Oslo Freedom Forum at XVII: Speaking truth to power for 17 years

 "Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indirectly, to all people. This is why we cannot remain silent in the face of evil or violence; silence merely encourages them." - Vaclav Havel  

 

May 26 - 28

Since 2011 this blog has followed the Oslo Freedom Forum and the different human rights themes over the past decade, and  celebrated in 2012 when the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent was inaugurated. 

This year marks 17 years of this important human rights forum.   

On the first day there was a debate on the effectiveness of sanctions as a policy tool, but left out of consideration the role that increased resources play in exporting authoritarian and totalitarian models to other countries.

Nearly ten years ago, in the Panam Post I made the case against loosening sanctions on dictatorships, using the example of what had happened on the two occasions that they were loosened on the Cuban regime.

"The Carter Administration was the first to lift the travel ban and hold high-level negotiations with the Cuban dictatorship, and both sides opened Interest Sections in their respective capitals between 1977 and 1981. Then from 1981 to 1982, the Castro regime executed approximately 80 prisoners, which was a marked escalation when compared to 1976. Furthermore, during the Carter presidency, Fidel Castro took steps that resulted in the violent deaths of US citizens.

During the Mariel crisis of 1980, when over 125,000 Cubans sought to flee the island, the Cuban dictator sought to save face by selectively releasing approximately 12,000 violent criminals or individuals who were insane into the exodus. According to his bodyguard, “with the stroke of a pen,” Fidel Castro personally “designated which ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the revolution.”

In Latin America, this warming of relations coincided with the arrival of the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua in 1979 and a widening civil war in Central America, all with Cuban backing.

The second to seek engagement was the Clinton administration in the 1990s, similarly coinciding with brutal massacres. That included 37 Cubans in the “13 de Marzo” tugboat sinking (1994) and the murder of four in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down (1996). Despite all of this, President Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro in 2000 and opened up cash-and-carry trade that formed a pro-Castro lobby in the United States. In Latin America, this warming of relations coincided with the arrival of Hugo Chavez to power in Venezuela in 1999 — with Cuban backing that has had negative consequences throughout the region."

Cuban speaker Enrique Del Risco was present at this 17th edition Oslo Freedom Forum on the second day, and he highlighted how regime elites are building shiny high rise hotels, while average Cubans live in squalor.  Western democracies are complicit in subsidizing these bad actors, often with taxpayer funds. Thanks to the U.S. embargo none of them are Americans.

Later the same day the 2025 recipients of the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent: Azza Abo Rebieh, Sasha Skochilenko, and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara were recognized.

Luis Manuel was able to deliver an audio message from his prison in Cuba.

This blog entry thus far is Cuba-centric, but the Oslo Freedom Forum spans the world, as do the human rights crises .  

Oswaldo Payá when awarded the Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought on December 17, 2002 spoke prophetically when he said: “The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized.”

Too often some Cubans, for justifiable reasons, are focused on the troubles in Cuba, but fail to see what is happening elsewhere.  Too many believe that we are alone, and that no one is watching our plight.

This is not true.

Martin Luther King Jr. in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" explained why.   

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

Just as what happened in Cuba affected what is happening in Venezuela, and Nicaragua, so is what happening in China and Russia affecting Cuba. Therefore we owe it to ourselves to learn what is happening around the world, and to be in solidarity with human rights defenders, and friends of freedom everywhere.

Tomorrow, May 28, 2025, is the last day of the 2025 Oslo Freedom Forum, please join them online.

On this day in 1895 José Martí was killed by Spanish troops in Cuba. The struggle for Cuban freedom continues. #JoséMartí130

"There is no forgiveness for acts of hatred. Daggers thrust in the name of liberty are thrust into liberty's heart." - José Martí

 

 #JoséMartí130

José Julián Martí Pérez: 28 January 1853 – 19 May 1895

 José Julián Martí Pérez was killed 130 years ago today in battle against Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos, near the confluence of the rivers Contramaestre and Cauto, on May 19, 1895. He is buried in the Santa Efigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. Cubans the world over honor his memory and Cuban independence follows a day later. Seven years and one day after Martí's death Cuba formally obtained its independence on May 20, 1902. Cuban historian Dr. Jaime Suchlicki in his essay "The Death of a Hero" describes him as Cuba’s greatest hero and most influential writer.

Yesterday, a modern José Martí, marked four years in prison. Maykel Castillo Pérez "Osorbo" is an artist, husband, father, and an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience who has spent 48 months separated from his family for "the crime" of exercising his fundamental rights. He is a rap artist,  like Martí a poet, a defender of human rights, and imprisoned for his defense of Cuban sovereignty residing among the Cuban people.  

Cuban prisoner of conscience: Maykel Castillo Pérez "Osorbo"

The Cuban dictatorship jails minors for expressing themselves, in an action reminiscent of the Spanish colonial government's targeting of the future Cuban independence leader when he was a child. On October 21, 1869, José Martí, then 16, was jailed and accused of sedition for a letter he wrote to a friend criticizing his decision to join the Spanish colonial army.

Cubans across the ideological divide claim José Martí as their own. The claims of the dictatorship, led by the Castro family, that Martí is the intellectual author of their political project is ironic considering that the life and writings of this Cuban journalist, poet, and independence leader are the antithesis of the Castro dictatorship. The late Cuban scholar Carlos Ripoll is required reading to understand the thought of José Martí.

The Institutional Repository of Florida International University’s Digital commons offered the following description of two videos examining the work of Carlos Ripoll on May 10, 2017.

Carlos Ripoll (1922-2011) was a Cuban scholar who lived in the U.S. for close to half a century, during which he carried out outstanding research on several Cuban historical, literary, and political topics. Chief among them was Ripoll’s life-long interest in the life and work of Jose Marti. Based on personal acquaintance with Ripoll, reading of his works, and a survey of Martiana donated by Ripoll himself to the FIU library upon his death, Dr. Santi will explore Ripoll’s reading of Marti, is legacy and, in particular, what Ripoll called repeatedly “the falsification of Jose Marti in present-day Cuba.”

 Dr. Enrico Mario Santí in this 2017 presentation hosted by the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University discussed his relationship with Carlos Ripoll’s and his view of Martí, describing a Martí who “was not a Marxist, but he was a radical revolutionary. On the one hand Martí was not a socialist, but Martí was very interested in pursuing a revolution after the War of Independence. In other words there were no easy political solutions that Ripoll was advocating, but on the contrary was asking us to think through these issues and to be very careful about the facts of Cuban history, and the way Cuban history was being manipulated.”

For Spanish language readers, Professor Santí recommends reading Ripoll’s essay “La noble intransigencia de José Martí” which is available online, among other works.

Both José Martí’s writings and actions taken by him in life point to a man who prized liberty, independence based in popular sovereignty, and freedom of speech, thought and association as fundamental to his sense of being. He was a prisoner of conscience, before Amnesty International coined the term, jailed for writing a disapproving letter to a classmate for joining the Spanish colonial army.

Under the Castro regime freedom of expression can end in prison for engaging in “enemy propaganda,” and freedom of thought can also lead you to prison for the crime of “dangerousness.” This is an affront to José Marti’s belief that “liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.” Hypocrisy, under the Castro regime, is a currency for survival.

The Castro regime's celebration of José Martí is doubly ironic because both Francisco Franco's father and Fidel and Raul Castro's father had been soldiers who fought in Cuba to preserve its colonial status within the Spanish empire. Castro's father, Angel, according to the 2016 documentary, "Franco and Fidel: A Strange Friendship", had a photo of Franco on his nightstand. This historical link translated into a "special relationship" between the two dictators and is available online.

Cuba under the Castros is not the vision advanced by Cuba’s greatest hero. This tradition of freedom and respect for freedom of thought and speech exists among Cuban dissidents, and on more than one occasion cost the lives of other heroes to defend. One of Martí's modern day counterparts is Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, who addressed the European Parliament on December 17, 2002:

“The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together.’”

Oswaldo was extra-judicially executed by the secret police on July 22, 2012.  International human rights body's have recognized that this murder was a political assassination.

Other counterparts of Martí are found among the Cuban artists, journalists and intellectuals that nonviolently gathered in front of the Ministry of Culture to read his works on January 27, 2021, and were beaten up by the Castro dictatorship’s Minister of Culture, and arrested by the regime’s political police.

José Martí with shirt of stars by Camila Ramírez Lobón

 Today we remember and honor José Martí and his modern day counterparts risking all for Cuba to be free, and hope that their authentic history will reach a wider audience to counter the disinformation spread by the Cuban dictatorship, and others.

"I think they kill my child every time they deprive a person of their right to think." - José Martí 

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia and the Varela Project: Three Important Anniversaries in May.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. - Cicero

 

 

Today, May 15, 2025 marks a birth anniversary: Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Cuban human rights activist turned martyr, was born in Holguin, Cuba on this day in 1967. 

 

14 years and one week ago today human rights defender Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia following a brutal beating three days earlier by the dictatorship's political police died from his injuries on May 8, 2011 . 

 

23 years and five days on May 10, 2002 Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas, Regis Iglesias Ramirez and Antonio Ramón Diaz Sánchez  of the Christian Liberation Movement (from left to right in above picture) turned in 11,020 signed Varela Project petitions to the Cuban authorities demanding reforms that would see human rights respected in Cuba and fundamental freedoms restored. 

 

Both Regis Iglesias Ramirez, Antonio Ramón Diaz Sánchez and dozens of other activists involved in the Varela Project were imprisoned in the March 18, 2003 crackdown known as the end of the Cuban Spring and spent seven long years in prison and now suffer exile. 

 

 

Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas was assassinated on July 22, 2012 by Cuban government agents together with Harold Cepero Escalante, the Chirsitian Liberation Movement's youth leader.

 

Totalitarians may terrorize and murder but those who live on have an obligation to remember and rescue both the facts and the truth. Please assist in this effort by spreading the word. 

 

Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia, Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante were killed for exercising their fundamental rights as human rights defenders in Cuba. 

 

At the same time it is important remember that the Varela Project shook the foundations of the Castro regime and continues to live on today as an example of the power of the powerless. 

Project Varela was one of the projects Orlando Zapata Tamayo worked on, and his death impacted a Canadian rock band I.H.A.D. who wrote and sang the song "Orlando Zapata" in his memory.

 

Project Varela at Twenty Three

 "The solution to the Cuban problem lies with the Cubans, and that's why we created the Varela Project." - Oswaldo Payá , Havana, February 2012

Oswaldo Payá, Regis Iglesias, and Antonio Diaz, turn in petitions

Twenty three years ago today on May 10, 2002, carrying 11,020 signed petitions in support of the Varela Project, the Christian Liberation Movement's Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Antonio Diaz Sanchez, and Regis Iglesias Ramirez delivered them to the Cuban National Assembly.

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, in his 1999 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting observed that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Memory provides context to unfolding events today, and helps to render informed judgements.

This blog entry is an exercise in preserving memory.

The Varela Project, named after the Cuban Catholic Priest Felix Varela, sought to reform the Cuban legal system to bring it in line with international human rights standards. They had followed the letter of the law in organizing the campaign. They specifically asked for the following in the petition.

• Guarantee the right to free expression and free association that guarantee pluralism, opening Cuban society to political debate and facilitating a more participatory democracy. 
• Amnesty for all those imprisoned for political reasons.  
• Right of Cubans to form companies, both individually owned and in cooperatives. 
• Proposal for a new electoral law that truly guarantees the right to elect and be elected to all Cubans and the holding of free elections

The Christian Liberation Movement was founded by Catholic lay people in Havana in September 1988, and is part of a non-violent dissident movement that traces its origins and influences to the Cuban Committee for Human Rights that was founded in 1976.

President James Carter at the University of Havana.

Former President James Carter visited Cuba in May 2002 and on May 15th gave a speech at the University of Havana, where he advocated for the lifting of economic sanctions on Cuba and "called for the Varela Project petition to be published in the official newspaper so that people could learn about it."

Yet the dictatorship's response to the nonviolent citizen's initiative, and to President Carter's request, was to coerce Cubans into signing another petition declaring the Constitution unchangeable and quickly passed it through the rubber stamp legislature.

The Varela Project was not presented for debate before the National Assembly, which according to then existing law drafted by the Cuban government meant that it should have been deliberated in that legislative body. 

Less than a year after the petitions were turned in, starting on March 18, 2003 the Cuban Spring would end with a massive crackdown on Cuban civil society with many of the Project Varela organizers, imprisoned and summarily sentenced up to 28 years in prison. 

The 75 activists with long prison sentences became known as the "group of the 75."

With the end of the Cuban Spring Antonio Diaz Sanchez was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and Regis Iglesias Ramirez was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The Castro regime announced, at the time, that the Cuban dissident movement had been destroyed. 

They spoke prematurely. 

First, the remaining activists who were still free continued gathering signatures and would turn in another 14,384 petition signatures on October 5, 2003, and they continued to gather more. 

Secondly, the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of the activists who had been detained and imprisoned organized themselves into the "Ladies in White." A movement that sought the freedom of their loved ones and organized regular marches through the streets of Cuba, despite regime organized violence visited upon them. This new movement was led by Laura Inés Pollán Toledo, a former school teacher.

Antonio Diaz Sanchez and Regis Iglesias Ramirez were released from prison into forced exile in 2010. 

President Carter made a second trip to Cuba in March 2011, and did not publicly mention Project Varela during that visit, but instead focused efforts on trading Alan Gross for the remaining members of the WASP network jailed in the United States on charges of espionage, and murder conspiracy that killed three Americans and a US resident in 1996, and calling for the lifting of economic sanctions on the Castro regime. President Carter also downplayed the threat of FARC, ETA, and ELN terrorists harbored in Cuba.

Less than two months after the visit, Cuban dissident and former political prisoner, Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia (age 46) was arrested and beaten to death by Cuban regime police while protesting the dictatorship and died early on Sunday May 8, 2011. Months later on October 15, 2011 Laura Inés Pollán Toledo died under suspicious circumstances at the Calixto Garcia hospital.

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas was killed on July 22, 2012 together with Harold Cepero, a youth leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, in a car "accident" that all the hallmarks of a state security operation copied after the East German Stasi, who trained intelligence operatives in the Castro regime.

Revisiting and remembering these historic moments is part of the struggle against forgetting, and the conversation that it may arouse will only serve, when backed up with facts, to strengthen memory with truth. Memory, and retentiveness are defenses against the Castro regime's totalitarian rewriting of history. 

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas in a July 14, 2003 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times provided context to the aftermath of Project Varela, and the March 18, 2003 crackdown in which 75 Cuban dissidents, many of them organizers of the petition drive were sentenced to prison terms of up to 28 years. 

"Cuba finds itself in a grave crisis. In the last few years, thousands of its citizens have participated in what’s known as the Varela Project, overcoming a culture of fear and calling for a national referendum on civil rights, the peaceful evolution of freedom and reconciliation. But now a cloud of terror hangs over that quest for change."

This analysis remains relevant today. 

In 2023 Antonio Diaz Sanchez, Regis Iglesias Ramirez and other members of the Christian Liberation Movement reflected on the significance of the Varela Project. 

Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2025

"Out of the Depths: The Anguish of Liberation and Rebirth: Marking 80 Years since the Defeat of Nazi Germany" - Yad Vashem

 

Never Forget   

We must never forget what happened and remain vigilant now and in the future to battle against the mass destruction of innocent human beings.  Polls in 2020 showed that new generations are ignorant of the Holocaust are deeply troubling. Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, remembers the six million Jewish people murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, and continuing forms of antisemitism in the world today.

Equally troubling today is a tyrant that wages aggressive war and commits atrocities to “de-Nazify” a democratic country led by a Jewish president.

Vladimir Putin would like the world to forget the Soviet Union's historic collaboration with Nazis in starting WW2, and Moscow's demonizing of the Jewish people through to the present day, but we owe it to the victims to remember the full history. Juliana Geran Pilon in her March 11, 2022 OpEd "Putin’s ‘De-Nazification’ Claim Began With Marx and Stalin: Anti-Semitic myths have long been a staple of communist ideology and Soviet disinformation" summarized and sourced this history in this excerpt.

Still, as the historian Robert S. Wistrich wrote, “it was only after 1967 that antisemitism and anti-Zionism would assume a truly systematic and organized character. . . . In place of the relentless Nazi myth about ‘Jewish Bolshevism,’ the Soviet Communists began to fabricate the equally mendacious thesis of ‘Jewish Nazism.’ ”

The idea of a Zionist-imperialist-fascist-American conspiracy culminated in the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution, passed in 1975 by a majority of United Nations member states. By the time the resolution was repealed in 1991, it had done significant damage. Osama bin Laden believed the fantasies of the “Protocols,” Mr. Wistrich wrote in his book “A Lethal Obsession.” The jihadist’s conviction that the world is run by a capitalist, Jewish cabal explains why the 9/11 suicide hijackers expected the World Trade Center to be full of Jews.

Placed in its historical context, this myth of antifascism, anti-Nazism and anti-Zionism is far more than rhetoric.

As Santayana observed, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is why we must remember and say never again.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

~ Primo Levi (z’l), Auschwitz survivor.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, an Iranian proxy, invaded and attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 240 hostages. This strike ignited a Middle East war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas, which has its base of operations in Gaza. 

This was the largest mass killing of Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Equally shocking was how this mass slaughter of Jewish people ignited anti-Semites around the World. 

In the midst of this barbarism and evil on October 7th, official Cuban journalist  Pedro Jorge Velázquez , who goes by the pseudonym  El Necio on X.cited Che Guevara's visit to Gaza in 1959 as an inflection point that turned Palestine into a world cause, and posted photos of the Argentine guerilla with Middle East leaders during his visit. 

El Necio libels Israel calling it a "Zionist colonization" without recognizing the fact tha the Jewish people are indigenous to this their ancestral lands. He claims that Guevara is the inspiration for the "resistance" i.e. terrorist barbarism taking place today, and concludes his rant with "Che Lives."  

Regime agents translated their virtual slander into real world action the next day.

On October 8, 2023, one day after the terror attacks in Israel, militant leftists held a protest in Times Square to celebrate the terrorist attack as a form of resistance, yelling anti-Semitic slogans and waving banners and posters. On October 11, 2023, The People’s Forum (TPF) released a statement justifying their October 8th demonstration in Times Square and reaffirming their support for the rampage. Manolo De Los Santos, the group’s co-executive director, is a researcher at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, with links to the Cuban dictatorship, and he was  “based out of Cuba for many years.” 

On January 24, 2024, Manolo De Los Santos said the quiet part out loud at The People’s Forum in New York City: “When we finally deal that ultimate blow to annihilate Israel. When the state of Israel is completely abolished and obliterated from history, it will be the single most powerful blow we can deliver against capitalism.“

I have attended meetings in the United States were those who identify as progressive would begin the meeting with a land acknowledgement. The Smithsonian Museum's National Museum of the American Indian on their website Native Knowledge 360° provides the following description of the practice.

Land acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native Peoples and non-Natives to recognize Indigenous Peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which we now live. Before public events and other important gatherings hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian, a speaker offers this acknowledgment displayed in the quote container on behalf of everyone present.

After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties.

The Jewish people are indigenous to the land they live on today, and lands inhabited by Palestinians, such as Gaza and the West Bank. Three thousand years ago the state of Israel was dominated by a Jewish community, until they were taken over by the Roman Empire in 63 BC and turned into a protectorate to rule over them, until the Romans crushed them, and drove many of them out of their homeland for violently resisting imperial rule beginning in 66 AD, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD and Jewish resisters to occupation were scattered across the Roman Empire in modern day Iraq, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Eastern Europe. 

Nevertheless throughout all this time there has been a continuous presence in what is today Israel.  We should also remember that today, and demonstrate our solidarity with this people who have suffered so much for so long.