How the lack of freedom to travel impacts a father and daughter

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Blanca Reyes: Denied entry to Cuba to visit her ailing dad

The press reports Cuban government statistics on travel to the island without the means to verify from an independent source while others talk about reforms. At the same time Cuban families continue to be divided by the communist dictatorship. One example, first reported back on August 14, has ended tragically.

Blanca Reyes had requested on July 22, 2013 permission to return to her homeland to visit her ailing 93 year old father and on August 13, 2013 was denied by a Cuban consulate official.  Two months later on October 13, 2013 Blanca tweeted:

"My dad fractured his hip, they are going to operate, and Cuban government denies me entrance to see him. He is 93 years old."

In a later tweet she raised an important question:

"Unable to enter your home, Cuba, can someone explain that? I address the people who still support the Cuban Government." 

Two days later on October 15, 2013 over twitter received the sad news that father and daughter were never again to be reunited:

"My father died today in Cuba did not see him for 9 years the Cuban government stopped me. UNTIL WHEN MY GOD?"

The denial of the freedom to travel in this particular case has led to the separation of a family and great suffering. Between 70,000 and 300,000 Cubans are banned from returning to their homeland under arbitrary criteria set up by the dictatorship.

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like so many other articles in that declaration, is systematically violated in Cuba today.

Courtesy of: http://www.blogactionday.org

What are human rights and why are they still important?

Taking Part In A Global Conversation on Human Rights

"Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness." W.L. Watkins (1907)

At first glance the definition of human rights should be self evident because it is the equivalent of asking what is the color of Napoleon's white horse. Human rights are those rights that pertain to you for being a human being. Since these rights are intrinsic to one's status as a human being they should also be universal.

Despite its simplicity the modern idea of a universal human rights standard was not even discussed until the 1550s. Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas in a debate over the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas offered for the first time a universal idea of human rights:

“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.”

Both the American and French revolutions tied the emergence of rights to particular national experiences while appealing to enlightenment values. At the same time critical voices, such as Edmund Burke, emerged that challenged the abstract rights discourse with concrete examples and in doing so provided a working alternative.

Less than 160 years after the French and American revolutions the failure of modern nation states to protect the rights of its citizens led to a new international consensus, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted and adopted on December 10, 1948 by the majority of nations that existed in the world at the time.

One of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was inspired by Christian humanism:

There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.

The formation of the United Nations was also an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was the first international human rights instrument and was signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia in April of 1948 nine months prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial role among them the Cuban delegation. 

The first draft of the Declaration was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them "were a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation, and the earlier Panamanian draft."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood.

The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this most important human rights document.

However, since 1948 the hopes that the United Nations and its human rights instruments would improve the human rights situation has not materialized. Genocides have continued to occur as have systematic human rights violations and countries with histories of respecting human rights standards have gone in the wrong direction during the ongoing war on terror. Several factors contributed to this lack of improvement.

As the Cold War heated up there was an attempt to split human rights along the bourgeois and socialist divide in order to justify the repression associated with totalitarian dictatorships. 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."

In the same interview the Cuban dictator 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."

The track record under Castro's communist regime is that when one set of rights are denied then all suffer. Both political and social rights have suffered in Cuba and this has included nightmarish episodes in the island's hospitals and system of health care.

This line of argument collapsed along with the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the universal human rights consensus reasserted itself only to be challenged by the Islamic bloc in 1990 with the passage of the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam which also weakens universal human rights standards.

Mary Robinson who was United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1998, when the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was celebrated and now co-chairs the new organization, Agenda for Human Rights funded by the Swiss government says the world has not lived up to the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “A reality that shames us frankly, that is not acceptable. If the world had taken seriously the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we would have a world where no parents would see their children waking up in the morning crying of hunger, dying from preventable diseases," said Robinson. "There would not be more than half a million mothers dying giving birth. We would have a different world and it would be a much more secure world, of course."

This leads to a sobering conclusion that the failure of nation states to protect the human rights of their citizens was not remedied by centralizing responsibility in a supranational organization such as the United Nations. Mohandas Gandhi had foreseen and predicted the failure. Gandhi, a self-described socialist, was not an enthusiastic proponent of centralized power arguing: 

The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. [...] What I would personally prefer would be not centralization of power in the hands of the State, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the State. However, if it is unavoidable, I would support a minimum of State-ownership.

Human rights must be defended and protected from the bottom up not the top down.  The top down approach has failed, but the bottom up or grassroots approach has shown promise.

Over the past sixty years we have seen how individuals and non-governmental organizations have defended human rights and exposed the crimes of the State and other parties. This has been carried out in a decentralized and non-violent fashion. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Human Rights First, Reporters without Borders, and other non-governmental organizations have operated at the international level in collaboration with national and local human rights organizations. 

At the national and local level groups of individuals organizing and challenging brutal and murderous regimes such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina against a military junta that disappeared 30,000 Argentines in 1970s and early 1980s and today in totalitarian Cuba the Ladies in White demand freedom and human rights with open non-violent displays of defiance pressuring dictatorships to meet their demands.

Prior to his assassination Mohandas Gandhi responded to the 1948 United Nations Committee charged with drafting what would later become the human rights charter stating: “All rights to be deserved and preserved come from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this fundamental statement perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of man and woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a document that outlines existing rights but its continued relevance and importance depends on human beings, that means each one of us, on this planet doing our duty to defend and respect these rights.

Courtesy of: http://www.blogactionday.org

Laura Inés Pollán Toledo: Still shaking the confidence of the Castro regime

"They can either kill us, put us in jail or release them. We will never stop marching no matter what happens." - Laura Pollan

Laura and the Ladies in White on the march in 2010

Two years later and the forces of repression still tremble before the memory of the 65 year old wife and mother. Watching her in the video below and one begins to understand the existential threat she represented to the totalitarians in Cuba.

She was a former school teacher turned human rights defender and international pro-democracy figure who courageously and nonviolently confronted Castro's half century old totalitarian dictatorship and paid for it with her life.

Laura Inés Pollán Toledo has not been forgotten and today across Cuba the political police organized acts of repudiation, closed streets, used loud speakers and detained over 120 Ladies in White across the island in an effort to drown out in a wave of repression activities in her memory.

The forces of repression failed.

They killed Laura but could not kill what she represents and now symbolizes. In 2010 she and the women's movement that she led, the Ladies in White forced the dictatorship to do the right thing and they used methods alien to the regime. It was the power of love and dignity backed up by courage and nonviolent discipline that forced one of the worse dictatorships on the planet to bend and release prisoners of conscience.

The Ladies in White continue their march for freedom and human rights and now also do it in memory of Laura. Love and dignity will always triumph over hatred and indecency. 

 

Remembering Laura on the eve of her untimely death

"We are going to continue. We are fighting for freedom and human rights.” - Laura Inés Pollán Toledo September 24, 2011

Hard to believe that Laura Pollan was taken from us two years ago tomorrow. She could have been the first president of a post Castro Cuba. Meeting with experts on political strategy one of their observations raised new concerns.

According to these experts, even when a government is opposed by the vast majority of the populace of a country it will still not make that leap of embracing change unless the opposition has good ideas and is a credible alternative to govern. Even when the regime in power fails in its most basic obligations and endangers the population with cholera and dengue.

It also appears that the dictatorship in Cuba has been closely studying democratic transitions around the world and has made the decision to eliminate agents of change.  In Eastern Europe they were people like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and in Asia they were people like Corazon Aquino.

The suspicious death of Laura Pollan two years ago on October 14, 2011 marked a dangerous new chapter of the struggle for freedom in Cuba that was further reinforced with the killing of Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012 and escalating violence are troubling trends.

The dictatorship is willing to kill whoever it must to hang on to power and the international community has been divided in condemning these outrages.

Another Sunday of repression and political terror grips Cuba in order to prevent women marching nonviolently to attend Mass and continue their call for human rights to finally be respected in Cuba. A mother has had her home repeatedly invaded and has suffered beatings along with her children and her elderly mother for refusing to renounce her defense of human rights. It is up to every day people of good will wherever they are to speak up for Cuba's human rights defenders and expose these outrages.

Solidarity has been demonstrated at the level of parliaments and the word is getting out in newspapers around the world but more needs to be done to ensure that Cuba become free and that no more icons of the Cuban resistance are murdered by a cruel totalitarian regime.

Troubling trends in Cuba: An Update

New regime tactic?: CDR president attacked activist with machete

The past six months have demonstrated that the human rights situation in Cuba remains grave and has deteriorated.

Amnesty International identified six new prisoners of conscience in Cuba over the past two months. On August 5, 2013 the human rights organization demanded the immediate release of five Cuban activists: Rafael Matos Montes de Oca, Emilio Planas Robert and the brothers Alexeis, Diango, and Vianco Vargas Martín. On September 12, 2013 Amnesty also recognized Iván Fernández Depestre as a prisoner of conscience. The Council of Human Rights Rapporteurs in Cuba has identified dozens of Cuban political prisoners.

Thousands of detentions of nonviolent activists exercising their fundamental rights have also taken place in the island over the past 6 months. There were more than 700 detentions documented in Cuba in the month of September alone.

Neither of these two new developments are new in Cuba but established patterns of repression.

However there are new developments that point to a disturbing escalation in violence. Ofelia Acevedo, human rights defender Oswaldo Paya's widow addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council on September 17, 2013 stated:

My family has received death threats and my children have suffered physical persecution by Cuban state security of the Cuban government in the streets of Havana. Violence against the members of all the opposition grows in the country. Less than three months ago Werlando Leiva of the Christian Liberation Movement was attacked with a machete on a public street because of his nonviolent work in favor of the plebiscite and human rights in the island. Werlando, who is a father of three, may never recover total mobility in his right hand. 

There have been other incidents involving activists being attacked by regime agents wielding machetes. This is a new and disturbing pattern when taking into consideration the escalating violence against female human rights defenders that has included beatings with blunt objects and disfiguring knife attacks later in 2012.

Taking all this into account and the suspicious deaths of human rights defenders such as Laura Pollán Toledo on October 14, 2011 and Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012 just to name two high profile cases the future for activists in Cuba is ominous.

Yris Perez Aguilera addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council during Cuba's universal periodic review on September 20, 2013 and denounced the violence and threats visited upon her stating:

I have been the victim of aggressions on the part of the Cuban authorities, especially by the agents Yuniel Monteagudo Reina and Eric Aquino Yera. They have beaten me into unconsciousness in the pavement, as took place most recently this past March 7 in Santa Clara. The hits to the head, neck, and back have caused me serious health problems that I have not been able to recover from. In addition to beating me, they have threatened me with death on various occasions, these agents have told me that they are going to rape me, and have shown their genitals during arbitrary arrests.  

She also denounced the suspicious death of a former female political prisoner who was not well known:

Daysi Talavera Ortiz, an activist in Matanzas, died run over by a car in January of the same year. Women human rights defenders in Cuba suffer homes under siege, aggressions against their young children, and the arbitrariness of the government that has remained in power for 54 years.

Human rights defenders are being brutalized, suffering death threats, and dying under suspicious circumstances over the past four years in a new and disturbing pattern. Sadly the international community rather than addressing these disturbing trends are instead discussing whether the regime switching controls from the infamous white card to new controls on the issuing of passports and permitting more travel after January of 2013 is substantive change.

The fact that the representative of the Ladies in White in Europe, Blanca Reyes, requested an entry permit to her homeland on July 22, 2013 to see her father who is 93 years old and very ill and lives in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba and was denied should dispel any illusions that the right of Cubans to travel inside and outside of their country has been restored. It is still defined by the whims of the dictatorship.

The answer written in the blood of Cuba's human rights defenders is that the regime's violent and murderous underlying nature has not changed at all. The body count of over a half century continues to rise and apologists for the regime still celebrate the dictatorship.

This is why it is so important to listen to the testimonies of both Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" and Yris Peres Aguilera who are with us today.

Thank you.