Christian Liberation Movement information update on prisoner of conscience, MCL National Coordinator Eduardo Cardet

 Christian Liberation Movement leader unjustly imprisoned
 

Cuban prisoner of conscience Eduardo Cardet

UPDATED INFORMATION as of April 13, 2017

By the Christian Liberation Movement
 
Update 04/13 Eduardo Cardet continues to receive pressure and threats in jail. They tell him that his appeals are in vain, that he will fully comply with the three year prison sentence and that he will not be transferred to an open center (which is what would correspond to him)

The family is worried, and does not understand the cruelty directed against him.

 Source: http://www.oswaldopaya.org/es/2016/12/01/detenido-y-golpeado-eduardo-cardet-coordinador-nacional-del-mcl/

Previous reports:

• Cuba: Further information: Defender sentenced after criticizing Castro: Dr Eduardo Cardet Concepción  
• ODCA DEMANDS RELEASE OF ODCA VICE PRESIDENT IN CUBA EDUARDO CARDET 
• Cuba: Activist sentenced to three years in jail after criticising Fidel Castro 
• Cuba should be removed from UN Human Rights Council until Castro frees Eduardo Cardet
• Send a message to the Castro regime: Free Eduardo Cardet!  

Castro’s war against human rights in Cuba

"We too, we Cubans, have the right to rights. We are human beings…" - Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, July 15, 2010, National Catholic Register

Human rights are those rights that pertain to you because you are a human being. This was once understood by the Cuban government but that all changed six decades ago.

Past is prologue

The Cuban diplomatic delegation representing what would be the last democratic government of Cuba, along with other Latin American governments, in the aftermath of WWII pushed hard for a human rights covenant.

On December 10, 1948 the countries of the world agreed upon a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that listed 30 articles outlining these rights.

Cuba’s last democratically elected president Carlos Prio Socarras was overthrown by Fulgencio Batista on March 10, 1952. Human rights and democracy began what would become a six decade long retreat.

Fidel Castro led an insurrection that claimed as its aim the democratic restoration of the republic, and the defense of human rights but in reality plotted replacing an authoritarian dictatorship with a totalitarian, communist regime that has now been in power 58 years.

Under authoritarian dictator Batista passive acceptance of the regime was sufficient but with Castro's totalitarian regime active support is necessary to avoid punishment. The Batista regime on paper maintained democratic norms, but Fidel Castro did away with them punishing all dissent with force of law.

Legal repression

All rights and freedoms in Cuba under the Castro regime are subordinated to the communist dictatorship and this reality is reflected in the Cuban Constitution.

The current system recognizes only one legal political party in Article 5 of said constitution which is the Communist Party of Cuba, described as "the organized vanguard of the Cuban nation, is the highest leading force of society and of the state, which organizes and guides the common effort toward the goals of the construction of socialism and the progress toward a communist society."

Article 62 of the 1992 Cuban Constitution states:

“None of the freedoms which are recognized for citizens can be exercised contrary to what is established in the Constitution and by law, or contrary to the existence and objectives of the socialist state, or contrary to the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism and communism. Violations of this principle can be punished by law.”

This is also reflected in Article 103 of the Cuban criminal code which outlaws political dissent as “enemy propaganda”:

1. Any person who: a) incites against the social order, international solidarity or the communist State, by means of oral or written propaganda or in any other way; b) prepares, distributes or possesses propaganda of the type referred to in paragraph (a) preceding; shall be punished with one to eight years imprisonment. [...] 3. If mass communication media are used for performance of the acts referred to in (1) and (2) of this article, the penalty shall be seven to fifteen years imprisonment. [...]

 Pre-Crime Cuban-style: "Dangerousness"

Science fiction author Philip K. Dick called it pre-crime but the Castro regime calls it a predilection to social dangerousness and defines it as follows:

Article 72. A dangerous state is defined as the special predisposition of a person to commit crimes, demonstrated by conduct that is manifestly inconsistent with the norms of socialist ethics. 

Article 75. A person who, though not in one of the dangerous states specified in Article 73, by virtue of links or dealings with persons potentially dangerous to society, to others, and to the social, economic, and political order of the socialist state may be predisposed to crime shall be warned by the competent police authority as to prevent him or her from engaging in activities that are dangerous to society or criminal in nature.

In 1996 Law 88, also known as the gag law, expanded restrictions on freedom of expression and association increasing prison sentences to 20-years. Many of the independent journalists, human rights activists, Varela project activists, and independent librarians arrested during the March 2003 crackdown were tried and sentenced under this law. All of them were identified by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience. Persons imprisoned for nonviolently exercising their internationally recognized human rights.

Cubans isolated for decades

Human rights experts have been systematically barred from entering Cuba for decades. The last time the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch were granted permission to enter a Cuban prison was in 1988. The International Committee of the Red Cross prior to that had not had access since 1959. 

Compare this to over 100 International Committee of the Red Cross inspections of the notorious US Guantanamo Detention Center since 2003 compared to one inspection of Cuba’s prisons in 58 years.

Amnesty International in its 2016/2017 world report cited that “Cuba is the only country in the Americas where authorities didn't grant them permission to visit.”

This systematic rejection of international human rights standards, international oversight,  and outlawing of dissent has meant that Cubans  have had no recourse but international institutions and international law to defend their rights. Attempts to use national laws led to the Cuban Constitution being declared unchangeable in 2002 and 75 activists sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the spring of 2003.

This has also meant that over the past 58 years Cubans have been subjected to summary executions, extrajudicial executions, torture, arbitrary detention for decades in cruel and unusual conditions, forced internal exile and a long list of horrors too long to list here.

Consider the following:

A family of four was detained on November 27, 2016 and three siblings sentenced to a year prison for going outside during the official mourning period for Dictator Castro. The twin sisters and brother went on hunger strike on March 7, 2017 to protest the unjust imprisonment and nearly died before being released on April 7th following international outrage. Mom was sentenced to a year under house arrest.

Eduardo Cardet, a Cuban physician and human rights defender, was beaten up in front of his wife and two kids by the secret police on November 30, 2016 for speaking critically of Fidel Castro's legacy. He was sentenced to three years in prison following a show trial on March 20, 2017.

There is also the case of a student who failing to actively lie and say what the dictatorship wanted paid a high price. David Mauri Cardoso, age 22, was expelled from university when he honestly answered a question about Castro in an exam in January of 2017 and described him as a dictator. He was being forced to lie or speak the truth and suffer the consequences.    

Opposition activists such as the Ladies in White are regularly beaten and harassed for exercising their right to peaceful assembly. Other non-violent activists such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (July 22, 2012) have been murdered and there have been no consequences.

The totalitarian nature of the Castro regime remains intact. Cubans need the solidarity of the international community to provide some protection against the dictatorship that has spent six decades waging war against human rights in Cuba.

Why has the Castro regime systematically barred human rights experts from Cuba ?

International Committee of the Red Cross has been able to visit the U.S. Guantanamo Detention Center to report on detainees over 100 times while the Castro regime allowed one visit in 1988.

Protesting Guantanamo Detention Center but silence on Castro's prison complex

Human rights experts have been systematically barred from entering Cuba for years. The last time the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch were granted permission to enter a Cuban prison was in 1988. The International Committee of the Red Cross prior to that had not had access since 1959.

Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons arrived in Cuba today, April 10th to examine the "challenges Cuba faces in addressing trafficking for sexual and labour exploitation, as well as any other forms of trafficking." Human trafficking is a big problem in Cuba, addressed in an earlier post, and one hopes that Ms. Grazia Giammarinaro is able to see beyond the Potemkin experience that Cuban officials will present to her. It will be interesting to learn how much access she will have to fulfill her mandate as a human rights expert.

Amnesty International in its 2016/2017 report stated the following:

"Independent human rights organizations and mechanisms, including UN Special Rapporteurs, did not have access to Cuba. Independent monitors were also denied access to prisons. Cuba remained the only country in the Americas region which Amnesty International did not have permission from authorities to visit."

The usual retort from the Castro regime and it's apologists is to cite the dismal human rights situation in the Guantanamo Naval Base. However the reason that so much is known and documented with regards to the prisoners there is because the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times.

Meanwhile the Castro regime over the past 58 years permitted only one visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Cuba's prisons and that was 29 years ago in 1988.


The lack of international outrage sends a message and that is that not allowing human rights organizations to visit prisons for decades has a lower cost then opening them up to international inspection.

You do the math. This doesn't add up to anything good in the long run.

Special rapporteurs, human trafficking in Cuba and fake news

How the Associated Press outdid the Obama State Department in downplaying Cuba's human trafficking problem.

Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially in women and children is reported to be arriving in Cuba on April 10th to examine the "challenges Cuba faces in addressing trafficking for sexual and labour exploitation, as well as any other forms of trafficking." The last time that the Castro regime announced that it was going to permit a visit by the UN expert on torture was in 2009 and it got a lot of positive publicity but never followed through. However no one is reporting on this episode now, but harking back to a 2007 visit by Jean Ziegler, who was the the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food but what goes unmentioned is that Mr. Ziegler has a pattern of pandering to tyrants. He was one of the founders of the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights that in 1998 was awarded to Fidel Castro. UN Watch, the Geneva based UN watchdog summarized Jean Ziegler's support for serial human rights violators:

In 1986, Mr. Ziegler served as advisor to Ethiopian dictator Colonel Mengistu on a constitution instituting one-party rule.  In 2002 he praised the Zimbabwean dictator, saying,  “Mugabe has history and morality with him.”  According to Le Monde, he paid visits to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Kim Il-Sung in North Korea.  Mr. Ziegler is also a long-time supporter of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose regime Mr. Ziegler hailed during an official visit in October [2007], while he refused to meet Cuban dissidents. Also this year, during an interview in Lebanon, Mr. Ziegler said, “I refuse to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

This is not the profile of a fair minded human rights expert. Let us hope that Ms. Giammarinaro does a better job in Cuba and at least meets with dissidents to get another view beyond the official line by the dictatorship. Something the last "independent expert" Mr. Ziegler refused to do.

Human trafficking in Cuba is an ongoing problem that the Obama State Department sought to downplay in its 2015 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report  reclassifying the island from Tier 3 to Tier 2 watch list and human rights experts at the State Department denounced its politicization at the time observing that there had been no improvement to justify the move. Nevertheless the Associated Press has once again gone a step further in fake news on Cuba by reporting that the United States "removed Cuba from a blacklist of countries that have failed to combat modern-day slavery after both countries formally restored diplomatic relations in July 2015." This is not true and Cuba remains on the blacklist on Tier 2.

The Obama State Department's last TIP report (2016) despite trying to minimize the Cuban governments involvement in human trafficking affirmed that "Cuba is a source and destination country for adults and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Child sex trafficking and child sex tourism occur within Cuba." Furthermore reported on how the Castro regime "uses some high school students in rural areas to harvest crops and does not pay them for their work but claims this work is not coerced."

Not mentioned in either the 2015 or 2016 TIP reports are the killings of fleeing refugees in December of 2014 and April of 2015. On December 16, 2014 the Cuban coastguard ram and sank a boat with 32 refugees, one of them, Diosbel Díaz Bioto, was killed. Yuriniesky Martínez Reina (age 28) was shot in the back and killed by state security chief Miguel Angel Río Seco Rodríguez in the Martí municipality of Matanzas, Cuba on April 9, 2015 for peacefully trying to leave Cuba. A group of young men were building a boat near Menéndez beach to flee the island, when they were spotted trying to leave and were shot at.

The 2016 report downplays the claims made by Cuban doctors that "Cuban officials force or coerce participation in the program" by giving credence to the Cuban government's claim that "the program is voluntary and well paid compared to jobs within Cuba."

Cuban doctors in Cuba make approximately $25 dollars a month in salary. In 2008 The Miami Herald reported that "more than 31,000 Cuban health workers -- most of them doctors -- who toil in 71 countries brought in $2.3 billion last year, ..., more than any other industry, including tourism. Most of them are paid $150 to $375 a month, a small percentage of the cash or trade benefits the Cuban government pockets in exchange for their work." 

 The Castro regime has exploited other Cubans in overseas work. The 2006 case of Cuban workers forced to work 112 hours a week for 3 cents an hour in Curaçao made the news. The workers had been unpaid; instead their compensation was deducted from Cuba’s debt to the Curaçao Drydock Company. Three workers sued the company accusing  "Curaçao Drydock Company of subjecting them to forced labour in a lawsuit in US federal court under the Alien Tort Claims Act and other laws.  They alleged that the company conspired with the Cuban Government to traffic them and other workers to Curaçao to work for Curaçao Drydock Company as part of a forced labour programme."

I look forward to reading Ms. Giammarinaro's report with great interest, but won't be following it in the Associated Press because too often to keep their bureau open in Cuba they get the news wrong. Reuters, The Miami Herald, and others although not perfect do a better job. Nevertheless they all failed to mention the last special rapporteur's support for dictators, the failure to follow through on the 2009 invite of the UN special rapporteur on torture and Cuba's terrible record on human trafficking. Nevertheless the Associated Press remained the worse of the worse in their reporting.

Excerpts of Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech on April 3, 1968

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968 in Memphis


Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 49 years ago on April 4, 1968. On the eve of his death he gave a prophetic speech that was also a call to nonviolent action and foreshadowing of his own death hours later.

I've Been to the Mountaintop Speech

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis.

[...]

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say,

"God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread.

[...]


Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base....

Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.

[...]

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm