Silent Vigil for Justice on Brothers to the Rescue Shootdown Anniversary for victims in Cuba and Venezuela

"Nonviolence is not an instrument of convenience, but a way of living in which one has to believe." - Mario Manuel de la Peña , murdered on February 24, 1996
 
"God's time is perfect but if we don't go out into the streets, the time of Maduro will be ETERNAL" - Génesis Carmona ( written on the poster she carried the day she was shot in the head by a Maduro government agent.), murdered on February 18, 2014
 

Silent Vigil at FIU on February 24, 2014

 Today the families and friends of Armando, Carlos, Mario and Pablo, the four men blown out of the sky while engaged in a search and rescue for rafters in the Florida Straits by air-to-air missile launched by a Cuban MiG, gathered as they have for the past 18 years in a silent vigil to mark the time when each plane was shot down: 3:21pm and 3:27pm on February 24, 1996.

As the years have passed the vigil has come to have added meaning, in 2010 on February 23 after years of torture and humiliation, prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo, denied water on and off for 18 days died while on a hunger strike. The next day when the vigil was held prayers were included for this brave human rights defenders.

Venezuelan woman: "I'm tired of being 'at least alive'"

Now, after two weeks of Venezuelan students shot in the head, run over, and tortured for nonviolently standing up and protesting for democracy in Venezuela they were also in our thoughts today. Génesis, Bassil, Roberto, José Ernesto and the other eight victims we know about and the many more that we don't know about are in our thoughts and prayers. Large numbers of Venezuelan youths have been disappeared since February 12, 2014.

Free Cubans and Venezuelans are joined together in resistance to the Castro and Maduro monstrosity that is emerging rapidly into existence and is known as Cubazuela. Venezuela is being merged into the Cuban totalitarian state where freedom is non-existent and all is fear, humiliation, shame, and terror.

Jorge Planas over Facebook has described the situation with chilling candor:

In Venezuela, the murderous regime, attacks churches and priests, murders women, students and men, more than 500 tortured, there are disappeared, and who appear, do so without life. This is not a myth as Dalmacio del Negro would say, this is the struggle of good against evil. I appreciate all your support and sharing this with others. 

It is is this reality that has led Venezuelan youths into the streets and 22 year old beauty queen Génesis Carmona to hold up a poster that said "God's time is perfect but if we don't go out into the streets, the time of Maduro will be ETERNAL" and for her sister at her funeral to say that she will continue. 

Last photo of Génesis Carmona (On the right)

 This is not a suicidal impulse born of grief but the lesser of two evils. As the wife of a Cuban pastor, Yoaxis Marcheco, in the island put it:"Better to risk your life then to live dying everyday as Cubans living inside Cuba do. Please show your solidarity with the peoples of Venezuela and Cuba in their struggle for freedom.

Flier distributed at FIU today for the Vigil

Former Cuban prisoner of conscience addresses UN Human Rights Council

Thank you Mr. President

My name is Regis Iglesias, Christian Liberation Movement spokesperson, poet and columnist. To defend human rights in my country, Cuba, I was arbitrarily arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison in April 2003 along with 74 other activists. I was in solitary confinement for a year and a half, sent to a prison hundreds of kilometers from my family, and I suffered the inhumane conditions of the prisons in Cuba.

Cuba, has been suffering for more than half a century a totalitarian and autocratic regime. The lack of political and civil liberties is critical, even when their own laws on the island leave loopholes for citizens to exercise and demand respect these inalienable rights of every human person.

Popular sovereignty has been hijacked by an oligarchy that refuses to respect the will of the people.

I was jailed for demanding, from these constitutional loopholes, a plebiscite in which the people express their sovereign will and claim their rights. After 7 years of captivity I was deported to Spain directly from prison.

The Cuban regime pursues, threatens, kidnaps, exiles, and uses violence with impunity against nonviolent opponents, kills them.

The military junta that has economic power in the island does not recognize or respect the the right of Cubans to freely enter or leave their own country, they are not walking towards reconciliation and the recognition of all rights for all Cubans. They are laying the groundwork to secure the continuity of its oligarchic project and creating greater social differences in the desolate and increasingly poor population of the island.

The voices of the victims of this repressive system, of those killed, Oswaldo Paya, Harold Cepero, Orlando Zapata, Roberto Ribalta, the voices of the prisoners and the repressed Sonia Garro, Yosvani Melchor, Calixto Martinez, Osvaldo Rodriguez, Gorky Aguila, Yris Pérez and many Cubans over 54 years of dictatorship demands solidarity so that we can begin the urgent process of liberation that brings reconciliation and happiness to all the children of Cuba.
 
Join us on our path to freedom, the path of the Cuban people.

Thank you.

Regis Iglesias spoke at 01:57:50 on item 49. for Ingenieurs du Monde http://webtv.un.org/watch/item:4-general-debate-contd-30th-meeting-22nd-regular-session-human-rights-council/2220338624001/#

Human Rights in Cuba: An endangered species

Human rights under siege in Cuba for over five decades

Human Rights Defenders in Cuba are a suspect class defined as mercenaries by the regime and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the Cuban government was a signatory on December 10, 1948 is a subversive document to be confiscated. Thousands of Cubans have been arbitrarily detained in 2012 alone for trying to exercise their human rights. Human rights defenders have been killed while in regime custody or died under suspicious circumstances.

It would not be a stretch to say that human rights are an endangered species in Cuba. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a generation as "the average span of time between the birth of parents and that of their offspring." A generation is about 30 years.

Cuba has been under some form of dictatorship since March 10, 1952 and under a totalitarian dictatorship since January 1, 1959 that means for the past 61 years human rights have been systematically violated and for the past 54 years human rights discourse has been systematically removed from the public sphere.

This means that two generations of Cubans have been born and grown up in a society where human rights have essentially been unknown. There have been times, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s when one might have thought human rights in Cuba extinct.

They would be wrong. From inside of the prisons and at the margins of society old activists who remembered and revered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and new generations of young activists, who although not knowledgeable of the history, found the desire for fundamental human rights hard wired in their conscience.

These factors led to the re-birth of Cuban civil society's defense of human rights in 1976 with formation of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights.

Over the next 37 years what began as a single organization formed behind prison walls and later situated in Havana grew into a nationwide movement and despite the brutal efforts of the dictatorship to destroy it - so far it has survived and thrived because human beings have an innate desire to be free and live with dignity. 

Despite the wishful thinking of the totalitarian despots in Cuba and their allies elsewhere: Cubans are human beings and have a right to their rights.

Courageous Cubans such as Jose Antonio Echeverria, Pedro Luis Boitel, Sebastian Arcos Bergnes, Mario de la Peña,Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, Armando Alejandre Jr.,Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Wilman Villar Mendoza, Juan Wilfredo Soto García, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Laura Inés Pollán Toledo, Harold Cepero Escalante and many more have given their lives in struggle for human rights and freedom in Cuba.  

With their sacrifice the world can bear witness that although endangered the struggle for human rights in Cuba continues via nonviolent means.

Voices in Cuba such as the Cuban rock n roller Ciro Diaz understands this reality and the sacrifice carried out by many and wrote a song about it called "El Precio" (The Price).  Here it is: