Cuban rapper Maykel Castillo Pérez jailed for defending human rights through his art on May 18, 2021 marked three years of unjust detention today

 #FreeMaykelOsorbo #PatriayVida #CubaIsADictatorship #FreedomForPoliticalPrisoners  

Prisoner of Conscience: Maykel Castillo Pérez

Maykel Castillo Pérez, a prisoner of conscience, artist, musician, and two-time Grammy winner, was imprisoned on May 18, 2021, marking three years of illegal captivity today. Eliexer Márquez Duany, better known as El Funky shared a Tweet demonstrating the repression suffered by Maykel prior to his arrest, and describing the circumstances of his arrest, and trial. Below is an English translation followed by the actual Tweet.

Today, May 18, 2024, Maykel marks 3 years of detention, sentenced to 9 years in prison by a rigged court. “This was the last photo I was able to take with him where you can see the high surveillance he had on his house for state security, and after a few hours they took him shirtless and barefoot.”

Hoy 18/mayo/ 2024,c cumplen 3 años d la dtenciòn d Maykel sentencia2 a 9 años d privación d libertad x un 3bunal amañado.”Esta fue la ultima📸q pude tirarme con el donde c ve la alta vigilancia k tenía n su casa x la S.E q después a las horas c lo llevaron sin camisa y descalzo” pic.twitter.com/p1WTkVRW9y

— El Funky (@elfunkycuba) May 18, 2024

Cuban curator, and a friend of Maykel's, Anamely Ramos González observed this anniversary, to demand Maykel's release with images of the Cuban artist living in freedom.

On May 18, 2021, Maykel Castillo (Osorbo) was taken from his house without a shirt and shoes and did not return. He is the only musician with two Grammys, imprisoned, because #CubaIsADictatorship. Today, however, we want to remember Maykel as in the second photos of the collage, free. #FreeMaykelOsorbo 

El 18 de mayo 2021 Maykel Castillo (Osorbo) fue sacado d su casa sin camisa y sin zapatos y no regresó. Es el único músico con 2 Grammy, preso, porque #CubaEsUnaDictadura
Hoy, sin embargo, queremos recordar a Maykel como en las segundas fotos del collage, libre.#FreeMaykelOsorbo pic.twitter.com/SQQj47cmU9

— Anamely Ramos González (@AnamelyRamos) May 18, 2024

Cuban prisoner of conscience Maykel Castillo Pérez “Osorbo” was sentenced to nine years in prison by the Castro regime on June 24, 2022. 

Fellow musician and collaborator "El Funky" released a new music video on May 13, 2023, Warrior, dedicated to his unjustly imprisoned friends Maykel and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.

Today Amnesty International Tweeted a call to Miguel Diaz-Canel to free Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo.

Three years after the arrest of #MaykelOsorbo (@MaykelOsorbo349), we continue demanding the government of @DiazCanelB immediately and unconditionally release him.

Share for a #CubaWithoutRepression. 

Al cumplirse tres años de la detención de #MaykelOsorbo (@MaykelOsorbo349), seguimos demandando al gobierno de @DiazCanelB su liberación inmediata e incondicional.

Comparte por una #CubaSinRepresión. pic.twitter.com/3nBiP10qzv

— Amnistía Internacional Américas (@AmnistiaOnline) May 18, 2024

These international human rights organizations have been following his case closely. Amnesty International offered the following background information on Maykel on August 19, 2021.  

"Maykel Castillo Pérez,known by his stage name Maykel Osorbo, is a Cuban musician and human rights activist. He is one of the authors of “Patria y Vida”, a song critical of the Cuban government that has been adopted as a protest anthem. On 4 April 2021, Maykel was walking in Havana when police officers questioned him and attempted to arrest him but desisted in the face of complaints from other passersby who considered the action unjust."

Eight days later on April 12, 2021 Maykel was the victim of a physical assault engineered by the secret police. Maykel was assaulted in Havana by strangers as state security agents filmed the assault. Maykel Castillo denounced the incident on a live broadcast through Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara's social media where Maykel stated, "I'm a tough black," he said. "Not even a thousand beatings are going to make me cross my arms and close my mouth," he warned. He underscored the danger facing him, and the possible escalation of violence by the dictatorship, and his commitment to nonviolence. “If you break a bone, it stays broken. If I die for that, the fault will be yours, because you are a murderer, " he said, addressing the government. 

"On 18 May [2021], security agents arrived at his home and arrested him. He is being held at the Pinar del Río Provincial Prison under charges of 'assault', 'resistance', 'evasion of prisoners and detainees' and 'public disorder.'"

This is not his first time he was jailed for a matter of conscience. On September 21, 2018 Cuban rapper Maykel Castillo Pérez, "El Osorbo" protested against Decree 349/2018 during a show in Cuba. Decree 349 is a law that further restricts artistic freedoms in Cuba. Three days after the concert, he was detained by the Cuban secret police, and kept jailed. 

On March 20, 2019 Maykel was sentenced to one year and six months in prison, and learned of his sentence on April 22, 2019. He was released on October 23, 2019. 

Please spread the word on his plight, and the plight of hundreds of other Cubans jailed for exercising their freedom of expression. 

One final note, in addition to being a prisoner of conscience, artist, and musician, Maykel is also a father. Imagine 1,095 days kept away from your daughter in a grimy cell.

Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy 2024: Dissidents from Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua to Spotlight Abuses at 16th Geneva Summit

#NeverBeSilent #NeverBeIndifferent

GENEVA, April 2, 2024 — Leading dissidents and courageous activists worldwide will gather in Geneva, Switzerland on May 15, 2024, for the 16th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy at the Centre International de Conférences Genève.

The Summit, hosted by a coalition of 25 human rights organizations, will showcase the voices of the world’s bravest human rights defenders, many of whom have suffered torture, and give a vital platform to family members of political prisoners who are struggling to free their loved ones.

Featured speakers include:

• Carolina Barrero, Cuban art historian, writer, and pro-democracy activist who faced repression from the Cuban regime before fleeing to Spain, where Barrero continues her advocacy work.
•  Lesther Alemán, Nicaraguan student leader and activist who faced persecution after confronting Ortega in person. Alemán was held as a political prisoner before being exiled from Nicaragua in 2023.
• Lisa Yasko, Member of the Ukrainian Parliament at the forefront of Ukraine’s public diplomacy efforts following Russia’s invasion. Founder of the Yellow Blue Strategy initiative.
• Victor Navarro, Venezuelan journalist and rights advocate who endured arbitrary detention and torture for criticizing the Maduro regime. Now in exile in Argentina, Navarro developed a VR experience that shows what conditions are like for political prisoners in Venezuela’s infamous El Helicoide.
• Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Australian-British academic freed after two years in Iranian prison as a victim of hostage diplomacy. She endured solitary confinement and psychological torture at the hands of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

 Speakers are available for interviews before the event and more speakers are set to be announced soon. For a full list of speakers please see our media kit. For media inquiries or interview requests, please contact media@genevasummit.org.

The annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy assembles hundreds of brave dissidents, human rights activists, diplomats, journalists, and student leaders, shedding light on pressing global human rights issues. It offers a platform for activists, former prisoners, and heroes to share their struggles for democracy. The Summit draws hundreds of attendees and garners extensive media coverage worldwide from major media outlets including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, and TIME magazine.

Admission to this year’s Geneva Summit is free and open to the public, but registration is mandatory.

Tomorrow human rights heroes from across the globe will gather at #GenevaSummit2024.

Are you ready?

We are.

Watch live starting at 10AM CET: https://t.co/aEhIrpbfLy pic.twitter.com/6xpIeg1k9p

— The Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy (@GenevaSummit) May 14, 2024

Yom Hashoah: Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day

 "It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere." - Primo Levi, 1986 The Drowned and the Saved 

Never Forget 

Today, we observe Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.#YomHashoah #HolocaustRemembranceDay pic.twitter.com/ouMeXatgrr

— Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation (@ABMFusa) May 5, 2024

We must never forget what happened and remain vigilant now and in the future to battle against the mass destruction of innocent human beings.  News today with polls showing that new generations are ignorant of the Holocaust is deeply troubling. As Santayana observed, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is why we remember and say never again.  

The rising tide of Jewish hatred fed by Iran, Cuba, and other bad actors has exploded across university campuses across the world.

Never Again is Now

Unfortunately the international community has failed more than once since 1945 to prevent another mass slaughter. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge murdered between one fourth and one third of its population between 1975 and 1979, civil libertarian Nat Hentoff pointed to another genocide that could have been stopped in Rwanda in 1994, and we witnessed another in Syria in 2016 where religious minorities, including Christians, and Palestinian refugees were massacred. However, because the Assad regime is backed by Havana, and Tehran progressives on university campuses largely ignored these crimes against humanity.  

Today it is also important to remember that antisemitism is on the rise world wide, emboldened to gather in crowds chanting “F**k the Jews” "Where’s the Jews?" less than 48 hours after 1,200 innocent human beings were massacred in Israel on October 7, 2023. People of the Jewish faith need our solidarity and support in confronting this rising hatred and intolerance to ensure that what Nazi Germany did never be repeated.

Karl Marx in his own words at 206: Nothing to celebrate, much to remember and condemn

Anti-Semite, racist, advocate of terrorism, and genocide honored in Cuba.  While Castro regime agents spread anti-Jewish tropes over the internet, and back Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah in their war against Israel.

Miguel Diaz-Canel and Raul Castro (center) Photo by Abel Padrón Padilla

The Castro regime celebrated May Day, but Cuban workers have nothing to rejoice about. In Cuba, there are no legal independent unions, and workers do not have the right to strike or bargain collectively. 72% of Cubans live in poverty, defined by the World Bank as a daily income of less than $1.90. 

Pro-Castro travel agencies encourage visitors to attend May Day celebrations in Havana, and talk of hundreds of thousands of Cuban workers participating, but make no mention that it is obligatory, and if one fails to attend they can be fined, or fired. 

Nor is any mention made that non-authorized protests are brutally put down, live streaming it can get you a 15 year prison sentence, and officials are threatening the death penalty for taking part in nonviolent protests.

Prior to Cuba's 1959 communist revolution, that was supposed to empower workers, but stripped them of their rights and agency, Cuban trade unions for over a half century had achieved much for their members, and Cuban society at large.

Labor legislation passed in 1938 guaranteed workers' rights such as the minimum wage, pensions that assumed a constitutional character; and the creation of the Central of Workers of Cuba  Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC in Spanish) on January 28, 1939. All of the above made trade unionism an important factor in Cuban civil society. 

In 1940 a new Constitution was drawn up that respected labor rights, and strengthened them, and ushered in a period of competitive elections in which power was contested. The right to strike was recognized in the 1940 Constitution. This translated into real world gains for Cuban workers. For example, the sugar union "managed to impose a guarantee clause, thanks to which the workers of the sector obtained an extra salary of 13.42%, known as the sugar differential." In 1945, with half a million affiliates, the CTC was the second largest trade union in the region.

Professor James W. McGuire and Laura B. Frankel in their paper published in the Latin American Research Review, “Mortality Decline in Cuba, 1900-1959: Patterns, Comparisons, and Causes” found that “Cuba's progress relative to other Latin American countries at reducing infant mortality was even greater from 1900 to 1960 than from 1960 to 1995. During the earlier period, Cuba led all Latin American countries for which data are available at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. From 1960 to 1995, by contrast, it came in fourth and fifth respectively.”

#Cuba celebra el #1deMayo.#PorCubaJuntosCreamos 🇨🇺 pic.twitter.com/7liIZuGnFD

— Presidencia Cuba 🇨🇺 (@PresidenciaCuba) May 1, 2024

Marxism-Leninism took power in 1959, and worker's rights began to evaporate along with wealth generation in the wider society.

On January 22, 1959 the CTC was replaced by the CTC-Revolucionaria. In the X Congress, held in November 1959. And in the XI Congress, November 1961, the delegates renounced almost all the achievements of the labor movement: "the nine days of leave for sickness, the supplementary Christmas bonus, the weekly shift of 44 x 48 hours, the right to strike and an increase of 9.09%, among many others.

The Hotel Habana Libre that had been owned by the Hotel Workers Labor Union (Sindicato Cubano de Trabajadores de la Gastronomía ) retirement fund was seized by the revolutionary government. The Hospital Maternidad Obrera (built 1939) was taken and fell into disrepair without adequate funding and maintenance by the revolutionary government.Workers were required to do "voluntary work" that was not voluntary.

The original intellectual author of this debacle is Karl Marx, and unfortunately despite the repeated disasters his ideology has caused around the world, many continue to advance his political agenda. This includes the communist dictatorship in Cuba, and their fellow travelers in the western media.

 

 Marx's writings demonstrate that the German philosopher is the father of the Communist ideology that has cost over a 100 million lives, and other endemic problems found in Marxist regimes.  Marx's early formulation of communism is antisemitic and offers a "solution" to the "Jewish Problem."

"Money is the Jealous God of Israel, beside which no other God may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities.  The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself...by destroying the empirical essence of Judaism, the Jew will become impossible." Source Karl Marx-Engels Collected Works (London 1975ff),vol. iii,pp146-74

His early defense of using terror, one of the key elements of Totalitarianism is also problematic.

"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you.  When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5

"Far from opposing the so-called excesses, those examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired hateful memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a helping hand." Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vii p 239

The communist dictatorship in Cuba has followed this tradition repressing Jewish people in Cuba and collaborating with their enemies abroad to destroy the Jewish state of Israel, and members of its official media spread anti-Semitic tropes worldwide.

This genocidal impulse is not limited to Jewish people, and can also be found elsewhere in Marx's writings.

Karl Marx in the essay “Forced Emigration,” in the New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853 seems to view the elimination of classes and races as a necessary part of revolution:

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. 

In a July 30, 1862 letter to Frederick Engels, his chief benefactor, Marx described nineteenth-century German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, in a racist manner:

The Jewish Nigger Lassalle . . .fortunately departs at the end of this week . . . It is now absolutely clear to me that, as both the shape of his head and his hair texture shows – he descends from the Negros who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the paternal side hybridized with a nigger). Now this combination of Germanness and Jewishness with a primarily Negro substance creates a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also nigger-like.

This may explain why the Soviet Union, the first communist regime, allied with Nazi, Germany in 1939 to divide Poland and plunge the world into World War II. It also might explain why 23 years later Fidel Castro would contract former Nazi SS Waffen members to train Cuban troops in 1962.

Winston Churchill recognized the historic context of Marxism observing, "Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism." In more concrete terms Benito Mussolini, the first fascist dictator, was a Marxist before he evolved into a fascist.

There is much to remember and condemn on the 206th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. There is nothing to celebrate. 

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?" - Matthew 7:15-16

If you want to help Cuban workers, and the Cuban people more broadly then sign the petition to call on international labor unions to call on the Castro regime to restore labor rights in Cuba.

 

U.S. Senate approves aide for Ukraine: A great day for freedom. Bad day for Putin, Xi, Khamenei, Castro and other autocrats."

Slava Ukraini!

The United States Senate approved aide for Ukraine tonight. I quoted President Zelensky on X and recognized that it was a "great day for freedom. Bad day for Putin, Xi, Khamenei, Castro and other autocrats."

The United States has an obligation with regard to Ukraine. When negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow broke down on removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine in September 1993, Washington engaged in a trilateral process with Kyiv and Moscow. This resulted in the January 1994 Trilateral Statement. Ukraine agreed to transfer its nuclear warheads to Russia. 

Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Abandoning Ukraine in the short term may appear to guarantee peace, but appeasement will encourage more aggression, and more war.

This is not Moscow's first genocide against Ukrainians. Please watch the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol to get a glimpse of the brutality of this war launched by Putin in February 2022, and share it with others. It is free and available online.

A coalition of Cuban and Cuban American groups on January 18, 2024 made public an open letter titled "Ukraine must not be abandoned."  

In the letter, Cuban American members of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (ARC), a coalition of pro-democracy and human rights organizations that operate inside and outside Cuba, have called on the U.S. Congress “to expedite its proceedings and vote for the national security supplemental, which would provide Ukraine the desperately needed security assistance to thwart Russia’s onslaught.”

Cuban democrats are closely watching the events unfolding in Ukraine, and Havana's involvement in this unjust war, but lessons are also being learned from the example set by Ukrainians. 

We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

“Requiem for the Forgotten” a composition by Frank La Rocca was premiered on.March 15, 2024 at the Epiphany Church in Miami, Florida.  It also included a new hymn, “Offertory for Ukraine,” written by poet James Matthew Wilson to honor Catholic martyrs persecuted under Soviet communism, and by Putin today.