Carlos Alberto Montaner April 3, 1943 – June 30, 2023

“There is a secret family of victims of totalitarianism, which can be the families in Burma or the victims in North Korea or in Iran or in Cuba. We feel a special bond with them because we belong to the same family.” - Carlos Alberto Montaner, (2011)

Carlos Alberto Montaner

One year ago today Carlos Alberto Montaner shuffled off this mortal coil after a long and debilitating illness. The Center for a Free Cuba released the following statement on the same day.

The death of Carlos Alberto Montaner in Spain after a long illness is a great loss for Cubans in the island and around the world who benefited from his tireless efforts to denounce the crimes of the Cuban regime. It is also a loss for millions of people worldwide whose struggle for human rights he defended in his many books, columns, and thousands of articles that appeared in major newspapers on three continents. Carlos Alberto was a champion for the victims of communism and oppression, and he urged the international community to assist them.

The chairman of the Center for a Free Cuba, Guillermo Marmol, stated: “Carlos Alberto Montaner served for many years on the Center’s research council where he made significant contributions to the Center’s policies, publications, and research. We are confident that it will not be long before the extent, significance, and importance of Carlos Alberto Montaner’s life is fully known in Cuba itself.”

The Center for a Free Cuba extends its deepest condolences to Linda, his widow; to Carlos and Gina, his children; and to his family, colleagues and friends. 

 The life he lived could have been very different, if at age 17 Carlos Alberto had not successfully escaped from an arbitrary detention in 1960, found protection in an Embassy, and months later was able to leave Cuba.

A year later, and the loss of this great man of letters is still felt. Three days ago, Alvaro Vargas Llosa paid homage to Carlos Alberto Montaner and observed that despite having had success in life, following his death his legacy has grown larger, and more impactful.

His writings, and interviews remain even more relevant, and important today.

For example, on April 4, 2007, Helen Aguirre Ferré interviewed Carlos Alberto Montaner on GBH, public television, about communism in Cuba. This analysis is still applicable today, but he had refined his stance by 2014.

Carlos Alberto Montaner contributed an article to the New York Times published on October 13, 2014 in which he made the case against normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba. He Tweeted it out one week after President Obama announced the normalization of relations with Cuba. 

 

Below is the article Carlos Alberto Tweeted out ten years ago this December. Time proved him right. 

 

New York Times, October 13, 2014

Cuba Doesn’t Deserve Normal Diplomatic Relations

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

Carlos Alberto Montaner is a Cuban-born author, journalist and syndicated columnist. His work appears in The Miami Herald and other publications throughout Latin America, the United States and Spain. His latest novel is "Tiempo de Canallas." He is on Twitter.

The United States should not normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba for several reasons.

First, the Cuban government has been officially declared “a state sponsor of terrorism" by the State Department. It's inconceivable to oppose the terrorists in the Middle East while treating them normally in the United States' neighborhood.

There's also a bipartisan consensus in Washington against the Castro regime. All three Cuban-American senators and four Cuban-American representatives, Democrats and Republican, agree that sanctions should be maintained. They are the best interpreters of the opinion of the almost three million Cubans and descendants of Cubans living in the United States.

Cuba systematically engages in undermining the interests of the United States. It is an ally of Iran, North Korea (to whom it furnishes war matériel), Russia, Syria, the FARC terrorists in Colombia and Venezuela. The F.B.I. recently warned that Cuban intelligence is trying to recruit people in the academic world as agents of influence. It once infiltrated them into the Pentagon and the State Department; today, they are in prison.

The Cuba dictatorship continues to violate human rights and shows no intention to make amends. The small economic changes it has made are directed at strengthening the regime. Why reward that behavior? During the entire 20th century, the U.S. was (rightfully) reproached for maintaining normal relations with right-wing dictatorships. For the first time, the U.S. maintains a morally consistent position in Latin America and should not sacrifice it.

A reversal of policy would be a cruel blow against the Cuban democrats and dissidents who view the United States as their only dependable ally in the world. Normalizing relations would be the proof needed by the Stalinists in the Cuban government to demonstrate that they don't have to make any political changes to be accepted. Not to mention a premature reconciliation without substantial changes would also be a harsh blow to the reformists in the Cuban government who are pressuring toward a democratic opening.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/10/12/should-the-us-normalize-relations-with-cuba/cuba-doesnt-deserve-normal-diplomatic-relations?smid=tw-share

 

Linda and Carlos Alberto Montaner

Remember her: Milada Horakova martyred on this day in 1950 by communist government for her nonviolent defense of Czechoslovakian democracy

Remember her 

Milada Horakova at her show trial in 1950.

Milada Horakova was hanged with three others in Prague’s Pankrac Prison as a spy and traitor to the Communist Czechoslovakian government on June 27, 1950. She was a  lawyer, social democrat, and a prominent feminist in the interwar and postwar periods. 

Milada had been a member of the Czech resistance to the Nazi occupation of her homeland and survived a Nazi prison. After Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 by the Soviets she became a member of parliament in 1946 but resigned her seat after the Communist coup of 1948. 

However she refused to abandon her country.  She was arrested at her office on September 27, 1949 "on charges of conspiracy and espionage against the state." 

Milada was subjected to a show trial. 

Oxford Languages defines a show trial as "a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice." 

Vladimir Lenin called them "model trials", but they would eventually become known as show trials under Josef Stalin with hundreds of thousands executed and millions sent to work camps in Siberia, and they would take place not only in the Soviet Union, but in the East Bloc including Czechoslovakia, and as far away as Cuba. The Nazis also copied the practice, and so have other repressive regimes.

Let’s celebrate champions of women’s rights, defenders of democracy, freedoms and dignity like Milada Horáková who bravely stood against totalitarianism in all forms and was executed on this day in 1950 for opposing the communist occupation of Czechoslovakia. Long live Heroes https://t.co/XXdZY8o5e4

— CzechEmbassyPodgorica (@CzechEmbassyME) June 27, 2024

Seventy three years after Milada Horakova addressed the court in the final day of her show trial on June 8, 1950 her words ring true and strong:

"I have declared to the State Police that I remain faithful to my convictions, and that the reason I remain faithful to them is because I adhere to the ideas, the opinions and the beliefs of those who are figures of authority to me. And among them are two people who remain the most important figures to me, two people who made an enormous impression on me throughout my life. Those people are Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Eduard Benes. And I want to say something to those who were also inspired by those two men when forming their own convictions and their own ideas. I want to say this: no-one in this country should be made to die for their beliefs. And no-one should go to prison for them."

Her life story was brought to big screen in 2017and on January 12, 2018 was available on Netflix, and is now available on Amazon. Below is an English trailer for this important film.

 Adam D. E. Watkins in his 2010 paper "The Show Trial of J U Dr. Milada Horáková: The Catalyst for Social Revolution in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1950" explains the importance of the show trial in gutting democratic traditions and replacing them with Stalinism:

The study deconstructs the show trial’s influence on inducing a country to foster the Communist movement against decades of democratic traditions. The research reveals the impact of the show trial of Dr. Milada Horáková in 1950 and how it was instrumental in reforming a society, marked the beginning of Stalinism, and ushered forth a perverted system of justice leading to a cultural transformation after the Communist putsch. Furthermore, the revolution truncated intellectual thought and signified the end of many social movements – including the women’s rights movement

According to D. E. Watkings Horáková was seen by the public as a symbol of  the First Republic and of democracy. Unlike others who did break under the relentless psychological and physical torture she never did. The communists tried to edit her testimony for propaganda purposes but as Radio Prague in their 2005 report on the discovery of the unedited tapes of her trial:

[S]he faced her show trial with calm and defiance, refusing to be broken. Audio recordings - intended to be used by the Communists for propaganda purposes - were mostly never aired, for the large part because for the Party's purposes, they were unusable.

Because she refused to cooperate with the Stalinists her punishment was particularly severe, even for the death penalty. In 2007 her prosecutor Ludmila Brozova-Polednova who in 1950 had helped to condemn Horakova to death, now 86, was tried as an accomplice to murder. 

During the trial Radio Prague reported that a note written by an anonymous eye-witness to Milada Horakova's execution quoted the young prosecutor recommending: "Don't break her neck on the noose, Suffocate the bitch - and the others too." Milada Horáková  was executed in Pankrác Prison on 27 June 1950 by a particularly torturous method: "intentionally slow strangulation, which according to historians took 15 minutes^. She was 48 years old." The urn with her ashes was never given to her family nor is it known what became of them.

In a letter to her 16 year old teenage daughter Milada explained why she had refused to compromise with evil. Her daughter received the letter 40 years later after the end of communist rule:

The reason was not that I loved you little; I love you just as purely and fervently as other mothers love their children. But I understood that my task here in the world was to do you good … by seeing to it that life becomes better, and that all children can live well. … Don’t be frightened and sad because I am not coming back any more. Learn, my child, to look at life early as a serious matter. Life is hard, it does not pamper anybody, and for every time it strokes you it gives you ten blows. Become accustomed to that soon, but don’t let it defeat you. Decide to fight.

Hours prior to her execution she reaffirmed her position to her family:

I go with my head held high. One also has to know how to lose. That is no disgrace. An enemy also does not lose honor if he is truthful and honorable. One falls in battle; what is life other than struggle? (Both quotes excerpts taken from here)

Ms. Brožová-Polednová, the prosecutor,  was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison in 2008 but was given a presidential pardon by Vaclav Klaus on humanitarian grounds one year and six months into her sentence and released in 2010. The former prosecutor defended her actions claiming that what she did was legal and that she was "following orders." She tried to appeal her conviction at the Strasbourg Court in 2011 and lost.

⚖On June 27, 1950, the Czechoslovak communist regime executed #FreedomFighter Milada Horáková. In Czechia, we commemorate today as the #DayOfPoliticalPrisoners. The number of #PoliticalPrisoners worldwide is unknown, though rough estimates by human rights orgs are around 1mill. pic.twitter.com/lnx1jkABpA

— People in Need (@people_in_need) June 27, 2024

Today, June 27, the day of Milada Horakova's execution is now recognized in the Czech Republic as  “Commemoration day for the victims of the Communist regime.”

Biopic of the life of Milada Horáková (2017)

 

Remembering Neda Agha-Soltan who was extrajudicially executed 15 years ago today in Iran

"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

 

Fifteen years ago today in Tehran, in the midst of the Green Revolution an agent of the Iranian Islamic regime, a member of the Basij, shot and murdered Neda Agha-Soltan. She was just 26 years old an aspiring singer. Her death was captured on video and went viral across the internet providing an image that brought home the reality of the violent crackdown visited on the nonviolent Green movement.

 

In Iran, the contested June 2009 election sparked an unprecedented wave of state-sponsored violence and repression. Thousands of peaceful protesters were beaten, arrested, tortured, and killed. One of them Neda Agha-Soltan, age 27, was shot and killed on June 20, 2009 during protests denouncing election fraud. 

Neda’s death was captured on video and in those terrible moments reflected the great crime committed by the Iranian government against the people of Iran. Official numbers place the number of killed at 36 during the protests but the opposition places the dead at 72. In 2009 at least 270 people were hanged and in 2010 at least 12 so far. 4,000 have been arrested including journalists and reformist politicians.

Neda's fiance, Caspian Makan, left Iran and has spoken out all over the world on camera and in print to denounce the atrocity. I met Caspian and heard him speak at the 2nd Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance, and Democracy on March 9, 2010. It is powerful testimony. Below is an interview broadcast over Al-Jazeera in English.

 

Fifteen years later those responsible for this crime have yet to be brought to justice and the regime that carried out this brutal crime along with many others remains in power.  It is precisely for these reasons that we must remember and continue to protest wherever and whenever possible to demand justice. 

"Although Neda has been murdered and is dead, they are still afraid of her, they come to the graveyard and want to kill her again. She's dead but her memory is getting brighter and brighter every day." - Hajar Rostami (Neda's mother interviewed in The Guardian on June 11, 2010 )

Ernesto "Che" Guevara born on this day in 1928. Nothing to celebrate.

 A mass murdering racist, who dined with Mao as millions died of hunger is not someone to celebrate.

"All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." - Matthew 26, 26:52

 Some wish to celebrate Ernesto Guevara's birthday today. If he and his comrades had their way the world would have been subjected to a nuclear holocaust in October 1962, and they were bitterly disappointed that it did not happen.

Thankfully, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev reached a peaceful outcome to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the Castro regime protested it and was unhappy with their Soviet allies not launching their nuclear missiles. 

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's essay "Tactics and strategy of the Latin American Revolution (October - November 1962)" was posthumously published by the official publication Verde Olivo on October 9, 1968, and even at this date was not only Guevara's view in 1962 but the official view in 1968: 

"Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice."

In the same essay, the dead Argentine served as a mouthpiece for Fidel Castro declaring: "We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims." Castro and Che were so outraged that the regime reached out to Nazis to purchase arms and train the regime's security services.

Castro and Che were not alone in their criticism. Mao Zedong also criticized Khrushchev for backing down in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and this was the last straw in a series of slights between the two communist powers that set the stage for the Sino-Soviet split. 

However Castro eventually backed off and returned to the Soviet camp whereas Che Guevara embraced the Maoists. 

This should not have been a surprise.

Mao Zedong had already been in power in China for a decade when the Castro regime took power in Cuba in 1959.  In September 1960 Havana diplomatically recognized the Peoples Republic of China. Between 1960 and 1964 the two communist dictatorships would collaborate closely together.

Mao's regime in 1958 embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a campaign to reorganize the Chinese populace to improve its agricultural and industrial production along communist ideological lines. The campaign was a disaster that led to mass famine and a death toll of at least 45 million.

In the midst of the famine Ernesto "Che" Guevara with a Cuban delegation visited Mainland China and met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other high ranking Chinese officials in 1960 to discuss conditions in Cuba and in Latin America, and the prospects for communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. As millions starved in China the two revolutionaries dined through several courses of traditional Chinese food.

Che and Mao dine in 1960 while millions starved in China.

 

Finally, on the question of race and sexuality the Argentine revolutionary had retrograde views that the woke today somehow continue to ignore or excuse.

Unlike Mohandas Gandhi, who truly evolved in his views on race as a young man but is still attacked for them, Che Guevara seems to get a pass despite not showing an equivalent evolution. Politifact on April 17, 2013 quoted from The Motorcycle Diaries, a book based on diaries the Argentine kept while traveling through Latin America in the early 1950s.

"The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations."

 "The Establishment" writing in the publication AfroPunk cited the above quote but dismissed it as something  Guevara wrote when "he was around 24 years old." He then goes on to say that he " went so far as to fight with an all black army," but failed to cite his critical quotes against the Africans he fought alongside.

Politifact in 2013 quoted this comment from Guevara’s writing on his time fighting with black revolutionaries in the Congo that included this line: "Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn."

It wasn't the Congolese, but Che's failure to train them that led to defeat. The other side that defeated Guevara's forces were also Congolese, but he tried to pass off his own incompetence with a racist excuse. 

However in another area Mr. Guevara has even more to answer for. In the same diary he refers to homosexuality in a negative context:

"The episode upset us a little because the poor man, apart from being homosexual and a first-rate bore, had been very nice to us, giving us 10 soles each, bringing our total to 479 for me and 163 1/2 to Alberto."

Fidel Castro in a March 13, 1963 speech was clear in his distaste for the "effeminate" were he openly attacked “long-haired layabouts, the children of bourgeois families,” roaming the streets wearing “trousers that are too tight,” carrying guitars to look like Elvis Presley, who took “their licentious behavior to the extreme” of organizing “effeminate shows” in public places.  The Cuban dictator, and Guevara's comrade, warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degenerates.”

Two years later in 1965, Fidel Castro spoke explicitly about the Cuban Revolution's views on homosexuals:

“We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” 

In 1964 the Cuban revolutionaries began rounding up Gays and sending them to Military Units to Aid Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). These forced labor camps were for those suspected of or found guilty of "improper conduct."  Persons with effeminate mannerisms: what the Cuban government called "extravagant behavior" were taken to these camps. 

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was in the revolutionary leadership in Castro's Cuba throughout this process and did not leave Cuba until 1965.

Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison and in the first half of 1959 presided over the executions of hundreds of Cubans, reported Andres Vargas Llosa in 2005.

Che Guevara addressing the United Nations on December 11, 1964 did not mince words: "We must say here something that is a well-known truth and that we have always asserted before the whole world: executions? Yes, we have executed people; we are executing people and shall continue to execute people as long as it is necessary.

Guevara bragged of the executions being carried out in Cuba.

 Between 1959 and 1964 the numbers of Cubans executed was in the thousands. This is nothing to celebrate.  However the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) disagrees with this assessment and celebrated the above speech with an excerpt that ends with "Fatherland or Death!" This is why I protested the U.S. rejoining UNESCO in 2003, and celebrated leaving it again in 2017.

On this day in 1928 the mass murderer Che Guevara was born. Shamefully, institutions like @UNESCO, not only pay homage to this brutal, racist and homophobic mass executioner. They also spread his toxic and murderous ideas. #ChesDead pic.twitter.com/flgs1SOpqh

— John Suarez ن (@johnjsuarez) June 14, 2024

In the video below you can watch the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century meet his Latin American protege.

R.I.P. Civil rights activist and nonviolence tactician James Morris Lawson Jr. September 22, 1928 - June 9, 2024

"Through non-violence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt. Mutual regard cancels enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes systems of gross social immorality.” 

~ James Lawson, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

 

James Lawson in Nashville, Tennessee. 2005 Photo by Joon Powell

James Lawson in Nashville, Tennessee. 2005 Photo by Joon Powell

Reverend James Morris Lawson Jr. has passed, but his nonviolent legacy lives on, and will live on for a long time to come. Paul Valentine in The Washington Post described him as the "architect of civil rights nonviolence."

Reverend James Lawson, a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s who trained the Nashville Student movement in nonviolent direct action was still engaged in forming activists well into his 90s and had a life time of experience to share. 

Reverend Lawson's  2010 keynote address at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict is an important talk to listen to, but thankfully there are many others.

This blog has followed his nonviolent struggle over the years with blog posts in 2010, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Reverend James Lawson is missed, but not forgotten, and his nonviolent lessons will continue to train and form new generations.