Remembering dissident's death one year ago leads to brutal beatings today

"The responsibility for Wilman Villar Mendoza’s death in custody lies squarely with the Cuban authorities, who summarily judged and jailed him for exercising his right to freedom of expression." -  Amnesty International,  January 20, 2012

Wilman Villar Mendoza (1980 -2012)

Cuban prisoner of conscience Wilman Villar Mendoza died in custody of the Castro regime one year ago today. He was just 31 years old. He should never have been in prison in the first place. He is survived by two little girls; a wife; and his mother.
 
On the Thursday, January 19, 2012 at approximately 6:30pm Cuban prisoner of conscience and opposition activist Wilmar Villar Mendoza died after his kidneys and other organs failed. He died the result of a prolonged hunger strike provoked by outrage over his unjust imprisonment and four year prison sentence issued in a closed-door sham trial on November 24, 2011 by agents of the Castro regime. He died defending both human rights and dignity. Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience and Human Rights Watch documented that Wilmar was a Cuban opposition activist.

Today, when members of his movement, the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), tried to remember their dead friend they were beaten up by Cuban state security agents. At 2:18pm Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia was able to post over twitter video footage of three of the victims of the attack. In a later tweet at 5:32pm, Jose Daniel states: "We can describe as very severe the attacks against UNPACU activists in Santiago de Cuba province, on first anniversary of the death of Wilman Villar."


 Totalitarian regimes have patterns of conduct. Beating up, arresting and imprisoning an innocent man for engaging in the nonviolent exercise of his fundamental human rights is a common practice in the Cuban regime. "Accidents" and sudden "illnesses" are also known to happen. Political prisoners are subjected to cruel and unusual punishment that amounts to torture.

Finally, when a prisoner or dissident dies and the Cuban government is responsible then the dictatorship engages in a campaign using both official propaganda outlets and agents of influence around the world to slander their memory and hold itself not responsible for their death. If necessary the dictatorship will manufacture "evidence" to makes its "case."

It is for that reason that human rights defenders and friends of freedom have an obligation to remember the truth and repeat it to others in order to defend the memory of men and women like Wilman Villar Mendoza who gave their lives in the cause of freedom.

If courageous men and women inside of Cuba suffer brutal beatings to nonviolently remember these martyrs to Cuban freedom then what is the excuse for those abroad to remain silent? Indifference before evil is not an excuse but a condemnation.

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. Elie Wiesel, The Perils of Indifference

"MURDER Jose Daniel Ferrer & we will solve your problems." - State Security to 18-yr old

Cuban State Security outdoes Machiavelli

"I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school." (Henry VI, Part III)



Cuban state security agent to 18-year old, Yohandry Pupo Sarmiento, a young dissident that they had pressured into a suicide attempt: "MURDER Jose Daniel Ferrer and we will solve your problems."

Capitol Hill Cubans in their blog entry "Pro-Democracy Leader Targeted in Murder Plot" outlined the context of the conspiracy to murder Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU). UNPACU has identified and mobilized new activists in Eastern Cuba and carried out numerous actions that have upset regime officials and the dictatorship is responding:

Thirty-two of UNPACU's members are currently in prison for political offenses -- two of them are women. Moreover, recently three UNPACU activists, Jesus Diaz Morales, Josue Senna and Ariel Meneses Cruz, were chased down by hooded individuals and beaten with blunt objects. The 18-year old, Yohandry Pupo Sarmiento, attempted suicide due to the pressure put on him by Castro's secret police. Pupo would later confess the episode to Ferrer. He was asked to poison Ferrer's food -- also putting Ferrer's wife and children at risk.

The deaths of human rights defenders in Cuba, over the past three years such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Laura Pollan, and Oswaldo Paya is evidence that the regime has taken its previous tactic of decapitation of the opposition to a new and more permanent level involving extrajudicial killings. The latest attempt against the life of Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia is part of the pattern.

There are two constants in the patterns of repression and human rights violations in Cuba over the past 53 years and they are the rising body count of victims and the use of fear as a tool of political control to maintain power over the Cuban populace. Underestimating the Castro regime has been a great mistake made by numerous "Cuba experts." 

One should recall that what would become the Castro regime's Department of State Security also known as G-2 got its start in the Guerrilla movement on August 22, 1958.  G-2 was trained by the most brutal intelligence service in the Soviet East Bloc, the East German Stasi. This relationship between the Stasi and the G-2 officially began on February 13, 1960 when Fidel Castro and Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan signed the Soviet-Cuban pact. In addition to the Castro brothers another one of the founders of state security in Cuba, Ramiro Valdez, is still active and as ruthless as ever with over a half century of experience.

Like their East German counterparts, Castro's State Security has not only infiltrated dissident groups on the island but the highest levels of the United States intelligence services and State Department. The case of Ana Belen Montes and Walter Kendall Myers should serve as a warning to those that underestimate this dictatorship. The poisoning of dissidents and staged car accidents were standard tactics of the Stasi that the Cuban intelligence service made them their own.

Cuban state security has managed to out survive their murderous Stasi mentors or in other words to outdo Machiavelli. 

Rights are neither bourgeois or socialist they're human

Why the totalitarian temptation denies human rights and objective truth


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

“It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.”

Mr. Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General

For the past half century the dictatorship in Cuba has carried out a massive campaign that claims that Cuba has a first class public health care system. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the regime and the lack of a free press the ability to investigate and hold accountable the Cuban public health system has been a limited undertaking by a few brave souls. The ongoing events in Cuba with the substandard care given to average Cubans and the cholera outbreaks across the island gives evidence that human rights cannot be divided into separate categories of civil-political and socioeconomic rights or what the Castro regime would describe as bourgeois liberties versus revolutionary liberties. Nevertheless, unless the system in Cuba is changed this latest episode as soon as it passes will also be covered up, ignored and denied, and the attack on human rights and those who dared to speak out on the dangers confronting the Cuban public will continue to be harassed, imprisoned and killed. The rest of this essay aims to explain why.

The 1948 consensus and the totalitarian counter-argument
Following the international consensus achieved on December 10, 1948 and codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there has been an ongoing effort by despots of different ideological stripes to divide, distort and destroy this international standard in order to replace it with one that benefits a particular interest.

Since 1959, Cuba has under the Castro brothers been subjected to a Marxist Leninist dictatorship that does not recognize international human rights standards as outlined in the declaration. Fidel Castro in a 1986 interview spoke plainly on the matter:

"There is revolutionary liberty and there are other liberties which are bourgeois. It's difficult for me to talk about them to Europeans because bourgeois liberties were born there. In England, France, those countries. You talk of equality, liberty, fraternity. I think only our society can truly speak of equality. There's no equality between millionaires and beggars."

What is ironic is that Mr. Castro has a point that with wide disparities of wealth the poor are at a disadvantage in exercising their rights. However, what he fails to mention is that in a society where the rule of law and the concept of equality before the law is exercised a beggar has greater protections that is to say "more equality" than a poor person in Cuba who is entirely subject to the whims of Mr. Castro who also happens to be worth $900 million dollars. In the same interview he went on and expanded his argument:

"Bourgeois liberties, no. We have two different concepts of freedom. Europeans have one, we have another.  Capitalism and socialism are not at all alike. Your political concepts of liberty, equality, justice are very different from ours. You try to measure a country like Cuba with European ideas. And we do not resign ourselves to or accept being measured by those standards."

Empirical and theoretical failure of totalitarian case
The case made by the Cuban despot, as was also made by his Soviet backers, was that what are considered civil and political rights were bourgeois rights and inferior to social and economic rights which they would claim are socialist rights.  The claim that civil-political rights and social-economic rights are mutually exclusive is false. In reality they are mutually reinforcing and are both found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Additionally, the claim by Mr. Castro that bourgeois liberties are alien to the Cuban experience because they emerged in Europe is not correct. The synthesis of civil-political and socioeconomic rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Europeans subscribe to  emerged out of the Latin American experience. Furthermore, it was Latin American diplomats that pushed hard for a human rights charter following World War II and the first international human rights charter was a regional one The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man that was adopted in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948.


What has emerged in Cuba under the Castro brothers is a socio-political model that first emerged in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century and has wreaked havoc wherever it has been applied and that is a totalitarian dictatorship. This kind of regime whether taking power in an advanced industrial country such as Germany or a backward agrarian Russia claimed the lives of tens of millions of its own citizens and impoverished those who remained afterwards.

 Today, in Cuba there is a cholera outbreak underway whose seriousness the dictatorship has hid from the Cuban citizenry and the international community. This may be due to a number of reasons. Cuba has suffered two dictatorships prior to Fidel Castro. In the late 1920s- early 1930s Gerardo Machado who had been elected changed the constitution and ran again unopposed and became a dictator. Between 1952 and 1959 Fulgencio Batista was the dictator of Cuba following the over throw of its last democratically elected president, Carlos Prio Socarras on March 10, 1952. Despite this turbulent political history, Cuba throughout this entire period had not suffered a cholera epidemic because its infrastructure was sound and public health and hygiene prevented it. The fact that Cuba is having troubles with Cholera in the 21st Century means that those socioeconomic "rights" that Castro brothers claim to defend are a fiction and the public health infrastructure is a disaster. However there is a more profound reason for the coverup and why at the root of the totalitarian experiment there is the need for the big lie. George Orwell in his essay, The Prevention of Literature, provided an excellent description of how totalitarian states like Cuba work and thrive:

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie.

Negative trends in Latin America
Unfortunately, since civil-political rights or what the regime calls "bourgeois liberties" are non-existent in Cuba which means that freedom of expression and an independent press are not there to hold the regime accountable and to inform the public of threats to health and safety that it is facing. An even more disturbing development is that this idea of "bourgeois" and "socialist" freedoms has gained traction in Latin America placing the regional human rights architecture that provided protections for Latin Americans against the military dictatorships of the 1970s in danger, and today thanks to countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Argentina it is being dismantled.




 

New rules for the same old game

"Calculate that by the 1st week of February I will have my passport be able to travel... fingers crossed. I'll believe it when I am in the plane!" - Yoani Sanchez, over twitter today.

AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

In October of 2012 the regime in Cuba announced migration reforms that would take effect today January 14, 2013. Cubans on the island are going through the motions, but many are as skeptical as Yoani Sanchez on whether they will be able to travel. Not so, John McAuliff of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, who lobbies for engagement between the United States government and the dictatorship in Cuba and was quoted today in an article by the Associated Press saying that "Cuba now provides greater freedom of travel to virtually all of its citizens than does the U.S."  

With all due respect to Mr. McAuliff but the above statement is not borne out by the facts and would earn him the laughter of many Cubans. For example, Rosa María Payá  was not allowed by the Cuban government to travel to Santiago, Chile between January 8 through the 15th. Its not only the Cubans that contradict his claim.

CNN on January 11, 2012 reported the following:

After weeks in which passport applications surged and just days before the new policy takes affect, Cuba this week "began to increase the information about the update announced last October," according to a story from the state-run Prensa Latina News Agency. Cuba faces holiday travel crisis Specifically, the Labor and Social Security Ministry defined categories of Cubans whose travel would be restricted. They include those who may be "criminally prosecuted, are subject to military service or (are denied) for reasons of defense and national security." "Also on the list are citizens who have obligations with the state or are not authorized under rules designed to preserve the skilled workforce and protect official information," read the Presna Latina story.

The United States government does not restrict doctors and athletes from traveling outside of the country. It also does not restrict between 70,000 and 300,000 US citizens from returning to their homeland. The Castro regime does engage in these practices. To claim that the Cuban dictatorship offers greater freedom to travel than the United States is a falsehood that is absurd.

This is not the first time that the press and "Cuba experts" have jumped on a Castro regime announcement while ignoring news that contradicts their optimistic assessment.

For example On August 8, 2012 BBC News reported that Cuba's ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted. Others soon followed reporting on the news. The stories specifically mentioned Celia Cruz as one of the artists whose music would return to Cuban radio.

 Diario de Cuba reported on August 21, 2012 that Tony Pinelli, a well known musician and radio producer, distributed an e-mail in which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT) confirmed that the music of the late Celia Cruz would continue to be banned. The e-mail clearly stated: "All those who had allied with the enemy, who acted against our families, like Celia Cruz, who went to sing at the Guantanamo Base, the ICRT arrogated to itself the right, quite properly, not to disseminate them on Cuban radio."

Whether it is the issue of censorship or freedom to travel the regime in Cuba has made lots of noise but the underlying policies of control and repression remain intact.  Meanwhile things are getting worse.

Opposition leaders are dying under suspicious circumstances and the overall human rights situation in Cuba is deteriorating.  The dictatorship is remaining silent about Cholera outbreaks across the island. Its behavior is that of a classic totalitarian regime. The changes carried out by the Cuban dictatorship are new rules for the same old game: hanging on to power.

State Security threatens 15-year old knifing victim with Psychiatric hospital admission

Berenice Héctor González

 Daughter of regime official repeatedly stabbed a 15 year old girl who had asked her to stop insulting the Ladies in White scarring her for life. Now state security agents are threatening to send her to a psychiatric hospital.

The attacker, Dailiana Planchez Torres, is the daughter of a captain of the political police in the town of Cienfuegos.

Berenice Héctor González, a 15-year old young woman, suffered a knife attack on November 4, 2012 after she had asked Daliana to stop insulting The Ladies in White, of which her aunt, Belkis Felicia Jorrín Morfa, is a member.

As a result, Berenice was repeatedly stabbed in the face, neck, breast and legs.  She received 66 stitches for her injuries.

Early tonight, January 12, 2013, Angel Moya tweeted: Berenice Hector Gzlz, girl brutally stabbed for defending Ladies in White threatened by State Security with psychiatric hospital admission.

The Castro regime has a track record of using psychiatric hospitals as centers to torture dissidents and destroy their minds. In addition, the conditions in these facilities are inhumane. In January of 2010, 26 psychiatric patients died of exposure at the National Psychiatric Hospital known as Mazorra.

First they scarred her body and now they seek to do the same with her mind and reputation. Further proof that the dictatorship in Cuba remains a totalitarian regime.