileges and have lived as the rich in the midst of a poor people reflect on it.

The people have no voice and want to express themselves. The nation disintegrates and Cubans want to save her, save Cuba for all, Cuba is greater than the power of a few and those that have that power that do not feel attacked, because the people awake, do not abuse the nobility of the Cuban people. Come on men of power! For you to there is a place among the people if you descend from the stands, and that is better than power.

Let all within Cuba and outside Cuba reflect. Let us act with great courage, but with a lot of responsibility, with great firmness but especially with much love.

Let us not turn to violence and force, but we will not submit or allow ourselves to be intimidated by them. Yes, we want change, changes in all of society, because the heart of Cuba has already changed, and we have renovated it in hope, work, suffering and sorrow. We have renovated ourselves and do not want Cuba to sink and our children with her. That violence not explode, that repression not explode, that the truth break out, and let there be an outbreak of Peace and Freedom.

No one in Cuba wants to submit to a foreign power, or return to other forms of injustice. Let us not fool ourselves any more, Cubans know what we want: we want reconciliation among all, we want a reunion with our distant brothers in exile, we want to work for our Country and our families, with boundless generosity to our hard work and positive creativity, we want dialogue, we want to solve this juncture of our history together, with love, we want freedom. We know it is possible and we will achieve it, it will be everyone’s victory.

Yes, Jesus is coming, he who was also a victim of violence, victim of the mob and its repudiation, victim of the pride of the powerful and of the slaves of the lie. Jesus is coming and he brings the victory of life over death, of love over hatred. He is the only one who brings true Liberation. That is Christmas.

The Christian Liberation Movement wishes you a Merry Christmas!

December 2012

The original Spanish text is available here.

Cuba in 2012: What would José Martí say?

"There is no forgiveness for acts of hatred. Daggers thrust in the name of liberty are thrust into liberty's heart." - Jose Marti

Two deaths on May 19 separated by 117 years

José Martí was killed in battle against Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos, near the confluence of the rivers Contramaestre and Cauto, on May 19, 1895. He is buried in the Santa Efigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. Cubans the world over honor his memory and Cuban independence follows a day later. Seven years and one day after Martí's death Cuba formally obtained its independence on May 20, 1902.

Cubans across the ideological divide claim José Martí as their own. The claims of the dictatorship led by the Castro brothers that Martí is the intellectual author of their political project is ironic considering that the life and writings of this Cuban patriot is the antithesis of the Castro regime.

117 years after his death in battle, the regime that claims him as their inspiration sent thugs to surround the home of a nonviolent activist, Idania Yánez Contreras, carrying out an "act of repudiation" in an act of psychological terrorism against her and her family. It was too much for Idania's grandmother, Antonia Rodríguez, who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on May 18 due to a drastic rise in blood pressure and died the following day on May 19. These violent acts by the dictatorship started on Wednesday, May 16, 2012  under the direction of the Lieutenant Colonel Regino, along with other agents. The soldiers made obscene gestures and shouted obscenities. Jorge Luis García Pérez ‘Antúnez’ (@antunezcuba) tweeted what was taking place as it happened and published the photos via twitter. The photos showed officials grabbing their genitals and screaming insults at the women gathered there. In addition to the psychological assault the mob began throwing rocks at the home and one of the rocks made it inside hitting Idania's mother, Aramilda Contreras.

The life and death of the Cuban poet, journalist, and independence leader who proclaimed that "It is necessary to make virtue fashionable," would have condemned the behavior of these regime agents.  José Martí believed that "Peace demands of Nature the recognition of human rights." A 53 year old dictatorship that rejects fundamental human rights is the antithesis of what he fought and died for.

Furthermore, he proclaimed the idea that "One just principle from the depths of a cave is more powerful than an army." A principle shared not only by dissidents in Cuba but also echoed by Vaclav Havel one of the dissidents who had an important role in ending Communism in Eastern Europe in the1989: "I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions."

In José Martí's writings the reader finds a man who loved freedom, rejected hatred -even of one's enemy- and only embraced violent conflict as a last resort. One wonders if instead of riding into battle on horseback if he would've been the trailblazer of nonviolent resistance. What would have Cuba's political culture been like if as in the case of Havel the Cuban poet and writer would've lived to have been president and guide the new republic in the first years of its existence?

In this thought experiment of one thing we can be sure, José Martí and his later political disciples would not be sending soldiers to grab their genitals, throw rocks at elderly mothers, and precipitate a grandmother's death by stroke after days of terrorizing her and her family. Both the persons who order these despicable actions and those who carry them out degrade and debase themselves in performing hateful and evil acts. The diabolical goal of this behavior beyond the obvious terrorism is to implant hatred into the adversary.

Its been said that when a friend betrayed him to the police José Martí sent him the following poem:

Cultivo una rosa blanca

En julio como en enero,

Para el amigo sincero

Que me da su mano franca.

Y para el cruel que me arranca

El corazon con que vivo,

Cardo ni ortiga cultivo,

Cultivo una rosa blanca.  

It translates to English as follows:

I cultivate a white rose 

In July as in January 

For the sincere friend 

Who gives me his hand frankly. 

And for the cruel person who tears out 

The heart with which I live, 

I cultivate neither nettles nor thorns: 

I cultivate a white rose.

Antonia Rodríguez and José Martí died on the same day 117 years apart under different circumstances that highlight the fact that Cuba in 2012 is not the Cuba that the Cuban independence leader bled and died for in 1895.

Christmas, Cuban prisoners of conscience & the power of love

You have heard that it was said, 'Love (agape) your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love (agape) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?
—Matthew 5:42-44


Cardinal Jaime Ortega in The Washington Post: "hope springs eternal" that Havana will honor its "formal promise" to free them.

The Washington Post reports that "The Roman Catholic Cardinal who helped broker a deal with Cuba to free dissidents jailed in a 2003 crackdown says he hopes the government will make good on its pledge to release the last 11 remaining in prison."

There is a commonality that all the 2003 prisoners of conscience still behind bars share according to The Washington Post:

Cuba agreed to the deal in July. All 52 were supposed to be freed by early November.

Exile was not an explicit condition of the agreement, however all but one of the 41 released so far are now living in Spain.

Those still behind bars have said they want to remain on the island.

These 11 men are "guilty" of loving their country not wanting to leave it and having the courage to say, while still in prison, that if released they will continue working to obtain democratic change using nonviolent means. The very reason the Cuban dictatorship unjustly imprisoned them in the first place.



The term "love" is not a sentimental or weak love, but the powerful "love" known through Christian thought and the ancient Greeks as "agape." C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves offered an explanation of the the four Greek words that are translated as love in English: "storge" (affection), "philia" (friendship), "eros" (sexual or romantic love) [ all of which have a rational basis for existing based on self-interest and reciprocity]. It is the fourth kind of love that Lewis describes as "agape" (selfless love) "passionately committed to the wellbeing of the other" that applies here. It is also the reason that the Cuban dictatorship could not predict that this would happen. Because agape has been described by Peter Kreeft as a "scandal to reason because it means loving people not just in terms of justice or what they deserve, but simply loving them absolutely. " It does not fit into the dialectical materialist framework. It transcends both the dialectical and the material because it is of the spirit and not the flesh.



Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while visiting St. Augustine in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights struggle spoke [in the video above] of this kind of love and the impracticality of violence:

"Its difficult advice and in some quarters it isn't too popular to say it...Let us recognize that violence is not the answer. I must say to you tonight that violence is impractical...We have another method that is much more powerful and much more effective than the weapon of violence...Hate isn't our weapon either...I am not talking now about a weak love it would be nonsense for an oppressed people to love their oppressor in an affectionate sense I'm not talking about that too many people confuse the meaning of love when they go to criticizing the love ethic. ...I am talking about a love that is so strong that it becomes a demanding love. A love that is so strong that it organizes itself into a mass movement and says somehow I am my brothers keeper and he is so wrong that I am willing to suffer and die to get him right and to see that he is on the wrong road."

As Christmas approaches and the Christian world prepares to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and begins to reflect on the "scandal of the cross" and the significance of Easter. It can be said that these men are following a distinctly Christian path.

Hopefully, after so many years separated from their families these prisoners of conscience will be able to celebrate Christmas at home with them this year. Nevertheless, one thing is certain whether in prison or back home their selfless sacrifice for the good of all Cubans follows Christ's teachings and with their example offers everyone hope. At the same time one cannot forget that there are still scores of political prisoners that will still be in prison despite the release of these 11 and they should not be forgotten.