Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream: 50 Years Later in Cuba and the United States

Fifty years from that speech by Martin Luther King Jr. and like him I have a dream of a Cuba that is inclusive, plural and modern where we all fit. - Yoani Sanchez,  August 28, 2013 over twitter 

Martin Luther King Jr

Fifty years ago on August 28, 1963 much of the United States was in the midst of a struggle to do away with segregation and civil rights activists were struggling to pass voting rights legislation. The march on Washington D.C. that culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech sought to pressure legislators into voting for the legislation, and they succeeded.

This was a nonviolent revolution that sought justice, and changed the United States of America and today an African American president sits in the White House evidence that part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has been achieved.

Let us compare this with the violent revolution that sought to end a dictatorship ninety miles away from U.S. shores in Cuba that in 1963 was just four years old. Fifty years later and the Castro dictatorship that replaced the Batista dictatorship is still in power killing and repressing. Despite fraudulent statistics in areas of health care and education the reality of an ongoing cholera epidemic and the mass exodus of millions of Cubans demonstrates the nightmare that exists in Cuba today. Tonight an unjustly imprisoned Cuban is on his 30th day on hunger strike demanding to be free.

Let us also not forget that many who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the 1950s took up arms again against him in the 1960s in an armed struggle that failed wiping out all opposition: violent and nonviolent for years.

A nonviolent movement began to emerge out of the prisons in the mid 1970s and onto the streets in the mid 1980s yet there are voices that claim that nonviolence hasn't worked and counsel either collaboration with the dictatorship or violent resistance.

Sadly, despite the successes of the civil rights movement in the United States by 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. found his nonviolent posture challenged by a black power movement that instead of accelerating change in areas of social and economic justice brought it to a halt. Reverend King warned black activists not to take the way of Castro and Guevara:

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., like Gandhi before him, was assassinated on April 4, 1968 meanwhile Fidel Castro has survived to the present day hanging on to power and turning it over to his brother as the island of Cuba sinks into misery and despair.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas

 Meanwhile another courageous man of Christian faith, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and a youth leader from his movement who had been a seminarian were martyred on July 22, 2012 for advocating nonviolent change in Cuba. Oswaldo had managed to obtain more than 25,000 signatures in a Stalinist dictatorship demanding a vote to change the system and recognize the rights and dignity of Cubans. Like Martin Luther King Jr. he was killed but his ideas and example live on to inspire others.

The dream survives in others even when the dreamer has been cut down by the forces of repression and hatred.

A nonviolent moment in America: Martin Luther King Jr. - I Have A Dream Speech - August 28, 1963

Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington D.C. August 28, 1963

 Fifty years ago today in Washington D.C. following a nonviolent march on the capitol to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial over 250,000 Americans gathered together peacefully to demand that the United States live up to the values espoused in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution and the promise made  when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It was a nonviolent moment in American history in which citizens spoke truth to power. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the nation proclaiming his dream of the future of the United States.


Less than four years later in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. would say that the dream had "turned into a nightmare" with the war in Vietnam and the black power movement that embraced violence.

On April 4, 1968 he would be martyred in Memphis, Tennessee shot down by a sniper while he was supporting a sanitation workers strike. His widow, Coretta Scott King, would continue her husband's work marching with 42,000 people on April 8, 1968 and achieved a negotiated solution to the strikers demands.

Fifty years ago today was a moment of optimism and hope that generated positive changes across America with voting rights laws that would soon be passed and government institutionalized segregation become a thing of the past. This was not because of one speech but through a movement that with its disciplined nonviolent resistance changed the United States of America forever. Reverend King fifty years ago outlined the movement's nonviolent vision: 

"This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

 It is a message that is still relevant today not only in the United States but in many places around the world were injustice persists.

Iván Fernández Depestre: Day 29 on hunger strike

Political prisoner Iván Fernández Depestre on hunger strike: Day 29

 Iván Fernández Depestre is a Cuban national of 42 years of age born on October 28, 1971 with identity card number: 71102805363 who lives in the interior of Cuba in  Placetas, Villa Clara province. Since July 30, 2013 he has been and continues to be slowly dying on hunger strike protesting his unjust imprisonment since day one. Today marks 29 days on hunger strike and there are signs that his life is now in the balance.

 

I believe that hunger strikes should be a method of last resort that should be well thought out on all fronts in order to analyze the likelihood of success and its moral soundness in a particular circumstance.  

Nonviolence practitioner Michael Nagler has laid out five rules for hunger strikers to consider:

1. Have to be the right person for the job. Not to be used by just anybody.
2. Right audience. (You should only fast against someone who was in sympathy with you on a very deep level. Gandhi never fasted against the British.)
3. Doable demand
4. Last Resort
5. Consistent with the rest of your life

Iván Fernández Depestre should not be spending one day in prison for exercising his fundamental rights, but going on hunger strike as a first option is a tactic that I would not counsel. Furthermore, the Castro regime has no sympathy for the Cuban activist, and would happily see him die.

Nevertheless, the man's actions are nonviolent but I would remind activists entertaining following that line of action that there are at a minimum 197 different nonviolent actions that one could attempt before arriving at the extreme of carrying out a hunger strike.

However, other human rights defenders in the island and abroad are mobilized trying to save Iván Fernández's life and finding other means to pressure the regime in order to obtain his demand of freedom.
 

Iván has been jailed since July 30, 2013 under circumstances where anywhere else in the free world would just be the exercise of one's civic duty. Although not formally recognized, he is a prisoner of conscience.  On the afternoon of July 30, 2013 Iván together with other nonviolent opposition activists Loreto Hernández García, Yuniel Santana Hernández, así como Yaite Diasnelli Cruz Sosa, Xiomara Martin Jiménez and Donaida Pérez Paseiros carried out a march in memory of the Cuban martyr Frank País, who was killed in the struggle against Fulgencio Batista (the prior dictator to the Castro brothers).  

This was not his first demonstration. Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" has made public videos that show Iván taking part in nonviolent demonstrations for a free Cuba. On July 22, 2013 he marched in tribute to the memories of martyred dissident leaders Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante who both died under suspicious circumstances on July 22, 2012 in Cuba.


 
He was tried on August 2, 2013 in a secret, closed door and summary trial in Placetas, Villa Clara and condemned to 2 years in prison for "pre-crime social dangerousness." 

Diario de Cuba describes his current health status as critical. Now is the time to get the word out and demand this courageous activist's freedom using all creative, nonviolent means at our disposal.

Rosa Maria Paya Addresses the Christian Democrats of the Americas

Address by Rosa Maria Payá Acevedo, Christian Liberation Movement delegate at Christian Democratic Organization of America (ODCA) Congress in Mexico City on August 23, 2013

Rosa Maria Payá Acevedo addresses ODCA Congress

 Mr. President of ODCA, presidential candidates, Cuban brothers, dear friends all,

Thank you ODCA for the invitation and courageous support that has signified the cause of truth and rights for Cuba. Thank you for the recent recognition of the entire Cuban delegation, many in my country have given their lives for the cause of liberty as Mr. Ocejo reminded us is the cause of happiness.


"These are times of dangers and hopes for Cuba. The lack of freedom and rights maintains the people immersed in great disadvantages. The government complicates the situation because it refuses a democratic opening while Cubans want real change and transparency, fraud is imposed" warned my father, remembering that:

"There remain mechanisms of repression and surveillance of citizens, total dependence and obedience of the courts of the group in power and their ordinances, cruelty in prisons, systems of control, concepts and practices of exclusion and marking or targeting, the fence of laws which are anti-rights and undemocratic are maintained over the citizen, despotism, the lack of democratic instruments for citizens to decide and finally the power group itself still stands above its own laws and with all the privileges stated above.

Moreover poverty grows and deepens the differences, under the simulacrum of economic opening. Also the cult of personality and the concretion of dynastic succession are affirmed with the denial of Cuban’s civil and political rights. These factors are components of the totalitarian regime that has caused and continues to cause severe damage to the people, an anthropological damage. The antagonistic contradictions between the regime and the freedom and rights of citizens remain. What has changed then? Or what is changing in Cuba: the people."

These people do not want to move from savage communism to savage capitalism, nor want Russian style or Chinese style changes, the people of Cuba want to participate in building our future and to be happy.

Two months ago, after 54 years, before the evident failure, the government has accused people of not having "honesty, [...] decency, [...] shame, [...] decorum, [...] honor and [...] sensitivity" and has threatened to take coercive measures. But have not referred to the torture or the forced repatriation of Cuban migrants in a concentration camp in the Bahamas. Neither have they spoken about outbreaks of dengue and cholera, as they also did not do before with polyneuritis, or serious statistics on the spread of HIV in Cuba, or the rate of suicide and domestic crimes, or medical malpractice cases, or the use of abortion as birth control, or the many other expressions of the "culture of death" on the Island.

Nor have yet announced merchant ships smuggling ammunition and fully operational arms, violating the national security of a fraternal country like Panama, violating several UN resolutions on the dictatorship of North Korea, and putting innocent lives at risk

The Cuban government is not legitimate, as the Venezuelan government is not and will not be because presidents of the world shake hands with the impostors in power, it will be much less because they spearhead regional organizations like the CELAC, as is the case of the Cuban dictator, to the shame of Latin America. Legitimacy is delivered by the people at the polls, in free elections, in an atmosphere of respect and safety. We all know that's not what happened in April in Venezuela and we all know that has not occurred in Cuba for more than 60 years.

That is why I believe our challenge as the Christian Democratic family resides in looking at the people before power, the human being who lives and suffers from power when it is not at the service of society. But that fragments and sickens society to perpetuate itself. What we are seeing in some of the countries of our America at the turn of a decade find themselves divided on populism, whose greatest concordance is the obstinacy with which they cling to power. They also agree on their embracing Cuba's dictators.

The humanist values of defending life, truth, sustainable and inclusive economic freedom, equality, the environment, and fraternity join us here today. The budgets that we defend do not respond to ideological fundamentalism, but they are a radical proposal that need firm parties; requires strong and free spirits that do not form a complex before power or before fashion or before a trend or before apparent majorities. Other forces and languages inconsistent with democracy have shown no qualms in showing they are allies. I understand that our option involves taking the side of the poor of the Earth, which in our region are many and they are also those who cannot even say that they are poor, because a government has hijacked all their rights.

I believe in the Christian humanist project as a real and effective alternative to the so-called crisis of disorientation that our societies seem to suffer. The world is confused with epithets that others have put on us, these negative nuances that fill the term conservative, or counterpose us to so called progressive forces. It does not seem to me that we have to define ourselves from codes which other interests have imposed, the message embodied in the Christian humanist option is new and renovating in a world that has displaced human beings from the center of its priorities. In the words of my father: "neither the state nor the market, can be above the rights, the will and freedoms of persons."

Please do not abandon, let us not abandon those in America and beyond, from positions of danger fighting for the same concepts that bring us here today. Not without suffering, I am witness what a tyrant can do when they feel that those who oppose them have been abandoned, when they feel that their opponent is alone. My father, like Caldera, like Adenauer, thought: "Rights have no political color, or race, or culture. Nor dictatorships have political color. They are not right or left, they are only dictatorships "and recalled that" Cubans have not chosen the path of peace as a tactic, but because it is inseparable from the goal of our people. Experience tells us that violence begets violence and, when political changes are made in this way, you arrive at new forms of oppression and injustice," as painfully illustrated by the hundreds of people killed this week in Syria and Egypt.

Most of Cuba's peaceful opposition agrees to defend the road map of The Peoples Path, we expect you solidarity with the demands of this proposal. In this framework thousands of Cuban citizens ask for your support in our demand for a plebiscite of the legal initiative of the Varela Project. We do not seek another caudillo to replace a dictator; we have a proactive and inclusive solution waiting for your solidarity. We need your help to stop the violent repression of the state security of the Cuban government against members of the Cuban democratic movement, to be able to keep fighting for real change. The recognition of the entire truth is essential to the reconciliation process of the transition to democracy that we seek. We need your endorsement of the need for an independent investigation to clarify the circumstances of the attack on my father and Harold Cepero, to help remove the sense of impunity that the Cuban government has and with which it continues to repress with increasing violence.

The essential transformation is taking place in the minds and hearts of Cubans. It's time to begin the process of reconciliation that we all want, because what we want is to live in harmony and freedom. Long ago the people stopped trusting the regime and despite the repression and apathy fewer and fewer Cubans are being dominated by fear.

On December 5, 2011 my father reminded them in a message to this organization that "there have already been many conjectures, postulates and intellectual exercises. There have already been many. Now for you should be the time of solidarity with Cuba, with our demands:

We want all rights. These are the changes we want! Now Cubans are going to demand real change, now let's fight for free elections,” through a plebiscite!

I think that the authoritarian phenomena that have been generated in our region demonstrate that what you do for the freedom of the Cuban people will be a commitment for the good of all America.

God help us all

Many Thanks

Text translated from: http://freecubafoundation.blogspot.com/2013/08/rosa-maria-paya-se-dirige-los.html

Oswaldo and Harold : A year and a month later truth and justice still needed

Half of the Cuban people believe that the leader of Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Paya, was murdered. The other half know it. - William Cacer Diaz, over twitter August 22, 2013

Oswaldo and Harold: Murdered by Cuban State Security

397 days ago on a Sunday afternoon two decent and good men were killed. At the time the evidence and suspicions pointed to Cuban government involvement. There was speculation that a state security vehicle had crashed into the car in which Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante were traveling with two European visitors both members of political parties related by shared values to the Christian Liberation Movement killing them. However, over the past year the evidence that comes to light paints a more disturbing picture.

On June 2, 2012 an old American car struck Oswaldo's 1964 VW station wagon while he was driving it with his wife, Ofelia Acevedo in Havana, with such force that it knocked the vehicle onto its left side on the opposite side of the road. 

The Cuban government's attempt to manufacture a crash scene claiming that only one car was involved and that the driver had been speeding and hit a tree ran into some difficulties despite the show trial. The two Europeans who survived the crash on July 22, 2012 although detained and held incomunicado, drugged, and subjected to the tender mercies of Cuban state security had already send text messages abroad shortly after the crash indicating the involvement of another vehicle.

After they were released from confinement in Cuba and got back to their home countries and were able to talk the picture that emerges is that Oswaldo and Harold survived the accident that the injuries the Spaniard sustained were after the accident and with the butt of a gun. The two Cuban human rights defenders were murdered in cold blood by agents of Cuban State Security.

After the killings when the families sought justice they too were threatened with death and after rising violence and a machete attack against a Christian Liberation Movement member the rest of the  Payá family left Cuban and became political refugees.

The fact that the international community with some noble exceptions has remained indifferent before this atrocity and that to the present date a serious, international and transparent investigation has not been undertaken into the deaths of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero is an outrage that must be remedied.

Truth and justice for Oswaldo and Harold. Please take action and sign the petition demanding an international investigation into their deaths. Their families continue to struggle for and demand justice, the least we can do is demonstrate our solidarity in a concrete way.