Thursday, March 26, 2020

Venezuela of the Castros scrutinized: Maduro charged with narco-terrorism, drug trafficking & other criminal charges

Where do you think he got the idea to do that from?


The United States Department of Justice announced today that Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 current and former Venezuelan Officials were charged with narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal charges. Maduro and other high ranking Venezuelan officials partnered with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to use cocaine as a weapon to “flood” the United States. The State Department is offering up to a 15 million dollar reward for  Nicolás Maduro's arrest and conviction, and up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of  Diosdado Cabello Rondón,  Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, and  Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones, and up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Luciano Marín Arango.

Venezuelan human rights defender and attorney Tamara Suju on March 19, 2020 in her article in El Nacional, "The Venezuela of the Castros and Díaz-Canel" put into historical context Venezuela's criminal regime.
"The criminal structure of Chavismo-Madurismo, and those members of the national armed forces that allowed it, will pass into history as the greatest shame and betrayal our country has seen in all its modern history. They not only denied two generations of Venezuelans the opportunity to improve their lives and live in peace, but they handed over the homeland to the oldest dictatorship in the continent in exchange for help remaining in power by controlling its people, persecuting, spying, repressing, torturing and humiliating its adversaries and sparking the current biblical exodus out of Venezuela."
Jackson Diehl  in The Washington Post  reported on May 24, 2015 in his article "A drug cartel’s power in Venezuela" that "Cuba’s communist regime and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been cut in on the trafficking [by the Venezuelans]."
Indicted co-conspirator Diosdado Cabello with Raul Castro and Bruno Rodriguez
 It is important to revisit communist Cuba's history of involvement in drug trafficking.

The Cuban dictatorship was placed on the list of state terror sponsors on March 1, 1982, after the U.S. State Department confirmed that the Cuban government was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group then battling to overthrow Colombia’s democratic government.

In the 1991 Frontline documentary, "Cuba and Cocaine", U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Jeff Karonis, stated, "We would observe in the middle of the day an air drop going on inside Cuban waters. The scenario would be for a small twin-engine airplane with maybe 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of cocaine to fly over Cuba, drop the drugs to a predesignated rendezvous point to several boats.  Then it would exit back down off Cuba, and many times a Cuban military vessel would be in the immediate vicinity, right on scene with them.''
During General Manuel Noriega's 1992 trial information emerged implicating the Castro regime in drug trafficking that was reported in the Sun Sentinel: "Federal prosecutors say Noriega traveled to Havana to ask [Fidel] Castro to mediate a potentially deadly dispute with top members of Colombia's Medellin cocaine cartel. They say the cartel chiefs were upset because a major drug lab had been seized in Panama despite payment of millions of dollars in protection money to Noriega. According to the Noriega indictment, Castro negotiated a peace accord between the cartel and Noriega at the 1984 meeting. The allegation forms a cornerstone of the racketeering and drug trafficking charges against Noriega." At the same time convicted cartel leader Carlos Lehder directly implicated Raul Castro and U.S. fugitive Robert Vesco "to route cocaine flights through Cuba."

Manuel Noriega and Fidel Castro
Christopher Dickey  World News Editor at The Daily Beast on June 4, 2018 wrote a well researched and documented article "How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela a Mafia State" that outlines the Castro regime's involvement in linking up Venezuelan officials with drug traffickers and guerilla groups, but begins with the 1989 Ochoa Trial, an effort by the Cuban autocrats to whitewash their drug trafficking image by executing the high ranking Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa in a political show trial. This ended one chapter of large scale drug trafficking for the Castros, but a new chapter began with the Chavez regime in Venezuela according to Dickey.
"In the years that followed the Ochoa trial, Cuba offered to cooperate with the United States fighting against drug traffickers. The Clinton administration shelved proposed indictments of the regime, and as relations gradually warmed, the U.S. would begin to liaise with Cuban authorities in the war on drugs. But at the same time the Cuban intelligence services were reaching out in other directions, to networks that would become the world’s biggest suppliers of cocaine: the narco-guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and  Venezuela’s security forces. 
Cuban counterintelligence is said to have tutored the Venezuelan spies, domestic and foreign, and helped to organize them to root out opposition to the regime of Hugo Chávez. Indeed, the Cubans taught them to do whatever might be necessary to survive.Over time, many of Chavez’s officers would become known as the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Suns: “cartel” because of their involvement with the drug trade on a scale that nobody in 1989 could have imagined; “the suns” for the insignias on the epaulets of Venezuela’s generals."
This arrangement has flooded drugs into the United States, and claimed many lives. Today's indictments of high ranking Venezuelan officials is a good start in cleaning up the scourge of drug trafficking in the Americas.
Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro

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When Communist Propaganda Runs Amuck: The Castro regime's tourist trap in Cuba

Communists lie people die

Italian tourist in Cuba: "“[w]e are in a terrible hospital, in awful sanitary conditions"
Channel News Asia reported on March 24th, "[a]s Latin American countries slowly began to close themselves off from the outside world against the threat of the virus over the last few weeks, Cuba continued to try to woo tourists - who brought in US$3.3 billion in 2018 - with wide-open borders and touting itself as a safe destination."

Cubanet reported on March 15th that Marta Cavallo, an Italian tourist diagnosed with coronavirus and admitted to the “Pedro Kourí” Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), over Facebook denounced conditions at the hospital, located west of Havana stating,“[w]e are in a terrible hospital, in awful sanitary conditions, when they give us food, they ask us to drink the soup from the plate, [without a spoon], there is not even toilet paper … they do not give us news of any kind, and it is impossible to talk with any doctor.”

Below is an advertisement posted on March 9, 2020 by Havanatur, a tourism company owned by the Cuban military that claims that because "Cuba is bathed in the rays of the sun all year, and taking pertinent measures they have greater strengths before COVID-19 and that Cuba is a safe destination"  showing a picture of folks on the beach in Cuba, without masks contrasted with two women with masks in an urban setting somewhere else.


On March 20, 2020, The Sun published "WHERE CAN I TRAVEL? Coronavirus travel advice: The full list of holiday destinations Brits can and can’t travel to" by Lisa Minot with a long list of countries either banning or putting strong restrictions on travel, but Cuba was still open for business:
"Cuba - No restrictions on entering the country. Screening on arrival, if presenting symptoms you may be taken to health facilities in Havana."
This at a time when Cuba is suffering from shortages of soap, and toiletries for Cubans in the island, and conditions in hospitals that do not meet minimum hygiene standards. Below is video smuggled out of a hospital in Cuba with patients exhibiting coronavirus symptoms.
 On March 11, 2020 the  official press reported that four Italian tourists who were staying at a hostel in the southern town of Trinidad after arriving at Havana airport on March 9, 2020 had presented respiratory symptoms and were taken to a hospital on March 10th, and on Wednesday the hospital confirmed three of the tourists had tested positive for the coronavirus.

This was most likely a clever move after Panama's Ministry of Health, a day earlier, on March 10th reported that two Panamanians, ages 55 and 29 who visited Cuba had tested positive for the coronavirus when they returned home.


The Castro regime has invested heavily in international propaganda campaigns, and doctor diplomacy (that often times turns out to be human trafficking) to create a positive, but false, image of Cuba as a medical super power. Worse yet, the Cuban dictatorship has a history of covering up epidemics in order to lure in unsuspecting tourists. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak the most recent documented outrage was a Zika outbreak in 2017.
The 2017 Zika hidden outbreak in Cuba should have given pause to those planning to travel to the island on holiday in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Yale School of Public Health’s Nathan Grubaugh and his colleagues in a 2019 report revealed a total of 5,700 Zika cases in 2017 that went unreported by the Castro regime, and observed that the “2017 Zika outbreak in Cuba was similar in size to the known 2016 outbreaks in countries with similar population sizes.”  

Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore said Cuba had "a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious," and that this was due to their desire to maintain high levels of tourism into the country.

The Castro regime has confirmed 57coronavirus cases, 1,479 people are hospitalized for surveillance and 37,788 are being checked in on by medical students. Based on past history, things are most probably far worse on the island.

This is what the Cuban military that runs tourism in Cuba delivered.
 
 
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Sunday, March 22, 2020

Cuba and China: A tale of two viral outbreaks

Trouble with China, North Korea, Cuba, and other communist dictatorships is that mendacity is part of their ideology, and there is no counterbalance in a totalitarian regime to hold them to account in the midst of an outbreak of disease.

Regimes in China and Cuba both seek political advantage in viral outbreaks
Pandemics have been with us throughout human history, but totalitarian regimes are a recent phenomenon. Both Cuba and China are totalitarian regimes and have a common playbook, and it can be seen with their responses to two recent viral outbreaks. It does not put people first, but the interests of their respective dictatorships.

First, let us briefly examine these two viruses and then how Cuban and Chinese officials responded to each of them.

Zika virus was identified in the Ziika Forest of Uganda in 1947 and spent decades spreading eastward through Asia and reaching the Americas with a major outbreak in 2015 -2017 that reached Cuba.

Zika virus
The Wuhan virus (SARS-CoV-2) the cause of a mysterious viral pneumonia cluster that first emerged in mid-November 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province was identified in December 2019 and has now spread around the world in the span of a few months.

Wuhan virus
Responses by Cuba and China although at different ends of a viral outbreak, with different characteristics, including mortality and rate of spread, are similar in how regimes covered up the severity of the epidemic in their respective countries, punishing whistleblowers, and with the aid of international organizations and media outlets preserving the narrative that they are competent administrators with an effective response to a viral outbreak.

The Cuban response to Zika 2015- 2017
Countries across the Western hemisphere reported outbreaks of Zika to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 - 2016 and travel advisories were issued. A WHO map showed Caribbean islands surrounding Cuba all having some level of a Zika outbreak, but Cuba remained clear.


 February 2, 2016: The Nation published “Zika Is Circling Cuba. What Will Happen When It Lands?” by Greg Grandin that also contained the subtitle “Cuba’s public-health campaigns are famously aggressive—but so is the Zika virus.” The author mentions that “[o]ver in Cuba, Zika has yet to make an appearance. It’s circling. There have been cases in Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands.”

The Nation author did not mention that the Cuban government in 1997 covered up a dengue outbreak, jailing a Cuban doctor who had gone public for “enemy propaganda.” Amnesty International provided additional detail on what had happened.
Dr  Desi  Mendoza  Rivero,  president of the Santiago  de  Cuba  Independent  Medical  Association, ... had been detained on 25 June 1997 in Santiago de Cuba, after making statements, which were disseminated by foreign media, about an epidemic of dengue fever in Santiago de Cuba  which,  according  to  him,  had  caused  several  deaths.  He  reportedly  accused  the authorities  of  covering  up  the  true  extent  of  the  epidemic  and  of  not  taking  sufficient measures to control it. He was brought to trial on 18 November 1997 and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, charged with "enemy propaganda."
Instead the magazine article claimed that “when dengue and chikungunya began to spread, the government stepped up its efforts at vector control, committed to contain any outbreak that might scare visitors away.” Grandin should read Katherine Hirschfeld's Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898, to obtain a fresh perspective from an academic.

February 23, 2016: Raul Castro announced that he was dispatching the Cuban military to keep Zika out of Cuba, and that the island had yet to report a single case of the disease.

September 2, 2016: The Associated Press reported on the regime’s containment efforts. “Cuba is among the few countries in the Western Hemisphere that have so far prevented significant spread of the disease blamed for birth defects in thousands of children. Only three people have caught Zika in Cuba.”



August 2, 2017: The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene published the paper “Why Did Zika Not Explode in Cuba?” citing “Cuba’s early and successful response to Zika, grounded in the country’s long-standing dengue prevention and control program, serves as a model of rapid mobilization of intersectoral efforts.” It also ignored reports that Cuba had jailed doctors and covered up prior epidemics.

News stories of Zika transmissions with a Cuba link should have raised questions. The first case of sexually transmitted Zika reported to the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County on August 1, 2017 was by a person whose partner had returned from Cuba with Zika symptoms.

January 2019: The New Scientist broke the news that "thousands of Zika virus cases went unreported in Cuba in 2017, according to an analysis of data on travelers to the Caribbean island. Veiling them may have led to many other cases that year."

Microcephaly is a birth defect associated with Zika
Yale School of Public Health’s Nathan Grubaugh and his colleagues estimated that the total cases of Zika in Cuba in 2017 alone would have been 5,700, and added that the “2017 Zika outbreak in Cuba was similar in size to the known 2016 outbreaks in countries with similar population sizes.”

Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore said “Cuba has a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious, and Zika is only mildly symptomatic in adults.” Zika can trigger paralysis (Guillain-Barré Syndrome), and in pregnant women, it may cause subsequent and severe birth defects in their babies such as microcephaly (abnormally small heads and brains that can require life-long specialized care).

Did the World Health Organization (WHO) call the Castro regime to account for this failure in reporting or address the dismal state of healthcare for the average Cuban?

The Chinese response to Wuhan virus 2019-2020
Caixin Media Company Ltd., a Beijing-based media group founded in 2010, has been pushing the limits of free speech in China with hard hitting investigative journalism that has taken a hard look at how the response to the Wuhan virus initially unfolded.

The chronology of what happened from mid-November 2019 through February 1st is taken primarily from their reporting.

Initial case of Wuhan virus was traced back to November 17, 2019.

Test results from multiple labs in December 2019 suggested there was an outbreak of a new virus with an “alarming similarity to the deadly SARS coronavirus that killed nearly 800 people between 2002 and 2003.”

Chinese doctors and scientists who were investigating the outbreak and warning of the danger were silenced and told to destroy samples, cease releasing test results and information about them. Those who continued to speak out suffered the consequences.

December 30, 2019: Dr. Li Wenliang “was one of several in Wuhan who sounded the first alarms and released initial evidence online. Li, who was punished by the Chinese government for releasing the information, allegedly perished from the Wuhan virus five weeks later.”

Dr. Li Wenliang
January 1, 2020: An official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered companies that were sequencing genomes of samples from Wuhan related to the new disease be stopped, the samples destroyed, and to “immediately cease releasing test results and information about the tests.”

Whistle-blowers arrested for warning about SARS-CoV-2
January 3, 2020: China’s National Health Commission (NHC), the communist regime’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish information related to the Wuhan virus, “and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The order, which Caixin has seen, did not specify any designated testing institutions.”

January 9, 2020: Chinese authorities announced that a novel coronavirus was behind Wuhan’s viral pneumonia outbreak. Transmissibility of the virus was downplayed, leaving the public unaware of the imminent danger.

January 11, 2020: Wuhan Municipal Health Commission resumed updating infection cases of the new virus after suspending reports for several days. But the government repeated its claim that there had been no medical worker infections and that there was no evidence of human transmission, and reported that the number of confirmed cases had dropped to 41.

January 14, 2020 WHO reports no evidence of human to human transmission
According to Ho-fung Hung, Professor in Political Economy at the Department of Sociology & School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in his article "Holding Beijing Accountable For The Coronavirus Is Not Racist" published in the Journal of Political Risk,"Genetic sequencing research shows that the first cases of Coronavirus in Europe and the US entered from China as early as mid-January when Beijing was still busy covering up about the disease and assuring the world nothing serious was going on."

January 20, 2020: Zhong Nanshan, a leading authority on respiratory health who came to national attention in his role fighting SARS, confirmed in a TV interview that the disease was spreading from person-to-person.

Two days later, Wuhan, a city of 11 million, was placed in lockdown.

January 23, 2020: World Health Organization (WHO), that had based its response on reports provided by the Chinese government, said “novel coronavirus is not a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).”

January 30, 2020: WHO declared the Wuhan Virus a PHEIC, but continued to defend the Chinese response as exemplary, despite the previous months cover-up and spread of the virus around the world.

On February 3, Xi Jinping in a speech to the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee emphasized the importance of “taking the initiative to influence international opinion” about the epidemic. "Since then," according to Professor Ho-fung Hung of Johns Hopkins University, "Chinese official media has been diligently criticizing foreign governments’ vigilance against the disease as overreaction and racism.. Ironically, Beijing chastised foreign governments for restricting travelers from China while it was itself putting tens of millions of Chinese citizens in lockdown."

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying "spread the misleading and unscientific notion that that the Coronavirus was less severe than the common flu in the US."  This shifted, but even a month later on March 4, 2020 the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman continued to talked down the severity of the outbreak, "The fact is that according to media reports, the 2009 H1N1 flu had a mortality rate of 17.4%. The mortality rate of MERS of 2012 was 34.4% and Ebola 40.4%. With China’s unrelenting efforts, the 2019-nCoV mortality rate in China is about 2.1%, much lower than the figures above. Since February 1, cured cases began to outnumber deaths. As of 12am February 3, a total of 632 patients have been cured and discharged. We have the confidence and the capability to win this battle."

Marcus Kolga in the March 20th essay "When will the Chinese government be held accountable for the spread of coronavirus?" raises a number of issues which are cited below with minor changes.

In contrast, Taiwan identified the outbreak and banned flights from Hubei before the end of 2019.
China did not identify the outbreak or limit flights until late January. During that time span five million people left Hubei, and the disease spread throughout China and the world.

Had China acted when Taiwan took action, the spread of the virus could have been reduced by 95 per cent. Thousands of lives, in China and around the world, would have been saved had China’s regime put aside its politics and acted swiftly.

Both the regimes in Cuba and China covered up the spread of viral outbreaks in their countries endangering lives to maintain the false narrative of superior health care. The two examples listed below are the most recent, but there have been others by both China and Cuba.

They continue to push these narratives in the midst of a global pandemic that may cost tens of millions of lives, and too many are willing to repeat their lies guaranteeing continued wrongdoing.

More examples of this "new standard of outbreak response" and archeologists of a future sentient species on Earth will be wondering how Homo Sapiens went extinct in the early 21st century.
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Friday, March 20, 2020

Good day for freedom in the Americas: OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro re-elected


The re-election of OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro today to the Organization of American States for a second five year term is good news for the Americas and especially Cubans and 
Venezuelans who wish to live in freedom. 

Congratulations Secretary General Almagro. #AlmagroYouStayInTheOAS 


Secretary Almagro understands the reality in Venezuela, and is campaigning against the Maduro regime being a member of the UN Human Rights Council.

The OAS Secretary General also understands the debt owed by the rest of the Americas to the Cuba, and the reality that exists under the Castro dictatorship on the island today.

We welcome his continued solidarity with these two peoples seeking to be free.
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Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Cuba's Black Spring Seventeen Years Later: A look back

We remember.

With Former Prisoner of Conscience Regis Iglesias at the UNHRC in 2013
There are days that one will never forget. Days that one remembers where they were when the phone call arrived and the news broke, but on March 18, 2003 began a month that I'll never forget. The calls began arriving at the Cuban Democratic Directorate from all over Cuba that human rights defenders and independent journalists were being rounded up and their homes searched by Cuban State Security agents. Over a span of 48 hours 75 activists who would become known as "the group of the 75" were rounded up and jailed.

Eleven days later would find me along with Jannet Rivero at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland and for both of us it was our first time there. Over the previous five years Janisset Rivero had represented the Cuban Democratic Directorate at the Commission. She prepared us and guided us around all the bureaucratic pitfalls. Our objective was to denounce the crackdown while relaying as much information as possible to human rights experts that wanted to know what was taking place. The detentions had taken place between March 18 and 19 but it was not until April 1, 2003 that relatives were notified of the summary trials that were held April 3 – 7, 2003 and the draconian prison sentences issued by the regime.

Reports circulated that prosecutors were requesting death penalties for some of the group of the 75. The death penalty had in fact been requested for both Jesús Mustafá Felipe and Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia.

At the same time another event transpired that demonstrated the willingness of the Castro regime to kill. On April 2, 2003 a ferry with 40 people on board going from Havana to Regla was hijacked by 11 Cubans who wanted to take it to the United States of America., but ran out of fuel 45 kilometers from the Cuban coastline.

The hijackers threatened to harm the passengers if there demands to flee Cuba were not met. However, the situation ended without violence and the regime in an official note announced that “all of those who had been on board were rescued and saved without so much as a shot or a scratch.”

The hijackers underwent summary trials between April 5 – 8, 2003 and three of them Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac, were sentenced to death and executed on April 11,2003.

The threat of death penalties being applied against the nonviolent activists and the summary nature with which the dictatorship would carry out the unjust sentence created a level of anxiety and pressure on all of us both in Geneva and in Miami working to relay the information as quickly and accurately as possible while seeking out press coverage and solidarity from others in order to pressure the dictatorship into not carrying out its threats. Over the course of our time there we spoke on five occasions before the Human Rights Commission about the situation in Cuba providing updates as events transpired.

On April 3, 2003 in the midst of the summary trials both of us addressed the United Nations Human Rights Commission on the agenda item "Question of the violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms in any part of the world"and summaries remain part of the official record:
JOHN SUAREZ, of Christian Democrat International, said that in recent days the Cuban Government had carried out one of its largest crackdowns ever against democratic opposition in Cuba. Homes were ransacked, books and computers confiscated and about 48 activists were arrested. During 2002 the number of assaults and arrests against independent journalists and human rights activists in Cuba had increased considerably. Taking advantage of the fact that the international community was primarily focused on the outbreak of war in Iraq, Cuban authorities had arrested dozens of non-violent activists in the past two weeks.
There were hundreds of political prisoners in Cuba. These defenders of human rights were systematically denied medical and religious attention and were held in provinces far from their places of residence.
JANNET RIVERO, of Liberal International, said the President of Liberation International had recently made an urgent appeal for the immediate release of dozens of human rights activists arrested in Cuba. During 2002, nearly 30 activists had been arrested and many were still in prison, not yet having been tried. Also during 2002, dozens of independent journalists had been arrested or fined for exercising their rights to inform and be informed freely. And more than 180 elementary, high school and college professors had been fired from their jobs or prevented from teaching for not responding unconditionally to the ideas and political campaigns of the Government. University students, meanwhile, had been expelled for signing a citizen initiative seeking the restoration of fundamental rights.
 On April 9, 2003 in the general debate on civil and political rights both of us again took the floor and in addition to the plight of the group of the 75 addressed the fate of other nonviolent activists:
JANNET RIVERO, of Liberal International, said attention must be paid to the policy of the Cuban Government of detaining political prisoners.  Some had been unjustly held for years, and recently there had been a wave of new repression against those advocating for human rights and democracy.  The repressive policy of Cuba had not stopped since 1959 and was aimed at keeping people from enjoying their civil and political rights.
Francisco Chaviano Gonzalez had been a prisoner of conscience for 15 years.  Liberal International pointed out that a Government that denied civil and political rights to its citizens was not a legitimate Government.  Liberal International called for the Cuban Government's repression of the Cuban people to cease.

JOHN SUAREZ, of Christian Democratic International, said that more than 100 human rights activists had suffered searches, arrests and expedited trials in Cuba.  Many had already been condemned to sentences of up to 26 years in prison for defending civil and political rights in the country.  On 7 April 2003, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was tried without due process and today was facing up to 25 years in prison for defending human rights in Cuba.  In Cuban prisons, political prisoners were denied medical assistance as a form of punishment for upholding their ideas.  Highly dangerous criminals were used by State Security to attack imprisoned activities, as was the case of Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina, a young activist whose jaw was broken in three parts, and who was severely beaten on three more occasions before being taken to the hospital.
 We continued to provide information and speak out at the United Nations Human Rights Commission and would continue do the same at the United Nations Human Rights Council that replaced it. More importantly, at the beginning we spoke for those who could not speak but as the years passed their families were able to speak out in Geneva addressing the countries of the world demanding their loved ones release, and eventually some of the former prisoners of conscience  themselves forcibly exiled would address the United Nations Human Rights Council such as Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina in 2012.

Below Blanca Gonzalez, a Lady in White, addressed the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2005 on the plight of her son Normando Hernandez.



Unfortunately, in 2013 at the United Nations Human Rights Council and in recent years, the interventions are no longer about only prisoners of conscience, and the torture and mistreatment of nonviolent activists, but their deaths under suspicious circumstances such as in the cases of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia, Laura  Pollán and now Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas.

What changed after 2003 that led the regime in Cuba to release from prison all the human rights defenders imprisoned during the Black Cuban spring?  The question also arises what has changed over the past four years that has led to the rise in the number of deaths of high profile human rights defenders in Cuba?

The formation of the human rights movement, the Ladies in White in March of 2003 led by capable women such as Laura  Pollán and Berta Soler who week in and week out challenged the repressive forces on the island with nonviolent civic resistance. Women marching with flowers, gladioli, through the streets of Havana demanding their loved ones freedom and the freedom of all political prisoners.  International human rights organizations played a crucial role in investigating and confirming that these activists were indeed prisoners of conscience.

International Committee for Democracy in Cuba
At the same time an international campaign led by members of parliament and former heads of state that petitioned and lobbied the Cuban government to release its prisoners of conscience made a great impact. The International Committee for Democracy in Cuba , an initiative proposed by Václav Havel, was formed in September of 2003 in response to the crackdown. All these factors combined with the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo on February 23, 2010 and rising violence against the Ladies in White by the regime and its failure to crush their nonviolent protests forced the regime to the negotiating table, but it had one more trick up its sleeve. Instead of directly meeting with the Ladies in White, thus being forced to recognize the nonviolent opposition movement, it sought the Catholic Church - not as a mediator between two opposing sides, as I'd first hoped - but the side the regime would negotiate with. This placed the Cuban Church in the unenviable task of taking the results of that conversation and call to the prisoners and their families and explain the regime's terms.

The release of the prisoners led to the international community lowering its guard and the dismantling of the committees whose sole objective the freedom of the group of the 75 had been achieved. This combined with a number of other factors led the Cuban regime to believe that it could literally get away with murder if it was done in a discrete matter. Despite the international attention and outrage over the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo other deaths failed to spark the same level of outcry and their frequency began to increase. Reaching into higher echelons of the opposition leadership, and until now reaching its culmination in the deaths of  Laura  Pollán and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas.

However it appears that the regime underestimated the Payá family's courage and persistence when making their calculations and there is now an international campaign underway to learn the truth and pursue justice, not revenge.

Both Oswaldo and Laura were not satisfied with a fraudulent change that would maintain the regime intact while granting it international legitimacy which would mean more money and credits that it needs to continue.

There are great challenges before the opposition but one of the lessons of the Cuban Black Spring and the decade that followed is that with courage, persistence and international solidarity even a brutal totalitarian dictatorship can be pressured into releasing all of its prisoners of conscience.

Unfortunately, failing to maintain the vigilance and the pressure only means that they were replaced by new ones and that the regime will retaliate and eliminate those it considers a threat when international vigilance is on the wane.

The good news is that seventeen years later Regis Iglesias, one of the prisoners of conscience of the Black Cuban Spring doesn't need me to speak for him at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The bad news is that he needs to be there addressing the extrajudicial killings of his friends Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante.

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