Cuba's Call to Freedom Remembered 150 Years Later By Honoring Laura Pollán Who Risked All for Liberty

Cuba's Yara Proclamation 150 years later and honoring Laura Pollán seven years after her death.

Laura Inés Pollán Toledo:  February 13, 1948 – October 14, 2011

150 years ago on October 10, 1868 a Cuban planter and lawyer, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes del Castillo, sounding a bell gathered his slaves together and told them that they were free and if they chose they could join him and his compatriots in the struggle for a new nation. The nearest town to the plantation was called Yara and this cry for freedom became known as the "Grito de Yara" the (Cry of Yara). This initial act led to ten years of war with Spain and although ending in a frustrating and temporary peace under continued Spanish rule it did much to forge the Cuban character.

Six years and three months ago not far from Yara in the same province of Bayamo, two Cuban patriots Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante, died under suspicious circumstances in what appears to have been an extra-judicial killing disguised as a car accident. 

In four days, the seven year observance of another appalling anniversary: the untimely death of opposition leader Laura Inés Pollán Toledo through what a Cuban medical doctor described as purposeful medical neglect. On October 14, 2011, Laura Pollan, one of the founders of the Ladies in White died, after years of suffering physical and psychological assaults against her person. She would become a victim of the Cuban healthcare system suffering and dying over the course of a matter of days while under the supervision of doctors who were revolutionaries first and doctors second.

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes never got to see Cuban independence nor even the end of the Ten Years war he died in 1874. Unfortunately, as with Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo and de Céspedes we are seeing another generation of heroes continuing the drive for Cuban freedom but dying before achieving their goal. It is for this reason that we must remember and honor these men and women who have given their last full measure to free a country subjugated to more than six decades of dictatorship. Seven years of authoritarian tyranny with Fulgencio Batista followed by 59 years of totalitarian tyranny with the Castro brothers. The body count of innocent Cubans has been steadily rising these past six decades with brutal patterns of repression.

Let us remember Laura Pollan the school teacher who became an international human rights icon and sadly a martyr of the Cuban freedom movement. On October 14 there will be activities inside and outside of Cuba to remember and honor this remarkable and courageous woman.  No doubt throughout the world wide web there will be different efforts and actions underway to honor this Cuban mother and wife who was taken from us far to soon.




Thankfully some of her words and writings survive and we can learn from her wisdom and continue the struggle for a free Cuba.

"They can either kill us, put us in jail or release them. We will never stop marching no matter what happens." (2010) 

"We are going to continue. We are fighting for freedom and human rights.” (September 24, 2011) 

"As long as this government is around there will be prisoners because while they've let some go, they've put others in jail. It is a never-ending story." (2011) 

“If we must give our own lives in pursuit of the freedom of our Cuba that it be what God wants.” (September 24, 2011) 

"We are not going to stop. If you have imprisoned our sisters thinking that we would give up, they are mistaken. We are very united (...) all the women's movements are very close." (October 2, 2011) 

They tried to silence 75 voices, but now there are more than 75 voices shouting to the world the injustices the government has committed. (2004) 

“We ask on this Christmas Day for freedom for our political prisoners and for the Cuban people to have a better future.” (2005) 

“It's an extremely sad day for us, because Christmas is a family holiday. Since our husbands are not with us, our families cannot be complete.” (2005) 

"We fight for the freedom of our husbands, the union of our families. We love our men." (2005) 

“We would never have thought this would go on for so long.” (2006) 

"Human rights basically have been dead in our country for three years. Physically, I am tired. But I am still fighting, as long as I am alive and my husband is jailed, I am going to keep fighting. (2006)

“We are calling for freedom for all political prisoners.” (2006)

Carlos Prio Socarras: Cuba's last democratically elected president ( October 10,1948 - March 10, 1952)

There once was a free republic in Cuba.

Cuba's last democratic president, Carlos Prio Socarras, was elected by Cubans in free and fair elections on July 1, 1948 and assumed office 70 years ago today on October 10, 1948. He was not perfect, but he was a democrat who respected civil liberties and presided over years of prosperity and freedom for Cubans. 

President Prio belonged to the Autentico Party and was succeeding Ramon Grau San Martin, another member of the same political party in the Cuban presidency. Both men respected human rights, and this was reflected by the actions taken by their diplomats at the founding of the United Nations.

 
Cuban diplomats invited Winston Churchill to lunch at the Cuban Embassy in London in December of 1945 and proposed the creation of a human rights commission for the United Nations. Beginning in 1945 Cuba took part in the drafting of the declaration and submitted nine proposals of which five made it into the final document.

The late Bishop Agustín Román on December 16, 2006 spoke of this chapter in Cuban history and "the important role the delegation of the Republic of Cuba to the United Nations in 1948 in the drafting and promulgation of the Universal Charter, particularly by Drs. Dihigo Ernesto, Guillermo Belt, and Guy Pérez-Cisneros is a historical fact."

The final draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was recognized by these Cuban diplomats as one that would have been “accepted by that generous spirit who was the apostle of our independence: Jose Marti, the hero who -- as he turned his homeland into a nation -- gave us forever this generous rule: ‘With everyone and for the good of everyone.’”

On December 9, 2017 Pablo Pérez-Cisneros Barreto, the son of Guy Pérez-Cisneros y Bonnel, wrote of his father and the national legacy that is bound up in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    My late father believed that the declaration is the fruit of the great efforts of our civilization and human progress, a unique moment in which humanity came of age in its civic education; that it is also a source of inspiration for the formation of today’s citizens, and not cause for divisions among them. [...] Cuba had the distinction of being the country that proposed the finished declaration be put up for its final UN vote on Dec. 10, 1948. Hard to believe now but Cuba was once a leader when it came to human rights. And it is important to note that nine initiatives proposed in 1945’s Cuba became part of the final declaration, and that Cuba was the country that entrusted the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in San Francisco to prepare the declaration as early as 1946. The third preamble of the declaration is a copy of one of the articles of the famed 1940 Cuban Constitution, and Cuba had the initiative to include in the declaration the right to honor one’s human rights and reputation, as well as protect citizens against arbitrary government interference in their private lives.  Cuba presented the first amendment to the draft declaration which was accepted, adding the right of citizens of any member country to follow the vocation they choose. Cuba presented a second amendment which was also accepted — the right of every worker to receive an equitable and satisfactory payment for their work.

The Castro regime claims to be a nationalist regime proud of Cuba's accomplishments, but when it comes to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the role played by a democratic Cuba in 1948 in its drafting, it is silent and the document itself is banned in Cuba.

 
Both Carlos Prio Socarras and Ramon Grau San Martin were democrats who rejected hatred and offered a pluralistic path to governance. They were the anti-thesis of what came later.  President Prio Socarras warned Cubans not to be consumed by hatred, but his warnings were not heeded and as we approach more than six decades of dictatorship his words were all to prophetic.

Do not be overly alarmed, however, by my words. For there is no reign of evil in Cuba, nor is your nation governed by the violence unleashed. What I fear is that it may be one day, because you knew how to decipher the secret of the times when you warned that "whips will pick up who sows whips" and that "the one who unleashes winds harvests storms", and for that day of the harvest of storms and whips, you see me from now worried. Rise up and tell the few Cubans that tend to the garden of your island, that they uproot the poisonous flower of hatred and throw the plant into the abysses of oblivion!*

Cuban democracy ended on March 10, 1952 with Fulgencio Batista's coup and 68 years later it has still not returned. Sadly as the years pass and those who lived those glory years of democracy leave us they begin to be viewed as myth. Add to that the current dictatorship's rewriting of history to diminish this democratic age in order to justify its own tyrannical rule and one can understand how the world would forget Cuba's own democratic chapter. 

Carlos Prio, Ramon Grau, Carlos Hevia: Three Cuban presidents

 Yet there is one witness who spoke out on behalf of the Republic on October 16, 1953 that the tyranny cannot ignore: Fidel Castro. During his trial for the July 26, 1953 armed assault on the Moncada Barracks he addresed the court and described Ramon Grau's and Carlos Prío's presidencies:

Once upon a time there was a Republic. It had its Constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a President, a Congress and Courts of Law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom. The people were not satisfied with the government officials at that time, but they had the power to elect new officials and only a few days remained before they would do so. Public opinion was respected and heeded and all problems of common interest were freely discussed. There were political parties, radio and television debates and forums and public meetings. The whole nation pulsated with enthusiasm. This people had suffered greatly and although it was unhappy, it longed to be happy and had a right to be happy. It had been deceived many times and it looked upon the past with real horror. This country innocently believed that such a past could not return; the people were proud of their love of freedom and they carried their heads high in the conviction that liberty would be respected as a sacred right. They felt confident that no one would dare commit the crime of violating their democratic institutions. They wanted a change for the better, aspired to progress; and they saw all this at hand. All their hope was in the future.

President Carlos Prío Socarras and his wife Mary Tarrero de Prío went into exile in Miami, but his struggle for a democratic Cuba did not end there. He would be arrested on more than one occasion accused of smuggling arms to rebels in Cuba seeking to overthrow Fulgencio Batista.

According to Ramón L. Bonachea and Marta San Martin in their book The Cuban insurrection, 1952-1959 in August of 1956, Fidel Castro and Carlos Prío met at a small hotel in McAllen, Texas where for over an hour they discussed the future of the insurrection against Batista. Castro asked Prío for money and the former president agreed to finance Castro’s expedition to Cuba. Prío would send the Cuban guerrillas almost one quarter of a million dollars in arms and money. Prío got other associates to contribute thousands of dollars more in cash to the guerrillas.

President Harry Truman shakes hands with President Carlos Prio

The last constitutional president of Cuba had publicly announced his plan to return to the island as early as 1955 and did so during a brief "amnesty" in 1956 only to be expelled at gun point a short time later and would return again in January 1959 with Fulgencio Batista's departure into exile. Only to depart for exile again in December 1960 as they saw the new government turning into a military dictatorship.

On June 11, 1961 Carlos Prío Socarras addressed 1,200 Cubans in exile and pledged to aid the Cuban underground. He would go on to aide and plan efforts to combat Castro's military dictatorship as he had done earlier against Batista.

As the 1960s drew to a close and the armed struggle against Castro's dictatorship drew to a close Carlos Prío in 1973 sought to preempt efforts at a negotiated solution in which democratic Cubans were not participants boldly proposing that Cuban exiles seek to insert themselves in the dialogue taking place between Nixon and Breshnev and negotiate the island's future. The proposal was met with wariness and opposition going no where.

Carlos Prío Socarras died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound on April 5, 1977 in his garage in Miami. Carlos Prío from his youth battling the Machado dictatorship as a University student in the 1930s to his later struggles against Batista in the 1950s and Castro in the 1960s and 70s he spent a life struggling against dictatorships of all ideological tendencies. Seeing the destruction of Cuba and the suffering of the Cuban people led him to despair.

First Lady of Cuba: Maria Dolores Tarrero de Prío

The last First Lady of a free Cuba, Maria Dolores "Mary" Tarrero de Prío died in Miami on September 23, 2010 and was laid to rest on September 25, 2010. She was the widow of Carlos Prío Socarras, the last democratically elected president of Cuba. She was buried alongside her husband.

Seventy years after he became Cuba's last democratic president, part of Carlos Prio's legacy lives on in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and his own example of civility and the defense of freedom of expression during his presidency. These are values that deserve to be honored and a legacy to be both respected and defended.

*"No te alarmen en exceso, sin embargo, mis palabras. Pues no hay reino de la maldad en Cuba ni tu pueblo está regido por la violencia desatada. Lo que temo es que pueda estarlo un día, porque tu supiste descifrar el secreto de los tiempos cuando advertiste que «fustas recogerá quien siembra fustas» y que «el que desata vientos cosecha tempestades», y por ese día de la cosecha de tempestades y de fustas, me ves desde ahora preocupado. Levántate y diles a los pocos cubanos que cuidan en el jardín de tu isla la venenosa flor del odio, que la arranquen de raíz y arrojen la planta a los abismos del olvido!"

A Bitter Taste of Freedom: Paying Homage and Demanding Justice for Anna Politkovskaya

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera

"People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think."

 - Anna Politkovskaya  August 30, 1958 - October 7, 2006

Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist who spoke truth to power in Russia. She was a critic of Vladimir Putin. She was shot dead in her apartment on Putin's birthday in 2006. Six individuals have been brought to justice, but the mastermind remains free 12 years after her assassination. Below is a 2011 documentary about this courageous woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking the truth and reporting it.

She is missed. #JusticeForAnna #EndImpunity

Havel at 82: Celebrating Václav Havel's living legacy of hope

"The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle." - Václav Havel

Václav Havel born on October 5, 1936

Václav Havel was that rarest of statesmen, a great and good man. In his first New Year's Message in 1990 as President he addressed the country with a candor and truthfulness both rare and needed stating: "I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you." 

Today, we observe the 82nd anniversary of his birth. The Czech play write, who became a dissident, defended artists, a prisoner of conscience, president of Czechoslovakia, resigned in protest over the Velvet Divorce, then president of the Czech republic and finally citizen and play write once again. All the while he demonstrated his solidarity with victims of repression in his own country and around the world.

This was done not out of a sense of optimism, but out of hope.  Consider for a moment how Havel responded to the invasion of his homeland.

In 1968, after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, an effort by Czechoslovak communist reformers to build socialism with a human face, Havel wrote the following to the Czechoslovak President Alexander Dubcek who had been one of the reformers later purged: "Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance." 

Václav Havel's signature card for Charter 77

Havel believed that moral actions, no matter how small or futile they may appear at the time can have profound consequences for both freedom and a just society. It is because the world is not a puzzle to be solved but incredibly much more complex that decisions of right and wrong made by each person have such great importance.

President Havel, in a November 11, 2009 address to the European Parliament in Brussels issued a challenge to the European Union and warned of the consequences of failure:

"Above all, clear and unequivocal solidarity with all those confronted by totalitarian or authoritarian regimes wherever they are in the world. And economic or other particular interests should not hinder such solidarity. Even a minor, discreet and well-intentioned compromise can have fatal consequences– even if only in the long term, or indirectly. One must not retreat in the face of evil, because it is in the nature of evil to take advantage of every concession. Besides, Europe has already had its own unfortunate experience of appeasement policies. 

On the other hand he understood that living up to the challenge of unequivocal solidarity with those resisting totalitarian regimes would have unexpected positive consequences, not only in those countries living under dictatorship, but also lifting up the moral values of those true to themselves by practicing the values preached.

"Our support can help open-minded people or outspoken witnesses to the situation in North Korea, Burma, Iran, Tibet, Belarus, Cuba or anywhere else, much more than we think. But it will help us too. It will help us build a better world and also to be more true to ourselves; in other words, to put into practice the values that we proclaim in general terms."

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and President Václav Havel in Prague (2002)

At the same time, he did not link hope with success but rather the certainty that what one is doing is both good and coherent. In 1990 in the book, Disturbing the Peace, Havel explained how he viewed hope.

“Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

The fruits of his legacy can be seen in the work of Forum 2000, an annual gathering of politicians, philosophers, artists, scientists, and the public to reflect on important issues challenging civilization. The topic on the twentieth gathering of Forum 2000 was "The Courage to take Responsibility." In two days the 22nd gathering will focus on "Democracy: In need of a critical update?"  Václav Havel was born 82 years ago today and passed away seven years ago, but his legacy of good works live on. Take part in his legacy attending Forum 2000, in person if you are in Prague, or via social media and live stream video if you are elsewhere.

U.S. Department of State expresses concern about the plight of imprisoned Cuban pro-democracy activist on hunger strike

U.S. calls on Cuban government to free Mr. Nuñez Magdariaga.

The Wrongful Detention of Tomás Nuñez Magdariaga in Cuba

Heather Nauert
Department Spokesperson
Washington, DC
October 4, 2018

The United States is gravely concerned about the physical health of Cuban democratic activist Tomás Nuñez Magdariaga, who has been on a hunger strike for more than 50 days in protest against his wrongful imprisonment. We understand his health is in a critical state, and that the authorities have denied his family the opportunity to see him. Cuban authorities arrested Mr. Nunez, a member of Cuba’s largest opposition group, the Patriotic Union of Cuba, on false charges and convicted him in a sham trial, during which they denied him the opportunity to present witnesses in his favor.

Cuban democracy and human rights activists have long experienced and denounced the Cuban government’s use of arbitrary detention on spurious charges as a tool of repression. Mr. Nunez’s condition is cruel confirmation of these wrongful practices, and serves as a dark reminder that there is no due process for those who criticize the Cuban government. The United States condemns these practices in the strongest terms, and calls on the Cuban government to release Mr. Nunez, whose life hangs in the balance, and all political prisoners in Cuba.

Tomás Nuñez Magdariaga: Before and now on hunger strike