CNN's Jake Tapper is right "Fidel Castro was a murderous despot who oppressed the LGBTQ community and many others" but there is more.

Giving credit when credit is due.

CNN journalist Jake Tapper spoke the truth when observed that "Fidel Castro was a murderous despot who oppressed the LGBTQ community and many others and pointing that out is actually part of being a news anchor."

He was responding to Afghan American filmmaker, musician, and activist, Ariana Delawari who was making a number of claims that do not stand up to scrutiny about Fidel Castro and his regime.

Mauvaise Conduite (Improper Conduct) is a 1984 documentary film directed by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal that explores the oppression of the LGBTQ community in Cuba, and is required viewing.  

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.” 

Castro apologists claimed that the Cuban dictatorship had changed since then, but the events of May 11, 2019 demonstrated just the opposite.

Pride March shut down by Castro regime on May 11, 2019

The hostility to Gays began early and from the top. 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.

This history should be taken into account when considering the Cuban quarantine of HIV positive Cubans from 1986 to 1997. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic it was associated with the Gay community. Furthermore the claim that HIV rates are lower in Cuba should also be taken with a grain of salt when considering the failure to report on other outbreaks.This is motivated by their need to justify the existence of the dictatorship with supposed successes in health care.

 

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.

The Castro regime is also a murderous regime. Glenn Garvin wrote an important essay in the Miami Herald on December 1, 2016 titled "Red Ink: The high human cost of the Cuban Revolution" and in it addresses the question of how many extrajudicial executions have taken place in Cuba and cites an authoritative source.

"University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own government, reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."

The killings have continued to the present day under Fidel Castro's replacement, his brother Raul Castro, who has head of the Cuban Communist Party remains the maximum authority in Cuba in 2020.

Inner power circle of the Castro regime (Cuban Studies Institute)

Ironically, some who attacked Mr. Tapper's claims raised the issue of racism. It is the Castro regime that has exercised white supremacy when the dictatorship's inner circle of power are old white men that have ruled over a majority black country for 61 years silencing black voices.

Black voices silenced by the Castro regime are numerous and many remain unknown. Others such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a brick layer and human rights activist tortured and taunted with racial insults for eight years until his death on hunger strike on February 23, 2010 became known worldwide.

Others such as Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike, but due to a lack of international solidarity passed on in anonymity.

Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros

It remains a sad reality that as the world begins to pay attention to extrajudicial killings of black men by the police. There is one place that when a police man shoots a young unarmed black man in the back those who would normally speak out if it was the United States are a European country, remain quiet. 

Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano shot in back and killed

Castro's Revolutionary National Police shot 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. 

Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano killed at age 27

Even the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus launched blue lives style campaign to rehabilitate the image of their murderous police that they called "Heroes of the Blue",  the usual suspects remained silent and continued to claim that Cuba was an example to follow.

Heroes of the Blue (Heroes de Azul) campaign by the Castro regime

On the broader front, Racist attitudes persist in Cuba under the Castros and is reflected in rates of interracial marriage being lower in Cuba than in Brazil that has a much higher level of inequality, and has not undergone a communist revolution.

On the economic front the glaring differences between black and white Cubans are shocking with 95% of Afro-Cubans having the lowest incomes compared to 58% of white Cubans.

Annual income by race in Cuba.

It is too late to help Orlando, Yosvany and Hansel, but it is not too late to help Silverio Portal Contreras, but time is running out for him.

Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience Silverio Portal Contreras

Silverio Portal Contreras,a former activist with the Ladies in White, is serving a 4-year sentence for "contempt" and "public disorder." According to a court document, he was arrested on the June 20, 2016 in Old Havana after shouting “Down Fidel Castro, down Raúl...” The document states that "the behavior of the accused is particularly offensive because it took place in a touristic area." The document further describes the accused as having “bad social and moral behavior” and mentions that he fails to participate in pro-government activities. 

According to Silverio’s wife, before his arrest he had campaigned against the collapse of dilapidated buildings in Havana. Silverio was recognized as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International on August 26, 2019. He was beaten by prison officials in mid-May 2020 and lost sight in one eye.

Lucinda Gonzalez Gomez, wife of the activist, has put out a desperate plea for help after receiving a call from her husband on June 10, 2020. “Silverio called me and put an official on the phone to explain the situation,” said Gonzalez Gomez to CubaNet. The official told her that “he was taken to the ophthalmologist and because of temporary loss of blood flow, he was losing sight in both eyes.”

Raul Castro and Fidel Castro with Mengistu review troops in Ethiopia

Castro apologists in their push back against Jake Tapper's criticism of Fidel Castro, cited the Cuban tyrant's relationship with Nelson Mandela, but ignored the Cuban autocrat's relationship with Ethio­pian dictator, Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Castro's involvement in the genocide in that African country.

Fidel Castro with Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia

These apologists also ignored that Mandela also had friendships with both war criminals Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, and Charles Taylor of Liberia. Both men are responsible for the murder of many Africans in their respective countries. That Mandela would be friends with Fidel Castro,
Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Charles Taylor is dark corner of an otherwise bright legacy.

 Mandela was friends with Charles Taylor and Mengistu Haile Mariam

The second President of the United States, John Adams, when defending British soldiers in a court of law, who had fired on a crowd during the Boston Massacre, stated: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." This holds true today for Castro apologists, the facts are against them in their defense of the Castro dictatorship.

Cuba's problematic legacy in Africa: A look back to Ethiopia and South Africa

 Revisiting the nonviolent end of the Apartheid regime, and Castro's genocidal crimes in Ethiopia
 

Castro with war criminal Mengistu in 1970s and Nelson Mandela in 1990s

April 27th is recognized as Freedom Day in South Africa. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first post-apartheid elections held on that day in 1994. This presents a great opportunity to reflect on the role played by the Castro regime in Africa.

Nationalist narratives tend to glorify violent narratives, at the expense of successful nonviolent initiatives. In India for example, the 3,000 nationalists who joined ranks with Hitler and the Third Reich to fight the British get credit with speeding up Indian Independence.  However the millions who took part in nonviolent actions in Gandhi's movement get short shrift as the Hindu nationalists grow in power in India.

The same holds true in South Africa. Piero Gleijeses. a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies writing in The National Interest in 2014 gives a positive assessment of the Cuban intervention in Angola quoting Nelson Mandela that their victory “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor ... [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa ... Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.”  For the record both sides claimed victory in the battle of Cuito Canavale.

Professor Gleijeses failed to look at the historical context, and Nelson Mandela's commitment to the violent overthrow of the Apartheid regime. In the case of South Africa the decision of the African National Congress to adopt violence as a means to end Apartheid in 1961 may in fact have prolonged the life of the racist regime by decades. It also led to Nelson Mandela spending decades in prison refusing to renounce his violent stand.

Sean Jacobs writing in The Guardian in 2016 repeats the same narrative portraying the Castro regime's agenda in Africa as anti-colonial and noble, but left out a massive Cuban intervention in Ethiopia that abetted war crimes and genocide.

Left to right: Ramiro Valdes, Raul Castro, Fidel Castro and Mengistu Haile Mariam

Fidel and Raul Castro were both deeply involved in sending 17,000 Cuban troops to Eastern Africa in order to assist Mengistu in consolidating his rule and eliminating actual and potential opposition. The last Cuban troops did not leave Ethiopia until 1989 and were present and complicit in the engineered famine that took place there. Also present was Ramiro Valdes, the founder of the Cuban secret police, who decades later would play an important role in Venezuela.



Human Rights Watch in their 2008 report on Ethiopia titled outlined "Collective Punishment War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region" some of the practices carried out by Cuban troops sent there by Fidel and Raul Castro excerpted below: 

In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”²⁴ Militarily, the counter-insurgency operations succeeded in greatly weakening the insurgents or driving them across the border into Somalia.

Charles Lane of The Washington Post raised the issue of the Cuban role in Ethiopia's famine:

The last Cuban troops did not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture. 

Mandela became a symbol of resistance, and later an agent of national reconciliation, but he was not the agent of regime change in South Africa.

UDF boycotted elections

It was not the armed struggle of the ANC that brought the Apartheid regime to the negotiating table but the United Democratic Front (UDF).  The history of how the Apartheid regime was brought to an end is often overlooked. This is the history of the UDF and the successful nonviolent struggle it carried out that is documented in A Force More Powerful:

 In the city of Port Elizabeth, Mkhuseli Jack, a charismatic 27-year-old youth leader, understands that violence is no match for the state's awesome arsenal. Jack stresses the primacy of cohesion and coordination, forming street committees and recruiting neighborhood leaders to represent their interests and settle disputes. Nationally, a fledgling umbrella party, the United Democratic Front (UDF), asserts itself through a series of low-key acts of defiance, such as rent boycotts, labor strikes, and school stay aways. 

Advocating nonviolent action appeals to black parents who are tired of chaos in their neighborhoods. The blacks of Port Elizabeth agree to launch an economic boycott of the city's white-owned businesses. Extending the struggle to the white community is a calculated maneuver designed to sensitize white citizens to the blacks' suffering. Beneath their appeal to conscience, the blacks' underlying message is that businesses cannot operate against a backdrop of societal chaos and instability. 

Confronted by this and other resistance in the country, the government declares a state of emergency, the intent of which is to splinter black leadership through arbitrary arrests and curfews. Jack and his compatriots, however, receive an entirely different message: the country is fast becoming ungovernable. Apartheid has been cracked. 

Undaunted by government reprisals, the UDF continues to press its demands, particularly for the removal of security forces and the release of jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. White retailers, whose business districts have become moribund, demand an end to the stalemate. The movement also succeeds in turning world opinion against apartheid, and more sanctions are imposed on South Africa as foreign corporations begin to pull out many investments. In June 1986, the South African government declares a second state of emergency to repress the mass action that has paralyzed the regime.

End of the Cold War coincides with End of Apartheid
The negotiations to end Apartheid began in 1990 after the collapse of the East Bloc and ended in 1991 the year the Soviet Union peacefully dissolved. The ANC no longer had the weapons and financial support provided by the Castro regime and Soviets from the 1960s into the early 1980s. There are those in South Africa who in 1989 mourned the passing of the Berlin Wall but if not for the end of the Cold War things may not have changed. Paul Trewhela in politicsweb offered the following analysis:

On 9 November 1989, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall cracked open, the Cold War in Europe came to an end, the Soviet empire tottered to its grave and the ANC military option lost whatever teeth it might have had. The military/security state erected by the National Party never lost a centimeter squared of its soil. Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, never won a centimeter squared of soil. True, the repeated mass mobilizations and popular uprisings within South Africa through the Seventies and the Eighties placed a colossal strain upon the regime, and, true, the economic strain upon the state - especially in conditions of attrition exercised against it by the US banking system - placed it under further serious pressures. Nevertheless, honest accounting must say that, given the continuation of the Cold War system in Africa, this nuclear-armed state at its southern tip was nowhere near collapse.

The international situation that undermined the ANC's armed struggle combined with the successful nonviolent campaigns of the United Democratic Front (UDF) facilitated the end of Apartheid in South Africa.


In South Africa there was a far older tradition of nonviolence going back to 1893 - 1914 with Mohandas Gandhi's experiments with nonviolence against anti-Indian racism there. It was in South Africa on September 11, 1906 that the word Satyagraha came into existence. It is this legacy of nonviolence that has endured and gives hope for the future unfortunately abandoning it and embracing the false and violent narrative of Castroism and the ANC is a recipe for endangering South African democracy.

Meanwhile today in South Africa medical students join those of other African nations in protesting their treatment by both African and Cuban officials.

How the ANC's armed struggle prolonged Apartheid in South Africa

"Violence sometimes 'works,' that is, forces a particular change, but in the long run leads to more misery and disorder." - Michael N. Nagler, Six Principles of Nonviolence  

It was the United Democratic Front and Nonviolence that ended Apartheid

Michael Nagler on page 43 of his important book "The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action" offers the following analysis of the decision to embrace violence in South Africa and its consequences:

“When sixty peaceful demonstrators were shot dead at Sharpeville, South Africa, in 1960, the African National Congress leaders decided that nonviolence was not enough to overcome the apartheid regime. They subsequently lost nearly thirty years trying to fight the regime with acts of violence before Nelson Mandela was released from prison and they regained their nonviolent momentum.”

It was not the African National Congress and the armed struggle that brought the Apartheid regime to the negotiating table but the United Democratic Front (UDF) and mass civic nonviolent action combined with international sanctions. 

Let me be clear that I've been to South Africa and met with members of the African National Congress (ANC) and engaged some of them in civil discussions on the nature of the Castro regime and found differences of opinions within the ranks. However, the open letter by the ANC to the Cuban Communist Party released last week that re-writes South African history and the end of Apartheid ignoring that it was the nonviolent struggle that freed Nelson Mandela and brought the racist regime to the negotiating table raises great concerns. Mandela's greatness, in my opinion, is that he presided over a nonviolent transition and left office after serving out a full term as president following a free election.

Unfortunately, the legacy of violence that did not succeed in defeating Apartheid may in the end destroy South African democracy by embracing a legacy of bloody violence and a regime such as the one that exists in Cuba.  In the long run violence leads to more misery and disorder.

Civic resistance actions ended Apartheid in South Africa

Sadly, the glorification of violence is not a phenomenon unique to South Africa. Embracing violence while ignoring or trivializing successful nonviolent actions is all too common a practice around the world. In a twitter exchange with professor Cynthia Boaz on October 11, 2011 when I asked her about this she replied that these were:  "Meta frames, i.e. deeply-held hardened beliefs about perceived efficacy of violence & the misconception that violence = power."Continuing the discussion I asked her how one could go about breaking down these "meta frames" and her response was that she didn't have an answer although her opinion was "that it requires truly grasping the power of nonviolent action by engaging in it."

At the same time that doing trumps talking when breaking through the meta-frames having access to the history of what actually took place is also helpful. In the case of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa the people who led the non-violent resistance are still around and telling their story. Let us listen to them and their courageous victories for freedom. One of these leaders is Mkhuseli Jack who is recognized by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory as a key figure in dismantling Apartheid can be heard below.

What Fidel Castro and the ANC don't want you to know about Cuba and South Africa

"Cuba is the sea of happiness. Towards there goes Venezuela. " - Hugo Chavez,  March 8, 2000

Open Letter from the ANC to the Communist Party of Cuba
Voice of America is reporting that South Africa has launched a campaign against US sanctions on Cuba. Reasonable people can disagree on the wisdom of sanctions and also taking into account the South African government's close relations with Cuba the position is not at all surprising and should not be a shock. Nevertheless, the call to release the remaining Cuban spies serving sentences for past crimes in the United States should give one pause. The misnamed "Cuban Solidarity Campaign" seeks to support the Castro regime. Finally what raised concerns about the future of South African democracy is an "Open letter from the African National Congress (ANC) to the Communist Party of Cuba" written by Gwede Mantashe and published on July 25, 2014 that not only celebrates the Cuban Communist Party but its guiding hand in shaping South African democracy while also quoting Lenin:

"In our quest to strengthen and consolidate our democracy, we still rely on the PCC`s willingness and ability to hold our hand against all odds. The ANC will continue to work closely with your party collaborating in all aspects of development and peace. As Vladimir I Lenin stated, 'taking power is easy the challenge is keeping it.' Demands on our 20-year-old democracy are many and varied. The glaring inequality and abject poverty of the majority of South Africans did not come in 1994. This is the legacy of centuries of oppression and deprivation."

However, ideas have consequences as does the belief that "it can't happen here." For example in Venezuela, under a flawed democracy, many thought that Hugo Chavez would shake things up but that it was impossible for the country of Bolivar to follow the path of Cuba under the Castro brothers. Despite the claims of President Chavez that this was precisely where he wanted to take the country. Fourteen years later and with a heavy Cuban presence involved in the repression of Venezuelans and the rule of law obliterated; opinions have changed. Many Venezuelans are risking their lives and freedoms to restore the rule of law, basic freedoms, and ending the rising violence in society. 


Glorifying a false and violent narrative

Michael N. Nagler, in the Six Principles of Nonviolence observes that: "Violence sometimes 'works,' that is, forces a particular change, but in the long run leads to more misery and disorder." In the case of South Africa the decision of the African National Congress to adopt violence as a means to end Apartheid in 1961 may in fact have prolonged the life of the racist regime by decades.  However, in the open letter by the African National Congress a different and self-serving narrative is constructed:

"We do not forget the great battle of Cuito Canavale where the myth of the invincibility of the might of racist South Africa was shuttered once and for all. The military skills of the cadres of both SWAPO and ANC trained by the Cubans sent the racists packing. The "Stalin Organ" or Katusha was so devastating it sent them running helter skelter all over the place. The South African Defense Force (SADF) was forced out and had to face the nation - albeit the white minority - to explain the body bags to parents and loved ones of the young men who had fallen illegally outside the borders of their country. Their grip on illegally occupied Namibia slipped away and the way was paved for the liberation of South Africa. The ANC was absolved by history as the unrelenting force for liberation and peace."

For the record both sides claimed victory in the above mentioned battle. What is disturbing is that the open letter uses the same language of being "absolved" while referencing another act of violence that took place in Cuba in 1953:

"We particularly wish to acknowledge this friendship of progressive forces in this month of July, which marks the 61st Anniversary of the raid on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, a campaign that is to the Cuban revolution what the sabotage campaign was to the ANC in the 1960`s at the beginning of the armed struggle against apartheid. We actually have one of our Umkhonto Wesizwe (MK) detachments named the Moncada Detachment. This is after throngs of young people especially students from all over South Africa joined the ANC and MK to fight the scourge in our country that was condemned as a crime against humanity by the United Nations. The friendship between the CPC and the ANC is not accidental. ... We are working very hard to educate our people about this bond and the trials and tribulations of the Cuban revolution. In a tradition began by the likes of Jose Marti, our brother and comrade Fidel Castro and members of the PCC managed to lead Cuba to freedom. From as early as 1962, despite difficulties created by the imperialist forces, Cuba offered South Africans much needed military and academic training."

The Nonviolent Campaign that ended Apartheid
The narrative laid out by the African National Congress glorifies violence but does not reflect what happened. One thing remains clear the ANC's goal of lifting economic sanctions on the Castro regime is to ensure that the Cuban Communist Party thrive and remain in power in Cuba.  The argument made by some, that engaging the Castro government with trade, investment and political recognition will lead to a democratic transition, was repudiated when made with regards to the South African Apartheid regime. For example consider the following statement by Immanuel Wallerstein, co-chairman of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars in 1977:

"Astonishingly, it is argued that strengthening the economic basis of the white apartheid regime will in fact bring change. This is nonsense, and those who speak it know it ... Continued American investment in South Africa in any form is continued American support for the regime in power. Those who wish to support change in South Africa have only two ways to do it: (1) active assistance to the liberation movement; (2) a call for United States economic disinvestment and political disengagement from the present South African state. The rest is sophistry."

Despite the current propaganda offensive, inside South Africa it was not the ANC and the armed struggle that brought the Apartheid regime to the negotiating table but the United Democratic Front (UDF). ANC and Castro apologists have generated a so-called secret history that is propaganda that has successfully glorified a failed violent struggle as successful. What is often overlooked is the real history of how the Apartheid regime was brought to an end. This is the history of the UDF and the successful nonviolent struggle it carried out that is documented in A Force More Powerful:

 In the city of Port Elizabeth, Mkhuseli Jack, a charismatic 27-year-old youth leader, understands that violence is no match for the state's awesome arsenal. Jack stresses the primacy of cohesion and coordination, forming street committees and recruiting neighborhood leaders to represent their interests and settle disputes. Nationally, a fledgling umbrella party, the United Democratic Front (UDF), asserts itself through a series of low-key acts of defiance, such as rent boycotts, labor strikes, and school stay aways.
Advocating nonviolent action appeals to black parents who are tired of chaos in their neighborhoods. The blacks of Port Elizabeth agree to launch an economic boycott of the city's white-owned businesses. Extending the struggle to the white community is a calculated maneuver designed to sensitize white citizens to the blacks' suffering. Beneath their appeal to conscience, the blacks' underlying message is that businesses cannot operate against a backdrop of societal chaos and instability.
Confronted by this and other resistance in the country, the government declares a state of emergency, the intent of which is to splinter black leadership through arbitrary arrests and curfews. Jack and his compatriots, however, receive an entirely different message: the country is fast becoming ungovernable. Apartheid has been cracked.
Undaunted by government reprisals, the UDF continues to press its demands, particularly for the removal of security forces and the release of jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. White retailers, whose business districts have become moribund, demand an end to the stalemate. The movement also succeeds in turning world opinion against apartheid, and more sanctions are imposed on South Africa as foreign corporations begin to pull out many investments. In June 1986, the South African government declares a second state of emergency to repress the mass action that has paralyzed the regime.

End of the Cold War coincides with End of Apartheid
If further proof were needed that the violence and militarism of the African National Congress (ANC) and Castro's troops did not achieve change in South Africa then one need only consider that negotiations to end Apartheid began in 1990 after the collapse of the East Bloc and ended in 1991 the year the Soviet Union ended. The ANC no longer had the weapons and financial support provided by the Castro regime and Soviets from the 1960s into the early 1980s. There are those in South Africa who in 1989 mourned the passing of the Berlin Wall but if not for the end of the Cold War things may not have changed. Paul Trewhela in politicsweb offered the following analysis:

On 9 November 1989, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall cracked open, the Cold War in Europe came to an end, the Soviet empire tottered to its grave and the ANC military option lost whatever teeth it might have had. The military/security state erected by the National Party never lost a centimeter squared of its soil. Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, never won a centimeter squared of soil. True, the repeated mass mobilizations and popular uprisings within South Africa through the Seventies and the Eighties placed a colossal strain upon the regime, and, true, the economic strain upon the state - especially in conditions of attrition exercised against it by the US banking system - placed it under further serious pressures. Nevertheless, honest accounting must say that, given the continuation of the Cold War system in Africa, this nuclear-armed state at its southern tip was nowhere near collapse.

The international situation that undermined the ANC's armed struggle combined with the successful nonviolent campaigns of the United Democratic Front (UDF) facilitated the end of Apartheid in South Africa. This is because in South Africa there was a far older tradition of nonviolence going back to 1893 - 1914 with Mohandas Gandhi's experiments with nonviolence in South Africa. It was in South Africa on September 11, 1906 that the word Satyagraha came into existence. In the same way that in Cuba there are dueling legacies one violent; one nonviolent the same holds true in South Africa. It is this legacy of nonviolence that has endured and gives hope for the future unfortunately abandoning it and embracing the false and violent narrative of Castroism is a recipe for endangering South African democracy. Under the Castro regime, nonviolent Cuban opposition leaders, such as  Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante have been killed under suspicious circumstances reminiscent of what was done to Steven Biko during the Apartheid regime.

Castroism's corrosive impact on democracy
Replicating the Cuban model in Venezuela has not brought the South American country into a sea of happiness the rule of law, free speech, and freedom of association have been decimated and violence has exploded in the country making it one of the most dangerous places on the planet. In Africa Cuban involvement in Ethiopia led to mass murder and war crimes bordering on genocide. In Cuba opposition leaders such as The obvious question that presents itself is what are the consequences presently of the ANC's embrace of the Cuban Communist Party to "hold [their] hands against all odds."

Amnesty International has been reporting that human rights defenders are being harassed and improper pressure is being placed on institutions, including the Office of the Public Protector and senior prosecutors. Freedom of expression is under threat in South Africa and laws have been passed restricting the rights of journalists. In 2013 the Index on Censorship made the following observation: "the past five years have seen worrying moves against free expression. These range from verbal threats to legislative measures to the irregular arrest of a journalist." On May 30, 2014 the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on another structural threat to a free press in South Africa: "Freedom of expression advocates in South Africa are concerned that the new Ministry of Communications, announced by President Jacob Zuma when he unveiled his cabinet on May 25, will compromise the independence of the public broadcaster and serve as a propaganda office."

The takeover of the media by the government and the ruling party while restricting freedoms of the press and of expression is an important step on the road to taking on Castroism's totalitarian model. Thankfully, in South Africa there is a vigorous civil society resisting these moves, but the fact that the ruling party sees in the Communist Party of Cuba an example to follow should be of great concern to democrats and human rights defenders.

Nelson Mandela: An Assessment

 From young revolutionary agitator to reconciling elder statesmen

 

Nelson Mandela (1918 - 2013)

Setting the Record Straight

Despite the numerous claims equating Nelson Mandela with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he was not a prisoner of conscience because he advocated violence for decades and refused to renounce it even to gain his freedom. Despite the claims of ardent revolutionaries this did not speed up the end of Apartheid, but to the contrary may have lengthened the life of that evil and racist system. Mandela's story is that of a man who joined a nonviolent struggle, turned to violence and after failing to succeed with violence for many years returned to nonviolence and achieved change.

Colleagues in the Cuban opposition who are holding up Mandela as an exemplar may be tempted to use violence. Presently, in Cuba there is a large nonviolent opposition movement that has suffered and continues to suffer the violence of a 54 year totalitarian dictatorship. Prominent opposition activists have been murdered by state security agents, and like Mandela some may be frustrated by the pace of nonviolent change. Believing violence to be a short cut may opt to follow Nelson Mandela's example. They would be mistaken to believe that violence will speed up the walk to freedom.

Mandela makes the case for violence

Mandela laid out the case for violence on April 24, 1964 at the Rivonia Trial before the Pretoria Supereme Court in which, in part, he stated:

At the beginning of June 1961, after a long and anxious assessment of the South African situation, I, and some colleagues, came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force.
     This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe. We did so not because we desired such a course, but solely because the Government had left us with no other choice. In the Manifesto of Umkhonto published on 16 December 1961, which is Exhibit AD, we said:
          "The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom."
     This was our feeling in June of 1961 when we decided to press for a change in the policy of the National Liberation Movement. I can only say that I felt morally obliged to do what I did.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

The Failure of Violent Resistance

For decades the African National Congress (ANC) allied with the Communist Party had received weapons, explosives, and training from Soviet and Cuban advisers. What was the response of the Apartheid Regime? Heightened repression, more massacres, and the development of nuclear weapons in the 1970s to target the majority black population and their Soviet and Cuban allies.  In April 1978, the South African government approved a nuclear deterrent strategy based on the following:

Phase 1: Strategic uncertainty in which the nuclear deterrent capability will not be acknowledged or denied.
Phase 2: Should South African territory be threatened, for example, by the Warsaw Pact countries through the surrogate Cuban forces in Angola, covert acknowledgement to certain international powers, e.g. the USA, would be contemplated.
Phase 3: Should this partial disclosure of South Africa's capability not bring about international intervention to remove the threat, public acknowledgement or demonstration by an underground test of South Africa's capability, would be considered.

The response of the Apartheid regime was not to buckle to the violence of the African National Congress but to escalate. The following decade saw many more massacres of the black majority by the apartheid regime, the forced resettlement of three million people to the "black homelands", more than 600 killed in clashes, and greater repression against the black majority. 

By the 1980s the ANC's militant wing had engaged in 156 acts of public violence including bombing campaigns targeting public establishments and Nelson Mandela's second wife Winnie, recognizing that they no longer had AK-47s to fight with advocated using gasoline and tires to "necklace" opponents and burn them alive stating: 

"Together, hand in hand, with that stick of matches, with our necklace, we shall liberate this country."

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission "concluded that she had personally been directly responsible for the murder, torture, abduction and assault of numerous men, women and children, as well as indirectly responsible for even larger number of such crimes." 

This is where Mandela's call to violence and alliance with the Cubans and Soviets led: to the white minority government responding to the threat with the development of six nuclear weapons and his own wife engaged in the murder of women and children. He may have not been directly involved but the advocacy and legitimization of violence and his steadfast defense of that position over decades had consequences.

It was not this violence that brought an end to Apartheid but nonviolent actions inside and outside of South Africa. The nonviolent Solidarity Movement in Poland set off a chain reaction of nonviolent change that spread across Eastern Europe in 1989 and ended with the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. Inside South Africa labor strikes began to have an impact and in coordination with an international boycott campaign made great impacts in South Africa.

On the face of it the collapse of the East Bloc and the Soviet Union should have been at least indirectly positive for the South African Apartheid state which had as its principle adversary the African National Congress that had relied heavily on the Soviet Union and their Eastern European and Cuban satellites that aided Mandela's movement.

Mandela was a man who joined a nonviolent struggle to end Apartheid and turned to violence  to break the will of the South African regime in 1961 and would beginning in 1964 spend the next 27 years of his life in prison but finally rejected violence as a political tactic because he had no other alternative. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc the African National Congress (ANC) no longer had a weapons supplier.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire the African National Congress's military option was taken off the table, and this allowed negotiations and non-violent action to achieve what political violence had not done in three decades: an end to the racist apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela as president of a multiracial South Africa. It is not a coincidence that the decision by the Apartheid regime to scrap the nuclear weapons program and dismantle its bombs was made after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

There are those in South Africa who in 1989 mourned the passing of the Berlin Wall but if not for the end of the Cold War things may not have changed. Paul Trewhela in politicsweb offers the following analysis:

On 9 November 1989, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall cracked open, the Cold War in Europe came to an end, the Soviet empire tottered to its grave and the ANC military option lost whatever teeth it might have had. The military/security state erected by the National Party never lost a centimeter squared of its soil. Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, never won a centimeter squared of soil. True, the repeated mass mobilizations and popular uprisings within South Africa through the Seventies and the Eighties placed a colossal strain upon the regime, and, true, the economic strain upon the state - especially in conditions of attrition exercised against it by the US banking system - placed it under further serious pressures. Nevertheless, honest accounting must say that, given the continuation of the Cold War system in Africa, this nuclear-armed state at its southern tip was nowhere near collapse.

The Anti-Apartheid movement was without an international backer and had run out of weapons and ammunition. What remained was the international grassroots campaign, boycotts, economic sanctions, and a nonviolent movement internally that could coordinate strikes and raise the consciousness of the black majority. This is what brought the South African government to the negotiating table. If the black majority refused to cooperate with their oppressors the system could not be maintained. At the same time the collapse of the international communist threat made it easier for them to negotiate without the fear that they would wind up in the Soviet orbit.


Mandela was not a prisoner of conscience

A prisoner of conscience is anyone imprisoned for the non-violent exercise of their beliefs. Independent journalists, human rights activists, and Project Varela petitioners currently imprisoned in Cuba are prisoners of conscience. According to Amnesty International, the human rights organization founded in 1961 that originated the term, a "prisoner of conscience" is someone imprisoned solely for the peaceful expression of their beliefs. The term was coined by Amnesty International's founder, civil rights lawyer Peter Benenson.  Amnesty International representatives in 1994 explained why Nelson Mandela had not been recognized as one:

Amnesty International adopted Nelson Mandela as a "forgotten prisoner" following his arrest and conviction in 1962 for alleged passport violations. In 1964 he spoke in his own defense at the famous Rivonia Trial and explained why he had chosen to organize an underground army (MK) and plan a campaign of violence directed towards the end of overthrowing the apartheid regime. Mandela's open avowal of chosing to use violence to further political ends caused a split within the ranks of Amnesty International, which at the time was very much smaller than it is now. One group advocated continuing to work unconditionally for Mandela's release, while the other urged that AI should adhere to its own principle and restrict it's efforts for unconditional release only to those political prisoners which they termed "prisoners of conscience" -- those who had neither used nor advocated violence. This would exclude Mandela from POC status, but would enable AI to continue to work on his behalf in terms of fair trial, and against the possibility of the death penalty.

This issue was debated at length at the 1964 congress in Canterbury England, and it was decided there in favor of the second position -- that is, not to make an exception for Mr Mandela. I would recommend that readers interested in the details and in the early history of Amnesty International should get ahold of a copy of Egon Larsen's --A Flame in Barbed Wire -- (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979). By the way, Amnesty International takes no official position on the justification of the use of violence. It only makes a distinction between those political prisoners who do and do not use or advocate its use as concerns its internal program of action on their behalfs.

President Mandela has long since acknowledged that Amnesty made its decision in good faith, and has thanked the organization for its work on behalf of thousands of other South African prisoners and detainees.

For example in South Africa Steve Biko was identified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience whereas Nelson Mandela was not. Biko was murdered by the Apartheid regime because his nonviolent black consciousness movement threatened the Apartheid regime as much or more than Mandela's violence. Nonviolence is not passive but active and resists injustice. Mandela in his 1964 speech failed to understand the power of nonviolent resistance. Since then the evidence has only increased that the more violent and extreme the regime the more successful nonviolent resistance to it and counter-intuitively the less successful violent resistance.

The greatness of Mandela: Peacemaker who gave up power
The greatness of Nelson Mandela and the reason that the world has honored him and will continue to for years to come is that once he made the return to nonviolent resistance and negotiation to bring an end to the Apartheid regime for strategic reasons he did not abandon the principles of nonviolence and reconciliation when dealing with his adversaries when he assumed power in a post-Apartheid system.

In neighboring Zimbabwe following international pressure and in particular from the United States the white minority regime (of what was then called Rhodesia)  peacefully transitioned into a black majority polity with the white minority also participating in 1979. In 1980 following the Lancaster House Agreement Robert Mugabe was voted into power in British supervised elections. This was not due so much to a military triumph by guerrillas but the political elite wanting to end international boycotts and the pariah status of the country. Reserved white seats in parliament were kept under the Mugabe regime until 1987. Unlike Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe has been president now for 33 years and shows no signs of retiring. According to a 2013 National Public Radio report on both men:

Once in power, Mugabe's military waged a brutal campaign against a rival black movement in the early 1980s, leaving an estimated 20,000 dead and setting the tone for dealing with any group seen as a potential rival....

Unlike in the rest of the African continent Mandela charted a radically different course once in power:

As the country's first black president, he consistently preached national unity, sometimes to the point of irritating the country's blacks, who felt he was too conciliatory.
And on a continent where many leaders rule until they are overthrown or die, Mandela served just one five-year term beginning in 1994 and then retired in 1999.

This is why Nelson Mandela is considered by some a heroic figure and will be remembered in the history books. He gave up power. Mandela could have easily followed the path of Mugabe or Castro and declare himself president for life. Remarkably, his links to the Communist party, Fidel Castro and other unsavory types who have done great harm elsewhere in Africa but assisted him in the violent struggle did not lead Mandela to following their dictatorial ruling style. Furthermore 27 years in prison and a life time in a profoundly racist society did not embitter him with the white minority.

Regis Iglesias, a former Cuban prisoner of conscience, and spokesman for the Christian Liberation Movement that is firmly committed to nonviolent change offered the following assessment:

"He was a man who knew how to move politically from positions of armed violence to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence among opponents before confronted in hatred. He called a tyrant like Fidel Castro "my President" and always ignored the fate of peaceful activists for democracy in Cuba. He was an inclusive President, generous and pragmatic that looked for the reconciliation of the entire South African nation. His achievements gladdened me, his inconsistency, born of political debt that he owed to the Cuban regime, caused me grief, it impeded me from believing in his good intentions more than in his pragmatic sense...Rest in peace Nelson Mandela"

The difference between a prisoner of conscience and a political prisoner

We have set up an office in London to collect information about the names, numbers, and conditions of what we have decided to call "Prisoners of Conscience;" and we define them thus: "Any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence." We also exclude those people who have conspired with a foreign government to overthrow their own. – Peter Benenson, Appeal for Amnesty, 1961

Prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo on the left and political prisoner Nelson Mandela on the right. How are they different?

The headline on the Associated Press article published in The Washington Post reads “Number of political prisoners in Cuba still murky.” There are two reasons for this. First the Cuban government has not allowed independent international human rights and humanitarian organizations access to Cuba’s prisons since 1990 that includes the International Committee of the Red Cross. The second reason is that there is confusion between the terms “prisoner of conscience” and political prisoner which are often used interchangeably by the press and the public but are not the same.

Political prisoner

A political prisoner is described by Amnesty International as "any prisoner whose case has a significant political element: whether the motivation of the prisoner's acts, the acts themselves, or the motivation of the authorities." Some political prisoners who were not prisoners of conscience because they advocated or participated in violence are: Nelson Mandela , Fidel Castro, and Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo. A political prisoner can be violent or non-violent. An armed struggle in which soldiers and civilians are targeted as took place in Cuba during the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship (armed opposition political violence beginning on July 26, 1953 with Fidel Castro's assault on the Moncada barracks) would be an example of a violent political action. Those captured would be political prisoners not prisoners of conscience.

There are two examples of American political prisoners that are often called prisoners of conscience but considering Amnesty International's definition of the term are the opposite of that: Mumia Abul Jamal and Assata Shakur. Both were members of the Black Panther Party which as a Maoist revolutionary movement advocated carrying rifles and shotguns in public demonstrations, and whose members on numerous occasions engaged in shoot outs with the police. Both Mumia Abul Jamal and Assata Shakur were arrested, tried, and convicted for murder for the shooting deaths of police officers: Daniel Faulkner and Werner Foerster respectively. Assata Shakur escaped to Cuba in 1979 and is still exiled their a fugitive from justice, but on her website continues to advocate revolutionary violence. She has reproduced on her website the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerilla by Carlos Marighella which has a chapter on terrorism and in its 1969 introduction states:

The accusation of "violence" or "terrorism" no longer has the negative meaning it used to have. It has acquired new clothing; a new color. It does not divide, it does not discredit; on the contrary, it represents a center of attraction. Today, to be "violent" or a "terrorist" is a quality that ennobles any honorable person, because it is an act worthy of a revolutionary engaged in armed struggle against the shameful military dictatorship and its atrocities.

The Cuban dictatorship published copies of the Mini-Manual in numerous languages and distributed copies worldwide in an effort to encourage urban guerrilla action and terrorism. Thats not to say that there have never been prisoners of conscience in the United States. For example during Woodrow Wilson's presidency and especially during WWI one finds that freedom of speech and association were under assault and numerous Americans were arrested for exercising their basic rights. Today, Travis Bishop, a sergeant in the US army and a conscientious objector is serving a one year prison sentence for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan because of his religious beliefs. Travis is recognized by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience in the United States along with Victor Agosto who is now free but served 30-day sentence in August of 2009.

Prisoner of conscience

A prisoner of conscience is anyone imprisoned for the non-violent exercise of their beliefs. Independent journalists, human rights activists, and Project Varela petitioners currently imprisoned in Cuba are prisoners of conscience. According to Amnesty International, the human rights organization founded in 1961 a "prisoner of conscience" is someone imprisoned solely for the peaceful expression of their beliefs. The term was coined by Amnesty International's founder, civil rights lawyer Peter Benenson. For example in South Africa Steve Biko was identified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience whereas Nelson Mandela was not. Amnesty International representative's explanation in 1994 is pertinent to the present analysis:

Amnesty International adopted Nelson Mandela as a "forgotten prisoner" following his arrest and conviction in 1962 for alleged passport violations. In 1964 he spoke in his own defense at the famous Rivonia Trial and explained why he had chosen to organize an underground army (MK) and plan a campaign of violence directed towards the end of overthrowing the apartheid regime. Mandela's open avowal of chosing to use violence to further political ends caused a split within the ranks of Amnesty International, which at the time was very much smaller than it is now. One group advocated continuing to work unconditionally for Mandela's release, while the other urged that AI should adhere to its own principle and restrict it's efforts for unconditional release only to those political prisoners which they termed "prisoners of conscience" -- those who had neither used nor advocated violence. This would exclude Mandela from POC status, but would enable AI to continue to work on his behalf in terms of fair trial, and against the possibility of the death penalty.

This issue was debated at length at the 1964 congress in Canterbury England, and it was decided there in favor of the second position -- that is, not to make an exception for Mr Mandela. I would recommend that readers interested in the details and in the early history of Amnesty International should get ahold of a copy of Egon Larsen's --A Flame in Barbed Wire -- (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979). By the way, Amnesty International takes no official position on the justification of the use of violence. It only makes a distinction between those political prisoners who do and do not use or advocate its use as concerns its internal program of action on their behalfs.

President Mandela has long since acknowledged that Amnesty made its decision in good faith, and has thanked the organization for its work on behalf of thousands of other South African prisoners and detainees.

Amnesty has identified Cuban prisoners of conscience and repeatedly called for their release. Many of them arrested in the Cuban Black Spring of 2003 are now being forced into exile. The Cuban Spring documentary (available above) interviewed many of them prior to their 2003 imprisonment and their family members afterwards.

Today, Cuba's Doctor Oscar Elias Biscet and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi are two high profile examples of prisoners of conscience. Another, also from Cuba like Dr. Biscet, was Orlando Zapata Tamayo who died on February 23, 2010 on a water only hunger strike. Efforts by the dictatorship to rewrite his prison record following his death to present him as a common criminal failed because the charges and convictions were already public record. Amnesty had published years earlier the circumstances surrounding previous arrests and the final arrest that placed Orlando Zapata Tamayo in prison until his untimely death:

Most recently, he was arrested on the morning of 20 March 2003 whilst taking part in a hunger strike at the Fundación Jesús Yánez Pelletier, Jesús Yánez Pelletier Foundation, in Havana, to demand the release of Oscar Biscet and other political prisoners. He was reportedly taken to the Villa Marista State Security Headquarters. He has not been tried yet, but the prosecutor is reportedly asking for three years’ imprisonment for “desacato”, “desordenes publicos”, “public disorder”, and “desobediencia”.

Organizing teach-ins, engaging in a sit-in and taking part in a hunger strike demanding that your friends still imprisoned from the sit-in be released can send you to a maximum security prison in Cuba and lead you to be recognized as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. This was the case with Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who unlike Nelson Mandela neither participated in or personally advocated violence.

Therefore, every prisoner of conscience is a political prisoner, but not every political prisoner is a prisoner of conscience. It is a narrower definition that applies to individuals exercising their fundamental rights to effect change or simply exercise their freedoms through non-violent means nor advocating the use of violence. One can be non-violent but advocate or personally condone violence and because of that be denied recognition as a prisoner of conscience.

Human Rights vs. National Security Interests

Now governments delight in declaring dissidents traitors and mercenaries in pay to foreign governments and interests, but there are international standards that indicate what a legitimate claim of treason is and what is illegitimate.

A 1995 international conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, drafted a set of principles that provide guidance regarding permissible justifications for restricting rights known today as the Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information. These principles invoke legitimate reasons to invoke national security interests which are: "protecting a country's existence or its territorial integrity against the use or threat of force, or its capacity to respond to the threat or use of force, whether from an external source, such as a military threat, or an internal source, such as incitement to violent overthrow of the government."

The International Consensus

The Johannesburg Principles also outline illegitimate justifications for invoking national security interests which are: "protecting the government from embarrassment or exposure of wrongdoing, or to entrench a particular ideology, or to conceal information about the functioning of its public institutions, or to suppress industrial action."

Finally the Johannesburg Principles specify that certain types of expression should always be protected, including criticizing or insulting the government and its symbols; advocating nonviolent change of the government or policies of the government; and communicating human rights information to the outside world. Human Rights Watch in their 1999 report Cuba's Repressive Machinery and in their 2009 report New Castro, Same Cuba find that Cuba's state security laws violate these principles, illegitimately restricting fundamental rights both in the phrasing of the laws themselves and in their application against nonviolent dissidents.

The Cuban government's attack on foreign funding by either government or non-governmental funding of domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is not unique the Russians and Venezuelans are passing or trying to pass laws to cut off outside funding streams to civil society. While in the Cuban case dissenting from the official government line means in most cases losing your job and in some cases also being kicked out of your home it is easy to see that the policy is to only permit the existence of pro-government voices.

The debate on the objectivity of NGOs receiving foreign government money in a democratic context such as Israel where Canadian government funds are supporting Palestinian non governmental organizations is to have an open and frank dialogue between NGOs not to lock up Palestinians for receiving money from Canada. Another example, similar to Cuba, is Burma where the opposition faces brutal repression and the cutting off of domestic resources and thus needs to look for support from abroad.

Regimes, like the ones in Cuba and Burma, are desperate to suffocate all voices of dissent by demonizing, imprisoning, exiling, or killing them. Amnesty International's identification of prisoners of conscience is an important indicator of the presence or absence of basic freedoms in a country. The Johannesburg Principles exposes regimes, that hide behind the national security facade to impose a climate of fear, for what they are brutal dictatorships that systematically violate the human rights of their own citizens.

There is a big chasm between an individual advocating the violent overthrow of a government and using the force of arms to lash out against representatives of those in power and individuals exercising their fundamental human rights to achieve nonviolent change. The first is a political prisoner and the second is a prisoner of conscience. The question now is will you join with the regime in a complicity of silence or speak out on behalf of those trying to improve human rights standards through non-violent means and make some noise?

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. - Elie Wiesel