Cuban dissident Antúnez says women, blacks, provincial residents joining movement
by Juan O. Tamayo
El Nuevo Herald
Cuba’s dissident movement has been growing with the increased
involvement of women, blacks and provincial residents, the opposition
activist known as Antúnez said Wednesday during his first public
appearance in Miami.
Jorge Luís García Pérez also said that
although President Barack Obama’s decision to lift almost all
restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island was
well-intentioned, his administration also “broke a tradition of
solidarity” with dissidents.
Cubans separated by decades of
animosity have been able to see each other again, but “that’s not helped
at all” to improve political conditions on the island, García said in a
lengthy interview with El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald.
The 48-year-old García, regarded as one of Cuba’s more combative
dissidents and best known as Antúnez, spent 17 years in prison after
shouting anti-government slogans during a speech by then-Defense
Minister Raúl Castro in 1990.
He landed in Miami on Sunday on his
first-ever trip abroad even though he has had a U.S. visitors visa for
the past six or seven years. The Cuban government previously told him
that he could leave the island only if he agreed to stay out, he said.
García was the latest of the many dissidents allowed to travel abroad
after Havana eased its migration restrictions in January. They include
Guillermo Fariñas and Antonio Rodiles, blogger Yoani Sánchez and Ladies
in White leader Berta Soler.
While Cuba’s dissident groups were
traditionally led by older intellectuals, García said, they have been
growing in recent years with the addition of blacks like himself, women
like the Ladies in White and people who live outside of Havana.
The most aggressive resistance is currently in the provinces, he added,
because people there know and trust each other while residents of Havana
barely know their next-door neighbors. García lives in Placetas, a
municipality of 50,000 people in central Cuba.
Proof of the
growing resistance is in the number of anti-government signs that appear
at sunrise, he told the newspapers, the rising rate of abstentions in
elections and the complaints increasingly voiced by usually ultra-loyal
military officers.
Castro, who succeeded ailing brother Fidel in
2006, has replied with increased harassments, threats and detentions
after which activists are usually released in isolated rural roads,
García said.
Like most Cuban dissidents, García also dismissed
the economic reforms pushed by Castro for the past five years as an
attempt to make only the minimum changes required to ensure the survival
of the island’s communist political and economic system.
Although the reforms have brought about “some slight improvements in
some sectors of the population,” García added, overall “the people see
no improvement at all. The people see fraud.”
“The people want bread, but also freedom,” he said, adding that the opposition movement “will not settle for little changes.”
García also declared that the hierarchy of Cuba’s Catholic Church has
been insensitive to the work of the dissident groups and that Cardinal
Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana, “does not enjoy credibility”
among Cubans.
As for the foreign journalists based in Havana, he
said that dissidents regularly send them news releases, photos and
videos but they seldom publish the information. Cuba has expelled
several foreign journalists whose coverage they deemed too negative.
Reporters in Havana are either “insensitive to the pain” of the
opposition “or in clear complicity” with the government, he added.
García, who helped found the National Movement for Civic Resistance
Pedro Luis Boitel, and his wife, Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, an activist
in the Rosa Parks Movement for Civil Rights, plan to stay outside Cuba
for about two months.
They are scheduled to meet Friday in Miami
with Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart and former Rep.
Lincoln Diaz-Balart, all Miami Republicans. It is not yet known if they
will travel to Washington or other countries to speak about Cuba.
García said he had the impression that people outside the island
sometimes view the allegations of human rights and other abuses reported
by dissidents as likely exaggerations, although dissidents most often
don’t report all they suffer.
Government agents once attacked his
wife and other women dissidents with machetes, he said. And he added
that a prison guard once threw a rope into his cell and said, “Look,
black guy. So you can hang yourself.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/08/3549600/cuban-dissident-antunez-says-women.html
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