Raúl Rivero Castañeda Poet, Journalist, and Dissident 1945 - 2021

"In this country, the real blockade, the one that affects the daily life of the people, is the internal governing system. It is the noose that ensures that Cuba remains immobilized and poor." - Raúl Rivero, 2002

 

Raúl Rivero Castañeda with his wife Blanca Reyes

 

Raúl Rivero Castañeda died today in Miami, Florida. He was 75 years old. Raúl Rivero was a poet, a journalist, and dissident. In 1995 he established the independent news agency CubaPress, and by 2004 was forcibly exiled to Spain. Amnesty International described how in 1997 the secret police told him to leave Cuba.

Raúl Rivero Castañeda was detained  for  several  hours  on  July 28, 1997 and told that the authorities intended to destroy Cuba Press.  He was re-arrested on August, 12, 1997 by State Security and was taken to what appears to have been the same house Olance Nogueras was taken to. He was held there until August 15, 2021 and, although treated respectfully, was repeatedly urged to leave the country."

Raúl Rivero refused to leave, and six years later in 2003 was jailed, and sentenced to 20 years in prison during the Black Cuban Spring. The Chicago Tribune on November 9, 2004 reported on his trial and imprisonment.

The trial of Raúl Rivero Castañeda began on March 20, 2003, and ended 10 days later, when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The government-appointed defense attorney didn't call any witnesses. A feeble appeal was quashed immediately. Rivero, 59, now sits in a stiflingly small cell with a hole in the floor for a makeshift toilet. Rivero's crime was that he had published, at his own expense, three issues of a small magazine dealing with social issues, culture and art. It was an exceedingly modest effort; the quality of the printing was terrible. By the time the third issue appeared, though, Rivero was in prison. 

Seven years later, what the secret police had suggested the Cuban writer do voluntarily in 1997, was done by force. The offer made in December 2004 was serve a twenty year prison sentence in Cuba or accept forced exile.  Raúl Rivero Castañeda arrived in Spain in December 2004, and he would eventually end up exiled in Miami. 

 

Below is an essay from 2002 that spoke truths that the Castro regime wanted to silence. 

 

Requiescat in pace

Raúl Rivero Castañeda: November 23, 1945 - November 6, 2021

The Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2002

The Internal Blockade in Cuba

May 16, 2002 

 

By Raúl Rivero Castañeda

HAVANA: A man riding the Chinese-made Forever brand bicycle under the Caribbean sun after eating a single slice of bread, washed down with very bad coffee, finds it difficult to ponder America's trade embargo against Cuba. Such a man has lunch on his mind-his and his family's. For him, abstract thought is a luxury that requires time, information, and a reason to reflect on a subject that, at first sight, appears to be from another galaxy. The truth is that ordinary Cubans are more oppressed by a personal embargo, one that has transformed them into blindfolded and muzzled pawns. 

The debate over the American embargo pales in comparison - removed to a far corner of the mind - to the obstructive domestic situation that envelops them. In this country, the real blockade, the one that affects the daily life of the people, is the internal governing system. It is the noose that ensures that Cuba remains immobilized and poor. 

The old standoff between the two nations is beside the point to ordinary people; they desire a closer relationship with the US, where many of their families and friends live. However, no political process has created a smooth path toward such an ending. Thus, the stalemate between the two nations really concerns only Cubans who have time to contemplate lofty political questions. 

These individuals read newspapers fabricated in the offices of the Communist Party; view only two television channels, both cut from the same cloth; and listen to radios that play the same worn-out speeches. Cuba provides no free flow of information and its citizens receive and read only pure propaganda. While the public is suspicious of government proclamations, it has no means to be heard. Hence, its silence appears to sanction the situation. 

In reality, Cubans want to remove the inequalities that exist between the people and their leaders before they deal with the problems between their country and the US. Ordinary citizens want to own a modest business, have access to a free press, organize political parties, re-make society, and liberate prisoners.

The authorities like to paint themselves as the victims of a powerful giant set on smothering a nation and its united people, but such a victim's face cannot be found when you look closely. The nation is not a united citizenry, but rather a mediocre country created through the universal gagging of its people. One can systematically catalog the ways that the authorities mistreat many of its people as terribly as they claim that Cuba's enemies treat her. 

These officials should take the money spent trying to convince other nations about the generous nature of Cuba's public health and education systems and apply it to the needs of Cuba's people. In fact, medical services are becoming more and more precarious and the educational system has not advanced beyond a common system of political indoctrination. Indeed, parents cannot really influence how schools shape their children. Whenever the government does address basic public welfare issues, its efforts merely produce dependent individuals who submit to the will of a self-selected group of leaders who are "elected" from time-to-time by fake elections.  

The leaders' commitment to the sovereignty of the masses thus rings false. Talk about the Cubans' free will is in reality a capricious and criminal act against the people. In recent weeks, thirty-six human rights activists, members of the alternative press, and representatives of the emerging civil rights movement have been imprisoned and may be tried. 

We can all agree that human beings are not duty-bound to live according to one master or philosophy; that individuals must live freely, enjoying the right to a bountiful and joyful existence among family and friends. But in Cuba one lives in the midst of a propaganda machine that infiltrates life on a daily basis; that emphasizes a climate of popular cheerfulness; that portrays the joy of a neutered horse, with its ability to befuddle the innocent, inspire the ignorant, and comfort the frustrated. 

Cubans are in the end consigned to hold fast to rigid and impossible schemes. As a result, hundreds of thousands of young adults are embarked on a future whose path is strewn with risky symbols and immense challenges. Sensing that the door has been slammed shut against their country's future, they work diligently merely for their individual good.

'1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows': A Memoir by Ai Weiwei (A Must read)

On November 2, 2021 the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's memoir "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" came out.  Over the years this blog has followed his career as a dissident artist, and his solidarity with Cuban prisoners of conscience. Most recently he wrote the entry for Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara in Time Magazine.

Penguin Books South Africa provided a video, along with the below transcript, of Ai Weiwei on why he wrote the book.

‘The idea for this book came to me during the eighty-one days I was held in secret detention by the Chinese government in 2011. During those long weeks, I thought often of my father, a poet who had been exiled during Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign. I realized how incomplete my understanding of him was and how much I regretted the unbridgeable gap between us. I did not want my son to suffer the same regret. I resolved that if I was released I would write down what I knew of my father and tell my son honestly who I am, what life is like, why freedom is so precious, and why autocracy fears art.’ - Ai Weiwei

Back in July 2021 Benedict  Rogers of Hong Kong Watch interviewed the Chinese artist, who asked him about the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. They also discussed the situation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, his film about the 2019 protest movement, Cockroach (2020) and his  memoir, '1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows'.

Although China and Cuba are geographically very far from each other, both nations are suffering the scourge of Communism, and this joins both peoples in the struggle for freedom. Ai Wei Wei's memoir is required reading.

Rejection of request to protest by Castro regime is yet another example of intolerance of freedom of expression. Protest leader say N15 civic march continues.

"Using violence is a stupid decision." - Dr. Gene Sharp, January 30, 2012

Source: CubaBrief

104 days ago today on July 11, 2021 tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets across Cuba declaring that they were no longer afraid, and calling for an end to the dictatorship. The dictatorship's response was public, swift, brutal, and sustained. The regime's repression has not ended, but nor has the civic defiance and courage of Cubans.

Reuters reported on October 21st that Cuban prosecutors had summoned protest leaders (organized in a Facebook group called Archipelago, from across Cuba who are calling for protests on November 15th over curbs to civil rights in Cuba, and demanding an amnesty for jailed regime opponents) warning them against convening civic marches "under penalty of the law."

Lexi Lonas reported in The Hill, on the same day that "a Cuban protest leader said Thursday his group will gather for a demonstration in November despite warnings from a prosecutor that doing so could have legal ramifications." Lonas cited a quote by Yunior Garcia, leader of the Archipelago group, taken from Reuters stating, "we are not mercenaries, nor are we receiving orders from anyone." ... "We are openly demonstrating a difference of opinion.”

Expressing a difference of opinion with the Castro regime is a dangerous proposition in Cuba. 

Expressing a difference of opinion in Cuba is a criminal offense under the dictatorship's legal code, and in practice. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, with regards to the upcoming November 15th Civic March said:

“Groups of people from various provinces around the country have been submitting requests in recent weeks to different local governments asking for authorization to carry out peaceful marches, organized in a clearly defined way in a legitimate exercise of their right to freedom of expression. Instead of guaranteeing these rights, President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s government has declared these civil society marches ‘illegal’ and ‘unconstitutional’, once again violating the right to peaceful protest in Cuba.”

The spontaneous nonviolent protests that took place in Cuba in mid-July were met with deadly force and hundreds, if not thousands of Cubans jailed. Cuban human rights defenders addressed this matter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) audience titled "Human rights situation in the context of protest in Cuba". However Black human rights defender Manuel Cuesta Morua was blocked by Havana from speaking.

President Miguel Diaz Canel, handpicked by Raul Castro, told Cubans in a televised national public address on July 11th: "They [protesters] would have to pass over our dead bodies if they want to confront the revolution, and we are willing to resort to anything.” Diaz-Canel made explicit his demand for violent confrontation stating: "We are calling on all the revolutionaries of the country, all the communists, to take to the streets and go to the places where these provocations are going to take place today from now on, and in all these days and face it decisively, firmly, with courage." He concluded his address to the country declaring: "The order of combat is given, revolutionaries take to the streets."

Regime agents dressed in black, and police officers fired their weapons on unarmed protesters, and some of the Cubans, who survived these encounters, showed where some of the rounds had passed through them. Not all survived these encounters with the dictatorship's security forces. On July 12th, the second day of the uprising, Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, (age 36) was shot in the back by police. NGOs initially placed the number of extrajudicial killings at five during the protests, but the total number remains unknown. Video emerged on July 15th of the aftermath of Diubis being shot in the back and posted over Twitter.

Human Rights Watch in their October 19, 2021 report "Cuba: Peaceful Protesters Systematically Detained, Abused" describes in detail how the regime is still using arbitrary detention, ill-treatment (including gender-based violence), and summary trials that fall far short of international standards to directly impact hundreds of Cubans. According to Human Rights Watch there are 1,000 Cubans detained and 500 current political prisoners, but these are partial numbers painstakingly gathered by human rights observers such as CubaLex that have also been threatened for their work documenting human rights violations.

Cuban dissidents responding to this violent and ongoing crackdown have asked for help and solidarity.

Eileen Kinsella reported in ArtNet News, on October 19, 2021 in her article "Havana Biennial Boycott Gathers Support, With Hundreds Signing Open Letter Against Government Crackdown" that a long "list of Cuban and international artists and experts have signed an open letter that was posted on e-flux" that include artists Tania Bruguera and Coco Fusco, as well as Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, calling for a boycott of the 14th Havana Biennial to protest "injustices committed by the Cuban government against its citizens, including harassment and wrongful imprisonment." High profile names have already withdrawn from the event, including Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, artists Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro and Aimee Joaristi Argüelles, and curator Maria Belén Saez de Ibarra, according to Hyperallergic.

 Thus far, this example of solidarity has not been replicated in the Paris Club. Marc Frank reported for Reuters on October 20th that the Castro regime "reached a deal with the Paris Club of creditor nations to postpone an annual debt payment due in November until next year, according to diplomats from five of the governments involved, the latest sign the Communist-run country is suffering a grave foreign exchange crisis. The historic 2015 Paris Club agreement with Havana forgave $8.5 billion of $11.1 billion in sovereign debt Cuba defaulted on in 1986, plus charges. Cuba agreed to repay the remainder in annual installments through 2033, but only partially met its obligations in 2019 and defaulted last year." The Economic Eye on Cuba, the blog of the New York based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, Inc. reported on this deal with an important note reproduced below.

NOTE: Individuals participating in the negotiations shared on background that the group of creditor countries have no expectation that the Republic of Cuba will maintain the terms of a newly-termed debt repayment agreement. The altering of debt repayment terms was pro forma as the Republic of Cuba continues to be in arrears for hundreds of millions of dollars of private sector commercial debt including to joint venture partners, and continues to seek debt forgiveness and debt restructuring of private sector commercial debt. There is an expectation that long-term government-to-government financing programs for infrastructure and durable products will become donations.

These "donations" to the dictatorship in Cuba are assisting in the repression of the Cubans. The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, a coalition of pro-democracy and human rights groups inside and outside Cuba, issued a press release condemning the deal reached by the Paris Club and the Castro regime and explained how "this concession to the Cuban regime will serve to subsidize repression in Cuba, as the regime continues to buy military equipment to crack down on civil society and peaceful demonstrations. On June 10, 2021, 240 Cuban leaders and activists signed a letter, asking the Paris Club to not collaborate with repression in Cuba. Their fears were confirmed on July 11, 2021, and unfortunately Cubans expect to see the same levels of violence and military and police deployment on November 15, 2021, as the Cuban Prosecutor’s Office has threatened the organizers of the upcoming peaceful demonstration."

The Christian Liberation Movement, based in Cuba that led the Varela Project which over 35,000 Cubans in the island signed, called for the isolation of the Castro dictatorship with the following proposal that contains eleven measures that includes the ongoing and successful boycott of the 14th Havana Biennial, but also not granting the Cuban regime lines of credit, and placing an arms embargo on the dictatorship.

We propose that until the dictatorship unconditionally releases all those arrested for the peaceful demonstrations and all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and holds free and plural elections:

– The Cuban regime should be excluded from participating in any international forum, Summit and event.

– Cuba should be investigated and condemned for its human rights violations by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

– All economic and military cooperation agreements with the Cuban dictatorship, like the EU-Cuba cooperation agreement, should be suspended.

– Lines of credit should not be granted to the Cuban regime.

– Foreign investments and tourism to Cuba should be discouraged.

– All products exported from Cuba, either directly by the regime or through foreign companies associated with Cuban tyranny, should be boycotted.

– An international arms and repression equipment embargo on Cuba should be imposed

– Cuba should be banned from all international sporting, cultural and academic events.

– Visas to military junta officials and relatives, and to members of Cuba's Communist Party and all organizations and institutions who take part in repressive actions or support the repression, should not be granted or should be revoked.

– Channels to send humanitarian aid should be facilitated as part of this campaign to isolate the regime and in solidarity with the Cuban people.

– An international commission to support democracy in Cuba should be created. It should promote that these and other measures are executed, and should watch over its implementation.

Dictatorship's like the one in Havana understand only one thing, force, but it can impact them in many ways and the list above demonstrates the power of nonviolent, civic action.

 

 

Placing the July 11th protests into context for a non-Cuban audience

 

Family Ties: Cuban Americans and Their Emigration Story | NBCLX

 

 

A recent surge of anti-government protests in Cuba have turned a spotlight back on calls for reform in the one-party Communist country. And for Cuban Americans whose families left the country in previous decades, it’s a reminder of what was lost and gained in their immigration to the U.S. NBCLX storyteller Eric Rodriguez takes a closer look at the Cuban emigration stories that are at the heart of the Cuban American experience.  

 

https://www.lx.com/community/family-ties-cuban-americans-and-their-emigration-story/44089/

Remembering Laura Pollán, Cuba's Lady in White ten years after her killing

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

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

 

Ten years ago today, Cuban opposition leader and human rights defender Laura Pollán died under circumstances that Cuban dissident and medical doctor Oscar Elias Biscet described as "death by purposeful medical neglect."
Laura Inés Pollán Toledo, a courageous woman spoke truth to power and protested in the streets of Cuba demanding an amnesty for Cuban political prisoners. She had been a school teacher, before her husband was jailed for his independent journalism in 2003 along with more than 75 other civil society members. Laura was greatly admired both inside and outside of the island.
 

But when one opposes the regime in Cuba not only is their physical life in danger, but their reputation is systematically slandered. The dictatorship claimed that she was a stateless "traitor." She became ill and died within the space of a week under circumstances that raise the question of foul play by Castro's secret police. Following her death the official media of the dictatorship began a slander campaign asserting that she was a common criminal.

  Following brutal repression, in an effort to prevent them from marching through the streets of Havana, Laura Pollan directly and nonviolently challenged the regime declaring, "we will never give up our protest. The authorities have three options — free our husbands, imprison us or kill us." 

Unfortunately beginning in 2010 a new and deadlier pattern of oppression presented itself with the extrajudicial death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo. 

Laura Pollán's "criminal" behavior was to start the Ladies in White movement after the Black Cuban Spring of 2003 and nonviolently challenged the Castro regime in the streets of Havana at the beginning, and eventually across the island. Laura reached out to the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the 75 prisoners of conscience jailed in March of 2003 along with her husband and they carried out a sustained nonviolent campaign that after nine years obtained the freedom of their loved ones.

 

Since she did not dissolve the Ladies in White when her husband returned home because she recognized that the laws had not changed, and that political prisoners remained behind bars and that she would continue her human rights activism, the Castro regime did away with her on October 14, 2011.

 

Today, the current leader of the Ladies in White, Berta Soler, paid homage to her predecessor over FaceBook while calling out and holding responsible the Castro regime for Laura's death.

 

Tenth anniversary of the physical loss of Laura Pollan Toledo. The Fidel Castro regime murdered Laura Pollan, they thought to silence her, but they did not succeed, she remains high in our esteem and is among us present at every step of the Ladies in White, following her legacy. 

 

Example of a woman, loving, brave, intelligent, audacious, teacher, warrior, for that and much more we say: LAURA POLLAN LIVES Laura is in our hearts Ladies in White we pay tribute and homage to: Laura Pollan Toledo.

  

 

Let us remember that Laura put into action over eight years in Cuba nonviolent resistance to tyranny.

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

"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)

"My life has changed a lot, now I have learned to love the country much more, the prisoners, the humanity. That's how I have so much work, that I don't have much time to think about myself, what really satisfies me, in short, I owe myself to other more important tasks. Now I understand much more, before I could not understand these things, you have to live and feel them to be able to dedicate soul heart and life to this beautiful cause." (2011)

The regime in Cuba is the most misogynist government in all of Latin America. Women who speak out and exercise their fundamental rights are regularly slandered, physically assaulted and sometimes die under suspicious circumstances as Laura did ten years ago today.