Property and human rights in Cuba

Without human rights the "right" to buy and sell property is a right to expropriate the poor.


Newsrooms around the world are reporting with great excitement that Cubans will be able for the first time in half a century to buy and sell property. It is being hailed as an expansion of economic freedom. The reality is much more somber. Human rights are non-existent in Cuba. There is a powerful elite known as the nomenklatura that has the power, in practice, to do whatever it wants regardless of the "law." Property rights are human rights. Human rights are non-existent in Cuba. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to the dictatorship, is a subversive document to be cited in court proceedings after being confiscated from the home of a dissident not something to to be taught in schools.

Human rights and the rule of law exist in order to protect those without power from the abuse of the powerful. Even in the United States this concept has been eroded with the 2005 Supreme Court decision Kelo vs. City of London which ratified the right of using government power to condemn private homes to benefit a property developer. However, in a communist state where the rule of law and human rights are not existent such as China for example Beijing has been described by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as "Kelo-on-steroids: neighborhoods are ripped down as skyscrapers go up."

"Enough of Evictions"

In reality, property can be taken from one owner and given to another with greater political influence. What has until now been a de facto practice for decades will be given a legal veneer in order to give the rich, powerful and politically connected [i.e. the nomenklatura] in Cuba the right to plunder the island. Variations of this took place in Russia and China. A practice that has already been going on for years in Cuba. Now the Cuban communists will become the oligarchs of a post-Castro Cuba.

Guillermo Fariñas arrested and beaten up for visiting hunger striker in hospital

Meanwhile, the level of violence against human rights defenders is increasing. EFE and AFP newswires reported that Guillermo Fariñas was arrested on Wednesday, November 2, 2011 while visiting hunger striker Alcides Rivera Rodríguez at the hospital. Guillermo's mother Alicia Hernandez told AFP that

"According to what I was told by someone who was with him, he was on his way in and (state agents) told him no, and there was some kind of melee and they arrested him. One of the agents held him, kept him in place, while another beat him. They have him in the police unit. They had never before physically abused him."

Jorge Luis Perez "Antunez" and Yris Pérez Aguilera
arrested and beaten for visiting hospitalized hunger striker

Three days earlier on October 31, 2011 around 4:00pm, activists Jorge Luis Perez "Antunez", Yris Pérez Aguilera [Antunez's wife], in the Arnaldo Milian Castro Hospital visiting Rivera Rodriguez, were beaten and arrested by State Security agents.

Also violently arrested before hand at around 3:15pm were activists Damaris Moya Portieles, Idania Yánez Contreras, Julio Columbié Batista and Yanisbel Valido among others totaling 20, who were gathered in the hospital lobby. Damaris Moya Portieles described what happened:

We were taken out of the hospital, dragged and beaten up to the cars of the Special Brigades, the patrol cars that state security had and well, the police. [...] From there we were taken to police instruction better known as "UPOC" and when we got there dragged out of the cars, and beaten up. I was already inside the unit and standing in front of the occupation room when my sister Idania Yanez Contreras arrived with three female guards from the Guamajal prison. They arrived hitting her with a closed fist to the abdomen, to the head, everywhere. There, I run to where the sister Idania Yanez Contreras is and try to take them off her although it is one of these women on top, she physically hold her hands completely peacefully saying please do not hit me any more. One of these women takes me by the hand and leads me to the front of the occupations room pushing me where the other two brought Idania by the hair and beat her and punched her.

Then I free myself from this woman that was holding me and I go to where my sisters Idania Yanes Contreras and Yanisbel Valido Pérez where. They were almost strangling Yanisbel because the color of her face was red, red, red and they were punching Idania a lot. Then a guard from Guamajal grabbed me who is a really tall and bulky woman who collides with me and my head falls on top of a fence. I'm hit on the head and there I have a very big bump, really huge. From there my hands and feet start to feel numb. It felt like my feet were inflamed ,they swelled up and they leave me lying on the floor and attack Idania with hits and punches she's dragged inward to the cell.

Idania Yánez Contreras badly beaten in the past and again this past week

Unfortunately, there is much more about this brutal episode and it is available in Spanish. Its disappointing that these three women and the other 17 activists, not being high profile international figures, suffer these brutal assaults and arrests that go unreported in the news wires. As in the case of Guillermo Fariñas they have suffered brutal beatings and arrest because they demonstrated their solidarity with a man who has spent a month on hunger strike demanding an end to the violence against nonviolent activists. The regime's response is to attack his visitors.

Both Idania Yánez Contreras and Yris Pérez Aguilera have been so badly beaten in the past that the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights had issued precautionary measures concerned about both women's physical integrity in 2011. Changes are taking place in Cuba but it is going from bad to worse. Without the rule of law, respect for human rights and escalating violence against nonviolent activists things are bound to get a lot worse.

Learn how to end tyranny without a blood bath

"If you fight with violence, you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon and you may be a brave but dead hero."- Gene Sharp


Gene Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983. Since its founding the institution has been and remains "dedicated to advancing the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflicts throughout the world. It is committed to the defense of freedom, democracy, and the reduction of political violence through the use of nonviolent action." Professor Sharp has been described as the Machiavelli of nonviolence.

Now through film, How to Start a Revolution, the world has an opportunity to learn about this man and his work. The world premiere was in Boston on September 18. There is a one time opportunity to see this film in South Florida. How to Start a Revolution, a documentary about non-violent strategic theoretician Gene Sharp premieres in South Florida at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival on Wednesday, November 9 at 5:30pm at Cinema Paradiso. Its in the middle of the week at a horrible time but it is worthwhile to do what you can to attend.



The Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter blog has been online since August 23, 2009 and has already referenced Dr. Sharp on several occasions. The author of this blog back in June 14-15, 1996 spent two days in a training led by Gene Sharp in Miami, Florida at Florida International University that was sponsored by Brothers to the Rescue. Sharp gave a presentation on how to face dictatorship's realistically. It was a life changing experience.

Gene Sharp is now 83 years old and his physical movement is limited but the strategic nonviolent vision, strategy and tactics that he has spent a life time teaching and writing about is on the march around the world. It is an alternative to violent wars that minimizes the human cost in confronting tyrants and despots around the world.

If you want to learn how to change the world without a blood bath then you should run to see this film and read as many of Gene Sharp's books as you can get your hands on.

South Florida Premiere of How to Start a Revolution, at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival on Wednesday, November 9 at 5:30pm at Cinema Paradiso located at 503 S.E. 6th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL - (954) 525-3456 Tickets available here.

Will you stand up for Tibet?

Today, November 2, 2011 is a Day of Action by Tibetans and Tibet-supporters being held the day before world leaders meet in Nice, France for a G20 Summit. Around the world demonstrations and actions are being carried out on behalf of the people of Tibet. Sadly, the regime in Cuba has been complicit in the suffering of the Tibetan people. All the more reason for Cubans and people of Cuban descent to demonstrate their solidarity with Tibet. Will you take a few moments to sign a petition and take a stand for Tibet? Additional information is available below.

Ten young Tibetans have set fire to themselves in eastern Tibet since March 2011; eight since 26 September. At least five have died including a nun. These unprecedented and truly desperate acts are a cry to the outside world for help.

Seven of these self-immolations are linked to Kirti Monastery in Ngaba, one of the largest and most influential monastic institutions in Tibet. China’s merciless and violent crackdown in Ngaba and throughout Tibet is intensifying Tibetan grievances and exacerbating the resentment and desperation felt across Tibet

This growing tragedy, if left unchecked, could spiral even further into a nation-wide crisis, unless the world acts now.

The international community, both citizens and governments, must Stand Up for Tibet. Global diplomatic intervention now will save Tibetan lives.

We demand a coordinated international response by world leaders to condemn China’s repressive measures in Ngaba and across Tibet, and to institute multi-lateral mechanisms to advocate for the Tibetan people. Most immediately, we call on China to withdraw its security forces from Ngaba and across Tibet now, and stop the ongoing harassment and torture of monks.

The Cuban Resistance and the Occupy Movement: Seeking justice on parallel paths

Divide et impera [Divide and conquer] - Julius Caesar
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere - Martin Luther King Jr.

Civic Resistance in Havana in 1994 and Occupy Wall Street in New York City in 2011

Today and tonight the world knows about arrests and demonstrations broken up by the police with reference to the Occupy movement but how many know about what has taken place in Cuba, just 90 miles away from US shores at the same time? New bureaus in Cuba are intimidated by the regime authorities into not fully reporting what is taking place because if they do they face expulsion from the country. The main way to learn what is taking place in Cuba is to follow Cuban activists and bloggers over twitter and that is still limited.

Two activists have been on hunger strike in Cuba since September 28, 2011 protesting the violence and increasing repression against activists by the dictatorship. Their names are Alcides Rivera Rodríguez and Rolando Ferrer Espinosa and they are both in critical condition. Alcides was admitted to the Hospital Arnaldo Milián Castro. At 4:00pm today activists who where at the hospital to support and accompany Alcides Rivera Rodríguez were beaten and arrested by State security units. There whereabouts are unknown. The activists who were assaulted and violently arrested in the hospital are Jorge Luis Pérez “Antúnez”,Yris Pérez Aguilera. Outside the hospital engaged in a sit-in, and also violently arrested were Damaris Moya Portieles, Idania Yánez Contreras, Julio Columbié Batista and Yanisbel Valido.

The reason the activists were present at the hospital is that human rights defenders have been known to die mysteriously from what amounts to purposeful medical neglect as appears to have been the case On October 14, 2011 with Laura Pollan and in 1997 with Sebastian Arcos Bergnes. On February 23, 2010, Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after 83 days on a water only hunger strike protesting torture and ill treatment. Prison authorities contributed to his death by denying him water on and off over a period of 18 days in an effort to break him.

The Occupy movement has a twitter account keeping a running count of arrests. As of October 31, 2011 at 10:00pm the number stood at 2,976. Over the course of 2011 until September 23 conservative estimates placed the number of Cubans arrested at Cuba at 2,221. Other estimates place the number of arrests at over 3,000. In Cuba, a number of the arrests are preemptive. State security agents arrest activists that the authorities believe will take part in a nonviolent protest sometime in the future and hold them until after the demonstration has taken place. The population of the United States is approximately 307 million and the population of Cuba is approximately 11.2 million.


Demonstration by Ladies in White violently broken up by state security agents (March 2010)

The comparison between the two is made here because today in a reply to an article in Women's E-News on women marching and protesting in Cuba there was a comment left that sought to down play what was taking place in Cuba drawing comparisons with the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS). The OWS doesn't need anyone to explain to it how an adversary will attempt to slander and libel a movement, but the Cuban democratic opposition has been the victim of a specially heinous campaign.

When 24-year old Scott Olsen had his skull fractured by a projectile in Oakland, California in the midst of the police breaking up an Occupy Oakland protest on October 25 ,2011 the news was broadcast throughout the country and around the world and widely denounced. But what of Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia who was beaten up by the political police for speaking out in a public park on May 5, 2011, required hospitalization, then died three days later. The news circled the world but was blacked out in Cuba.


Occupy Wall Street, Miami, FL in 2011

There are similarities between the Occupy movement and the civic movement in Cuba. Both are confronting injustices in their respective societies and both have opted to resist using nonviolent means. Activists in Cuba are holding workshops on nonviolence and discussing the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. One of them is Librado Linares, a former prisoner of conscience and member of the Cuban Reflection Movement. The same is being done within the Occupy movement and also over the internet with brief 140 character long rules for activists. One example are the 8 Rules authored by nonviolent action advocate Cynthia Boaz:

1) Nonviolent action AND speech, no matter what. Zero tolerance for violence.
2) Unity of message across orgs & people. Consistent demands, all should know them.
3) There must be a long-term and coherent strategy, not just tactics & actions.
4) Police should be seen as potential recruits to movement, not enemy.
5) Keep national/international audience in mind when framing. Goal is win people over.
6) Defensive strategies never win. Don't respond to attacks using their language.
7) Claim victory whenever possible. Important for morale.
8) Keep anger in check with solidarity actions & humor.

In both instances what is taking place transcends the ideological divide and is a question of basic rights. In both instances the adversary has sought out the age old strategy to divide and conquer while using fear as a wedge. Not to mention using agent provocateurs to discredit the movement.


End the Fed, New York City , NY in 2008

Nevertheless, while there is life there is hope and activists can learn from past mistakes. How to respond constructively to violent repression and maintain the movement whole in order to achieve desired change. One lesson learned time and again over the years is the need to at least speak out against injustice wherever it is present and when possible take action against it. This requires both solidarity and empathy with people of good will from around the world.


Uprising at the Seawall, Havana, Cuba 1994

The Economist remembers Laura Pollán

Laura Pollán Toledo, teacher and human-rights campaigner, died on October 14th, aged 63

Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition

THE house at 963 Calle Neptuno, in the centre of Havana, was small, but Laura Pollán kept it beautifully. The grey floor-tiles with their snowflake motif were always swept clean, even though her fluffy mongrel terrier shed his long hair everywhere, and though the door was kept open to get some air in from the bike-filled, rowdy, dusty street. In the front living room she had cane chairs with heart-shaped backs, and triangles of lace decorated the shelves. Outside, the tiny back yard was a jungle of pot plants and climbers, with neatly folded washing hung against the ochre walls. And the tower of the Iglesia del Carmen watched over it all.

But her house was also a cell for liberty. The living-room walls were hung with lists of the names of political prisoners, their photos, and a huge chart that showed them bursting from their chains when her group notched up a success. Prisoners’ wives and daughters crowded there for her monthly Literary Teas. She once got 72 women in, under the slowly turning ceiling fan, and put up 25 overnight. They came from all over Cuba: Pinar del Rio, Santa Clara, Las Tunas, Manzanillo (in the east, where she was born), even from the Sierra Maestra, where Fidel Castro had holed up in the mountains to start his revolution. They gathered at her house because she was central, and had a telephone. After 2003 the phone kept ringing, and she would answer it in a whisper, knowing it was tapped; each call would end with “Cuidado”, “Be careful”. A security camera and floodlights appeared outside her front door, supplementing the plain-clothes men who loitered there. Her bookshelf now held a tiny statue of Santa Rita, the saint of the impossible.

What had started all this was the arrest of her husband, Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, for “acting against the territorial integrity of the state”. Seventy-four others were arrested with him in that Black Spring of 2003, and given average prison sentences of 20 years. Ms Pollán knew he had done nothing. The picture of him she wore emblazoned on her T-shirt showed a mild, smiling man, an engineer, who kept his glasses on a cord round his neck. He liked to underline phrases in the newspapers and clip pieces out, organising them under “Politics” or “Environment”. She supposed he was just trying to point out contradictions in the government line. They didn’t discuss it, any more than she took part when his friends from the banned Liberal Democratic Party came round to talk. She would disappear to the kitchen then, making coffee, and leave the men alone.

But they were taken away. Husbands, fathers, brothers, disappeared. Ms Pollán came home from teaching evening class to find 12 state security agents invading her house, carrying away the clippings and two old typewriters. One agent stood by even as she and Héctor tried to say goodbye to each other. Two weeks later she started to bring together the women she kept meeting at the Villa Marista barracks and at various government offices, seeking news of their men. They became the Damas de Blanco, or Ladies in White.

Marching through Miramar

Ms Pollán came brand-new to campaigning. She was a mother (of Laurita), a housewife and a teacher: someone who loved literature and had taught peasants to read in the early years of the revolution. She had never done anything wilder. Short, blonde and stout, she was not cut out to be hauled into a bus by the police. All she wanted was to see Héctor back, and all the others. Her group would meet each Sunday at the church of Santa Rita in Miramar, Havana’s grandest district, say the rosary, hear mass, and then walk ten blocks in silence along Quinta Avenida on the green verges under the palm trees. The women wore white, symbolising pure intentions, and carried gladioli, a single stem each.

Yet politics crept in. At the end of every march the women would chant “Libertad!”—for Cuba as a whole, as much as for their men. They would throw out pencils with Derechos Humanos on one side and Damas en Blanco on the other, hoping that, slowly, people would pick them up. Enemies called them “mercenaries” and “Ladies in Green”, in the pay of the United States, and Ms Pollán had to admit that they did get American dollars and American parcels for their imprisoned men. Shock mobs of other women were especially bused in to attack them, beat them and pull their hair. Ms Pollán could fight back with the best: when a man called her “Puta!” once, she threw her gladioli in his face. In one battle in September she was crushed against a wall, which may have set off the breathing troubles that killed her.

By then, the 75 prisoners they were campaigning for had been released; most by the intervention of the Catholic Church and the government of Spain, but around 20 by their own efforts. Héctor, gaunt and thin, came out only last February. The numbers of Ladies dwindled, to 15 or so, as their work seemed to be done. But for Ms Pollán it was not done. Her Ladies had to go on marching as long as the laws remained that could fill the prisons again. As long as Cuba was not free, she would go on sitting at her computer with her little dog stretched out on the tiles beside her, alert for the telephone, with her front door open and Santa Rita at the ready, and the ceiling fan turning slowly in the smothering air.

from the print edition | Obituary