#RaiseYourVoice for Cuba's prisoners of conscience and victims of regime violence

Please #RaiseYourVoice

Amnesty International is circulating an Urgent Action for Cuban artist Danilo Maldonado, known as El Sexto, and there are only 5 days and 11 hours remaining with 864 letters already sent out of a goal of 1,200.  Amnesty International in Australia provided more information on El Sexto's plight:

Meet Danilo Maldonaldo Machado, popularly known as El Sexto.

Danilo is a Cuban graffiti artist who campaigns for human rights through artistic work. He’s now in prison without charge for peacefully exercising his freedom of expression.
In 2014 Danilo was arrested by Cuban police for transporting two pigs to an art show with the names of Cuban leaders – ‘Raúl’ and ‘Fidel’ – painted on them. Officials accused Danilo of “aggravated contempt”, claiming that painting the pigs disrespected the Cuban leaders of the Revolution. Danilo was then imprisoned under the country’s harsh laws.

This is an attack on freedom of expression and an attempt to silence political criticism.
Danilo continues to fight for freedom. He participated in two hunger strikes which were both cut short after officials allegedly assured him that he’d be released. This wasn’t the case. Danilo remains in prison and needs your help.

Danilo’s mother has asked Amnesty to help her son. Please stand up and demand his freedom.

The good news is that Danilo Maldonado's plight is resonating in the press with reports in the BBC, and the Amnesty International campaign for his release.

The bad news is that this is the tip of the iceberg with more than 300 arrests this past Sunday and three activists still jailed for addressing Pope Francis last month. Not to mention that Danilo is not the only artist behind bars in Cuba.

Maikel Castillo Pérez  stage name, El Dkano - Maikel Oksobo

On January 28, 2015, the rapper Maikel Castillo Pérez  stage name, El Dkano - Maikel Oksobo, was sentenced to a year in prison in Havana. He was targeted for having used music to express his dissenting political opinions. El Dkano was sentenced under a charge known as ‘peligrosidad predelictiva’ (‘dangerousness that is likely leading to a crime’), which is used to imprison dissidents for long terms. His defense attorney told a reporter from Diario de Cuba that prosecutors wanted the judge to sentence him to five years. The 31-year-old’s lyrics are known for criticizing the Castro regime. He once described his style as that of someone who “doesn’t make concessions with a system full of liars.”

It is of great importance not only to raise your voice for Cuba's prisoners of conscience but also for Cuba's dissidents who have been the victims of regime violence such as Sirley Ávila León who was the victim of a regime orchestrated machete attack on May 24, 2015 that led to the loss of her left hand and crippling machete blows to her right arm and both knees. There have been other attacks prior to this one targeting opposition activists.

Lastly, it is important to raise you voice and demand truth and justice in the extrajudicial killings of nonviolent activists such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante who were targeted and murdered by state security on July 22, 2012.

How the lack of freedom to travel impacts a father and daughter

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Blanca Reyes: Denied entry to Cuba to visit her ailing dad

The press reports Cuban government statistics on travel to the island without the means to verify from an independent source while others talk about reforms. At the same time Cuban families continue to be divided by the communist dictatorship. One example, first reported back on August 14, has ended tragically.

Blanca Reyes had requested on July 22, 2013 permission to return to her homeland to visit her ailing 93 year old father and on August 13, 2013 was denied by a Cuban consulate official.  Two months later on October 13, 2013 Blanca tweeted:

"My dad fractured his hip, they are going to operate, and Cuban government denies me entrance to see him. He is 93 years old."

In a later tweet she raised an important question:

"Unable to enter your home, Cuba, can someone explain that? I address the people who still support the Cuban Government." 

Two days later on October 15, 2013 over twitter received the sad news that father and daughter were never again to be reunited:

"My father died today in Cuba did not see him for 9 years the Cuban government stopped me. UNTIL WHEN MY GOD?"

The denial of the freedom to travel in this particular case has led to the separation of a family and great suffering. Between 70,000 and 300,000 Cubans are banned from returning to their homeland under arbitrary criteria set up by the dictatorship.

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like so many other articles in that declaration, is systematically violated in Cuba today.

Courtesy of: http://www.blogactionday.org

What are human rights and why are they still important?

Taking Part In A Global Conversation on Human Rights

"Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness." W.L. Watkins (1907)

At first glance the definition of human rights should be self evident because it is the equivalent of asking what is the color of Napoleon's white horse. Human rights are those rights that pertain to you for being a human being. Since these rights are intrinsic to one's status as a human being they should also be universal.

Despite its simplicity the modern idea of a universal human rights standard was not even discussed until the 1550s. Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas in a debate over the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas offered for the first time a universal idea of human rights:

“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.”

Both the American and French revolutions tied the emergence of rights to particular national experiences while appealing to enlightenment values. At the same time critical voices, such as Edmund Burke, emerged that challenged the abstract rights discourse with concrete examples and in doing so provided a working alternative.

Less than 160 years after the French and American revolutions the failure of modern nation states to protect the rights of its citizens led to a new international consensus, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted and adopted on December 10, 1948 by the majority of nations that existed in the world at the time.

One of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was inspired by Christian humanism:

There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.

The formation of the United Nations was also an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was the first international human rights instrument and was signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia in April of 1948 nine months prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial role among them the Cuban delegation. 

The first draft of the Declaration was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them "were a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation, and the earlier Panamanian draft."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood.

The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this most important human rights document.

However, since 1948 the hopes that the United Nations and its human rights instruments would improve the human rights situation has not materialized. Genocides have continued to occur as have systematic human rights violations and countries with histories of respecting human rights standards have gone in the wrong direction during the ongoing war on terror. Several factors contributed to this lack of improvement.

As the Cold War heated up there was an attempt to split human rights along the bourgeois and socialist divide in order to justify the repression associated with totalitarian dictatorships. Fidel Castro in a 1986 interview spoke plainly on the matter:

"There is revolutionary liberty and there are other liberties which are bourgeois. It's difficult for me to talk about them to Europeans because bourgeois liberties were born there. In England, France, those countries. You talk of equality, liberty, fraternity. I think only our society can truly speak of equality. There's no equality between millionaires and beggars."

In the same interview the Cuban dictator went on and expanded his argument:

"Bourgeois liberties, no. We have two different concepts of freedom. Europeans have one, we have another.  Capitalism and socialism are not at all alike. Your political concepts of liberty, equality, justice are very different from ours. You try to measure a country like Cuba with European ideas. And we do not resign ourselves to or accept being measured by those standards."

The track record under Castro's communist regime is that when one set of rights are denied then all suffer. Both political and social rights have suffered in Cuba and this has included nightmarish episodes in the island's hospitals and system of health care.

This line of argument collapsed along with the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the universal human rights consensus reasserted itself only to be challenged by the Islamic bloc in 1990 with the passage of the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam which also weakens universal human rights standards.

Mary Robinson who was United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1998, when the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was celebrated and now co-chairs the new organization, Agenda for Human Rights funded by the Swiss government says the world has not lived up to the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “A reality that shames us frankly, that is not acceptable. If the world had taken seriously the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we would have a world where no parents would see their children waking up in the morning crying of hunger, dying from preventable diseases," said Robinson. "There would not be more than half a million mothers dying giving birth. We would have a different world and it would be a much more secure world, of course."

This leads to a sobering conclusion that the failure of nation states to protect the human rights of their citizens was not remedied by centralizing responsibility in a supranational organization such as the United Nations. Mohandas Gandhi had foreseen and predicted the failure. Gandhi, a self-described socialist, was not an enthusiastic proponent of centralized power arguing: 

The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. [...] What I would personally prefer would be not centralization of power in the hands of the State, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the State. However, if it is unavoidable, I would support a minimum of State-ownership.

Human rights must be defended and protected from the bottom up not the top down.  The top down approach has failed, but the bottom up or grassroots approach has shown promise.

Over the past sixty years we have seen how individuals and non-governmental organizations have defended human rights and exposed the crimes of the State and other parties. This has been carried out in a decentralized and non-violent fashion. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Human Rights First, Reporters without Borders, and other non-governmental organizations have operated at the international level in collaboration with national and local human rights organizations. 

At the national and local level groups of individuals organizing and challenging brutal and murderous regimes such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina against a military junta that disappeared 30,000 Argentines in 1970s and early 1980s and today in totalitarian Cuba the Ladies in White demand freedom and human rights with open non-violent displays of defiance pressuring dictatorships to meet their demands.

Prior to his assassination Mohandas Gandhi responded to the 1948 United Nations Committee charged with drafting what would later become the human rights charter stating: “All rights to be deserved and preserved come from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this fundamental statement perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of man and woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a document that outlines existing rights but its continued relevance and importance depends on human beings, that means each one of us, on this planet doing our duty to defend and respect these rights.

Courtesy of: http://www.blogactionday.org