Molotov Ribbentrop Pact at 80: Exploring the long history of Communist-Nazi collaboration

There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years. - George Orwell, About the "current Russian regime" (11 April 1940)

Eighty years ago on August 23, 1939 Communist Russia and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The treaty had secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two regimes. The Communist International (Comintern) issued new orders to their members once the non-aggression pact had been made public. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emeritus, at Emory University, described the new directive.

Good communists were ordered to oppose anyone intending to stand in Hitler’s way.  With Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow at the end of September and the signing of a German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, the Comintern emphasized that the primary adversary was those countries that were at war with Germany, and those socialists and social democrats fighting against fascism. Germany had concluded a pact with the USSR, while “reactionary” England, at the helm of a vast colonial empire, was the “bulwark of capitalism.” Thus, communist parties in England and France were ordered to call for the defeat of their countries—ordered, in other words, to officially embrace treason.

Nine days later on September 1, 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Germans invaded Poland from the East and met their Nazi allies on September 22, 1939 in a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk to celebrate their victory.

German Lt-Gen Mauritz von Wiktorin, Gen Heinz Guderian & Soviet tank commander Semyon Moiseevich Krivoshein in Brest-Litovsk, Poland on 9/22/1939.

230,000 Polish soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Soviets. The precursor to the KGB was the NKVD.

"From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.  Thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders were taken into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, shot in the back of the head or in the neck and buried in mass graves.

This arrangement only ended on June 22, 1941 when the Nazis double crossed their Soviet allies and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. This strategy cost 22 to 28 million Russian lives in World War Two, and nearly led to the Nazi conquest and occupation of Russia.

Josef Stalin overseeing the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

How did these two regimes with diametrically opposed ideologies become allies? The Nazis who believe in racial hierarchies and the Communists who believe in economic equality? Vladimir Lenin's observations on class struggle in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920 gives an insight into the communist moral vision:

"The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

Fascists believe freedom of expression and liberalism are a sham and they embrace violence as a positive force to achieve national unity. However at the same time their ideological nemesis, the communists, also reject the same existing system and embrace violence as a means to achieve their end. Both have agreed on the need to destroy the existing democratic order, and with their "moral" world view have not discounted working with each other to achieve that end.

Anti Fascist Action conference in Germany (1932)

The destruction of the Weimar Republic in Germany was a joint exercise by the Communists and the Nazis. Antifa came into existence during these years, and was controlled by the German Communist Party (KPD). Rob Sewell in his 1988 book Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Fortress Books described how the German communists allied electorally with the Nazis:

"In August 1931, to capitalise on their growing popularity, the Nazi Party launched a referendum to overthrow the Social Democratic government of Prussia. At first the KPD correctly attacked it. Then, three weeks before the vote, under orders from Stalin's Comintern, they joined forces with the fascists to bring down the main enemy, the Social Democrats. They changed the name of the plebiscite to a 'Red Referendum' and referred to the fascists and the members of the SA as 'working people's comrades'!"

Professor Klehr described how the communists had viewed the Nazis as a means to undermine capitalist democracies and achieve power . Antifa identified all political parties that were not communist as fascist. This meant that social democrats, centrist, and conservative political parties were  all lumped together with the Nazis and labeled fascist.  The Comintern's class against class approach fractured any potential broad anti-Nazi coalition.

"Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1932 had been immeasurably aided by the German communists' steadfast support for the Comintern tactic of “class against class,” which demanded no cooperation with other anti-Nazi forces. German communists blithely insisted that Hitler’s triumph would be evanescent—summarized in their optimistic slogan, Nach Hitler, kommen wir ('After Hitler, us'). 

This is why you see a communist like "The Communist Vulture" in 2019 declare that "nonviolence is an endorsement of white supremacy." Polarizing the political culture, tearing down democratic institutions and changing the system by any means is the objective. Both are seeking revolution and using whatever means to achieve it, except nonviolence. This is because their ideology is founded on violent struggle. The communist believes in class struggle therefore non-violence is anathema to them. Same holds true for Nazis, who view violent struggle through a racial prism.

The rejection of nonviolence is not new. The Soviet press published an article written by S.M. Vakar in 1948 following Mohandas Gandhi's assassination titled "The Class Nature of the Gandhi Doctrine" in the Soviet philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). The Marxist Leninists repudiate Gandhi because of his "reformist methods of struggle" and principled rejection of class struggle. According to them the nonviolence "doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the Indian masses." The Soviet KGB went further in their active measures against Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States.

Meanwhile the Soviet Union following the end of World War II was funding Neo-Nazi parties in West Germany in an effort to undermine their democracy. They backed the Socialist Reich Party in 1950 that worked with the Communist Party of Germany.  Campaign themes of the Socialist Reich Party included that the Holocaust was an allied propaganda invention, it accused the United States of building fake gas chambers and producing fake news-film footage about concentration camps, that the politics of the Allied-powers created West German state were merely a front for American domination, and that West Germany's puppet status of the United States should be opposed. 

Fidel Castro in 1962 when Otto-Ernst Remer was selling him weapons

In the early 1960s the Nazi who saved Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1944, Otto-Ernst Remer, had contacts with and assisted Fidel Castro in Cuba with the purchase of weapons. Ernst-Remer along with Ernst Wilhelm Springer sold the Cuban dictator 4,000 pistols. The German foreign intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), reported that "evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives."  

The myth that the communists are anti-fascists is a dangerous one. The fact is that they view the Nazis as a tool to polarize society, accelerate the development of class consciousness, destroy Western Democracies and replace them with communist regimes. 
 

Independent computer network in Cuba has been taken over by the Castro regime

The Castro regime is totalitarian.

Preemptive arrests and state security presence block protest for SNET

Today the space outside of the Ministry of Communications was taken over by state security, and preemptive arrests were made to prevent youth that wanted to protest the take over of SNET by the Castro regime from gathering and expressing themselves.

Yoani Sanchez reported earlier over twitter that "with arrests and threats, State Security aborts a protest for SNet. Activists, independent journalists and members of the wireless network denounced political police pressures."

#Cuba Más detalles de lo ocurrido hoy: Con arrestos y amenazas, la Seguridad del Estado aborta una protesta por SNet. Activistas, periodistas independientes y miembros de la red inalámbrica denunciaron presiones de la policía política. https://t.co/3YeDRyPXxz pic.twitter.com/nlV8gdLiac

— Yoani Sánchez 🇨🇺 (@yoanisanchez) August 17, 2019

On August 16, 2019 Andrea Rodriguez, the long time Associated Press correspondent in Cuba, reported that "after weeks of complaints and protests, the state JovenClub will absorb SNET, the street network that delighted gamers for a decade without Internet in Cuba."

This is a euphemistic way to report that the Castro regime has seized an independent network in a government take over. 

This has also happened in the real world in the recent past with the seizure of the Rotilla music festival in 2011. Rotilla had been tolerated and held gatherings in Cuba for over a decade before it was shut down.

S-Net and Rotilla were not political spaces but free spaces for youth to gather. In a totalitarian regime that is unacceptable. This is why when members of S-Net try to maintain a horizontal platform they are tolerated for a time, as was Rotilla, but is eventually eliminated. The priority is control not providing more services and spaces for Cubans.

It's ironic that @ETECSA_Cuba fights #SNET. In the long run, they would gain business by giving SNET free Internet access. ETECSA would get new users, new apps & the #Cuban economy & society would benefit. https://t.co/rwshJXuvlC https://t.co/1xrFQgY3OP
@camilocondi @ElYuma pic.twitter.com/YAhxEPWCaM

— larry Press (@larrypress) August 15, 2019

Ernesto de Armas  on August 15 over twitter posted a 5-second video that briefly shows a blue vehicle traveling with the following text: "Yesterday at 11:45 pm + - State security came to my home. They took me in a patrol car. They threatened me, falsely accused me of things, even threatened me with jail. I am very sad that this happens just to defend SNET in my country. I don't hurt anyone ..."

Ayer a las 11:45pm +- vino la seguridad del estado a mi casa. Me llevaron en una patrulla. Me amenazaron, me acusaron falsamente de cosas, incluso me amenazaron con la cárcel. Estoy muy triste de que esto suceda solo por defender SNET en mi país. Yo no hago daño a nadie...😢😢 pic.twitter.com/cBJGlBdfGz

— Ernesto De Armas (@RealErnesto95) August 15, 2019

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 more than a hundred S-Net users gathered outside the Ministry of Communications of what 14ymedio described as "SNet (Street Network), the largest wifi network in Cuba."

In a prior CubaBrief the phrase "the devil is in the details" was used to discuss economic sanctions and trade with with Castro regime. It should also be applied when discussing the expansion of the internet in Cuba.

On May 29, 2019 both official and independent publications on the island reported that on July 29, 2019 the Cuban government would recognize private, informal networks and legalize them. Reuters reported that Cuba announced that "it would legalize private Wi-Fi networks to access the internet and connect computers," based on resolutions (98/2019 and 99/2019) issued by the regime's Ministry of Communication

What has happened is the opposite of what was reported in May. "S-Net", a domestic, non-hierarchical, self organizing and self configuring private network that covers all of Havana and is also found in the country side has been declared illegal.The two resolutions issued by the Cuban dictatorship's Ministry of Communication in May 2019 that were interpreted positively by the international press are being used to target this mesh network. Now what had been long tolerated is being shut down.

In addition, Article 68 of Decree-Law 370/2019 issued on July 4, 2019 prohibits "f) hosting a site on servers located in a foreign country, other than as a mirror or replica of the main site on servers located in national territory” and “i) to disseminate, through public networks of data transmission, information contrary to the social interest, morals, good manners and integrity of people.” This can be easily used to censor on-line platforms with political views that do not advance communism in Cuba, and has also come under criticism in Cuba.

The Cuban government is shifting tactics for controlling information. For a long time it simply barred internet access on the island, but now it has decided to follow the Chinese model: expand internet access, while systematically controlling and censoring it. The regime is playing a little catch up and had been caught off its game with protests that were mobilized through social networks earlier this year. This also presents an opportunity to further systematically monitor Cubans on a mass scale, and would be a modernizing tool for totalitarianism as it is now in China.

The tactics changed but the objective remains the same. The Castro regime continues its six decade effort to block access to the free and uncensored flow of information. The dictatorship began by targeting and shutting down independent newspapers, radio and television stations in 1959 and sixty years later it is doing the same with the internet.

Antonio García Martínez of Ideas at WIRED and author of 'Chaos Monkeys' had reported in 2017 on the burgeoning internet scene in Cuba gives a more somber assessment now in 2019, "Information may want to be free, but dictatorships have other plans."

Freedom of expression whether with paper or electrons continues to be a cat and mouse game in Cuba.

Black Ribbon Day 2019: The Hitler-Stalin Pact that started WW2 and that communists would like to erase.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera

Eighty years ago on August 23, 1939 the world was shocked to learn that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was named after their respective foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Observers would have been even more horrified had they known of the secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers. What they called a "peace treaty" in reality was a war treaty.

Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).

Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland. On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together.

Nazi and Soviet soldiers greet one another in Poland (1939)

About 230,000 Polish soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Russians. The Soviet precursor to the KGB was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.  Thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders were taken into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, shot in the back of the head or in the neck and buried in mass graves.

Months later, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed the Baltic States in June 1940.

This should not have come as a complete surprise.

The same people who would join Hitler's brown shirts were also susceptible recruits to join Antifa. Communists viewed the SA as a "proletarian-revolutionary paramilitary wing"of the Nazi movement and susceptible to being recruited to the communist cause. The case of Richard Scheringer, a supporter of Adolf Hitler and army officer who converted to communism in the early 1930s is a high profile example of this.

Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emeritus, at Emory University, described how communists had mistakenly viewed the Nazis as a means to achieving power and undermining capitalist democracies. Antifa identified all political parties that were not communist as fascist. This meant that social democrats, centrist political parties, and conservative parties were together with the Nazis all labeled fascist. Fascism, according to Antifa, is anti-capitalism. This was the Comintern's class against class approach and fractured any potential broad anti-Nazi coalition.

"Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1932 had been immeasurably aided by the German communists' steadfast support for the Comintern tactic of “class against class,” which demanded no cooperation with other anti-Nazi forces. German communists blithely insisted that Hitler’s triumph would be evanescent—summarized in their optimistic slogan, Nach Hitler, kommen wir ('After Hitler, us'). 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is this strategy but on a grander scale. Let the Western democracies and the Nazis exhaust each other in the conflict and then seize everything. Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. reported that "Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West."

Soviet and Nazi soldiers fraternize after conquering Poland in 1939

The Communist International (Comintern) issued new orders to their members once the non-aggression pact had been made public.  Professor Klehr described the new directive.

Good communists were ordered to oppose anyone intending to stand in Hitler’s way.  With Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow at the end of September and the signing of a German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, the Comintern emphasized that the primary adversary was those countries that were at war with Germany, and those socialists and social democrats fighting against fascism. Germany had concluded a pact with the USSR, while “reactionary” England, at the helm of a vast colonial empire, was the “bulwark of capitalism.” Thus, communist parties in England and France were ordered to call for the defeat of their countries—ordered, in other words, to officially embrace treason. 

According to Klehr, Nazi reports confirmed that Communists were fulfilling their part of the agreement siding against Western Democracies.

 A June 1940 Gestapo report approvingly noted that the Soviet government was favorably disposed to the Third Reich and had endorsed its invasions of the Scandinavian states and Belgium and Holland “as necessary and proper.” The report went on to note that the Comintern had avoided open attacks on Germany,  and that the parties and publications allied with the Comintern were not pushing for communists to struggle against National Socialism or denounce fascism.

This arrangement only ended on June 22, 1941 when the Nazis double crossed their Soviet allies and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet foreign minister, Molotov

Communist morality has no problem with any of it because as the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin observed in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920:

"The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

The myth that the communists were anti-fascists is a dangerous one, and the fact is that they viewed the Nazis as an instrument to wipe out Western Democracies and replace them with communist regimes believing that the fascists would quickly fade out of power.


This reckless strategy cost 22 to 28 million Russian lives in World War Two, and nearly led to the Nazi conquest and occupation of Russia.

It also led to Poland spending another half century under Soviet domination and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia occupied by the Russians.  A conquest that arose out of the Hitler-Stalin pact that endured following the end of the war.  

The Baltic Way brought an end to one key element of Molotov Ribbentrop

It was a nonviolent movement thirty years ago that liberated the Baltic nations. The Baltic Way brought an end to this part of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. 

On June 4, 1989 the Solidarity labor movement won in free elections and the Polish people finally regained their sovereignty after nearly 50 years under Soviet domination. They did it nonviolently. 

So did the people of the Baltic states when two million Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians joined hands together in a giant human chain stretching 370 miles on August 23, 1989. Fifty years to the day after the treaty that brought them so much grief had been signed.

This history must not be forgotten. The Spanish scholar George Santayana understood that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Embassy of Estonia, Embassy of Latvia, Embassy of Lithuania, JBANC, Estonian American National Council, EU Delegation to the USA, Lithuanian American Council, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation are organizing a reenactment of this nonviolent action that freed three peoples. 

Be a part of history: join this reenactment of a unique historical event. All nationalities are welcome.

Save the date: August 23, 2019 at 1:00pm

Holding hands in a human chain to celebrate freedom in front of the U.S. Capitol (West side, First Street SW & 1st Street NW)

Afterwards informal gathering at 2.30 PM at Biergarten Haus, 1355 H St NE, Washington, DC.

Imagine what would Cuba be like today if Fidel Castro had never been born.

Aspiring totalitarians yesterday celebrated the birth of Fidel Castro, and some such as Jordan claimed that they could not " begin to imagine what state Cuba would be in now if it weren't for him, Raul, Camilo and Che amongst every single other fighter."

This leads to an interesting thought experiment. What would have happened if Fidel Castro had never been born, and his 60 year dictatorship had never existed? Let us examine where Cuba was prior to 1959 and where it is today and imagine "what might have been?"

The economy

In 1959 in terms of per-capita GDP Cuba was second to Chile and was doing better than Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. In 2015 Cuba lagged well behind the other four countries. It would be fair to say that in economic terms, despite billions in Soviet and Venezuelan subsidies that the past six decades have been a disaster for Cuba.  

Firing squad in Cuba.

Death count in Cuba

There are tens of thousands of Cubans who would be alive today if Fidel Castro had never been born.

"University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own government, reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."

 Cuban diplomats pushed for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948

Democracy restored in a post-Batista Cuba

Many of the leaders of the July 26th movement who did the heavy lifting in the fighting in the field, and lobbying Washington DC to place an arms embargo on Fulgencio Batista in the Spring of 1958 authentically wanted a democratic restoration in Cuba. As did the majority of the Cuban people. This is why Fidel Castro lied systematically through the 1950s and into 1960 denying that he was a communist and claiming to respect civil liberties and democracy.  

While Fidel Castro paid lip service on civil liberties, and locked up his compatriots, who had complained that communists were infiltrating the revolution as slanderers, he carried out the consolidation of power and formed a communist totalitarian dictatorship. 

Fidel Castro turned Cuba's diplomatic corps into a weapon of subversion and violence, recruited Nazis to train his repressive apparatus in the mid 1960s and linked up with cocaine traffickers in the 1980s in an effort to target the soft underbelly of the United States. 

Without Fidel Castro the democratic transition in a post-Batista Cuba would not have been side-lined and the old democratic order that had done pioneering work on international human rights restored.

Fidel Castro had designs on Venezuela since 1959.

Venezuela

If Fidel Castro had never been born then Hugo Chavez would not have had a mentor and the assistance of the Cuban secret police to take over Venezuela and turn it into the dictatorship it is today with Nicolas Maduro, and his Cuban advisers, and the humanitarian crisis threatening the region.

Cuban family arrested for not mourning death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Human rights in Cuba

If Fidel Castro had never been born then Cubans would not be going to prison for not sufficiently mourning the dictator's death in 2016, or worse yet providing a negative assessment of the regime he created. Thousands of men and women would not have spent decades in Cuban prisons for their political beliefs.

If Fidel Castro hadn't been born they would not have been killed

Opposition leaders such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante would not have been killed on July 22, 2012 by Castro's state security agents. Nor the games played by Castro to invite the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in order to get positive media coverage but then not follow through. There would not have been the massacre of refugees by Castro regime agents slaughtered for trying to flee Cuba.

Students entering the University of Havana

Education

 Cuba in 1953 had the fourth lowest illiteracy rate in Latin America with an illiteracy rate that was 23.6%. Costa Rica's at the time was 20.6%, Chile's was 19.6%. and Argentina's was the lowest at 13.6%.  The rest of Latin America showed similar or greater gains without sacrificing civil liberties. 

There are also great concerns about the Cuban educational system today. First the issue of a system of education being transformed by the Castro dictatorship into a system of indoctrination and secondly following the collapse of Soviet subsidies the material decline of the entire system along with shortages of teachers. 

Without Fidel Castro intervention Cuba was on track to having a first class education system without sacrificing civil liberties. Now it has neither.

Cholera patients in Cuba (CNN)

Healthcare

The Castro regime in the past failed to report Dengue (1997) and Cholera (2012) outbreaks in Cuba. Jailing those who warned the world of the threat.  In 2017 the Cuban dictatorship failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017.

On November 29, 2018 The New York Times reported that the  Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO) "made about $75 million off the work of up to 10,000 Cuban doctors who earned substandard wages in Brazil." A group of these Cuban medical doctors are now suing PAHO for the organization's alleged role in human trafficking.

This may also raise new questions on the relationship between PAHO, Cuba and reporting not only on outbreaks but the healthcare statistics that present the regime in a positive light.

Without Fidel Castro, Cuba would be another normal country that would be reporting health statistics that were accurate because there would be both an independent press and civil society to keep the government honest. Both were destroyed by Fidel Castro and his regime.

Independent Cuban journalist sentenced to a year in prison for committing journalism.

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." - Elie Wiesel, Nobel Lecture 1986

Independent journalist Roberto Quiñones faces year in prison.

Today at the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC a son demanded his father’s freedom. Roberto de Jesús Quiñones faces a one year prison sentence for exercising his fundamental rights. He is an independent journalist, attorney, Catholic lay person, and family man. His son, Roberto José Quiñones Castro, is a university student in Virginia who is working his way through school.

Last week on August 7th Roberto de Jesus Quiñones was sentenced to a year in prison in a rigged trial. Today his son brought a letter to the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC calling for his dad’s freedom.

Roberto José Quiñones with letter in hand protests dad's sentence

His father was unjustly imprisoned for five years for being an independent attorney in Cuba in 1998. No longer able to practice as a lawyer upon his release, he became an independent journalist.

On April 22, 2019 Roberto de Jesús Quiñones was beaten up for covering the trial of a religious couple sentenced to prison for homeschooling their kids. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported on April 24th what had happened:

On April 22, at around 2:00 p.m., Cuban police agents detained Quiñones, a contributor to the news website CubaNet, as he was standing outside of the Guantánamo Municipal Tribunal, according to CubaNet and the Association for Press Freedom (APLP), a Cuban press freedom organization. At the time of his detention, Quiñones was covering the trial of two Cuban evangelical pastors facing charges for homeschooling their children, CubaNet reported. While being transported in the police car, agents beat Quiñones, injuring his mouth, tongue, and right thumb and causing an inflammation in his right ear, his wife told APLP.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists in the same report "Cuba is one of the most hostile environments for the press in the world, and ranks among CPJ's 10 Most Censored Countries."

Roberto Quiñones was physically assaulted on April 22, 2019.

Today the Cuban embassy did not respond to the petitions of this Cuban citizen. Since they would not accept the letter Roberto José read it aloud and in it he outlined the real reason for his father's political persecution:

"The rigged trial held against my father for his work as a journalist, independent lawyer, and Catholic activist in the Family and Penitentiary Ministry of the Guantánamo-Baracoa Diocese, was actually a reprimand for his dignified work in general, and especially for his accompaniment to the evangelical pastors Adya Expósito and Ramón Rigal, also tried and convicted in a rigged manner on April 22 in that same Court; and also when my father was beaten and arbitrarily detained."

When he concluded reading the letter, all present chanted: Free Roberto Jesús Quiñones! Following the protest Roberto José Quiñones gave a short interview in English outlining the circumstances of his father's case and how his dad is doing presently.

Picket today outside the Cuban embassy in Washington DC.

Earlier today 30 non-governmental organizations called on the Cuban state to respect and guarantee the rights of journalist Roberto Jesús Quiñones.