Exposing Reese Erlich's biased reporting on political prisoner Denis Solis and the San Isidro Movement

Call to Free Denis Solis and in defense of the San Isidro Movement 

Journalist and adjunct professor in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, Reese Erlich, has a track record of reporting on Cuba that at best can be described as having a pro-regime slant, and at worse being an agent of influence on the level of a Walter Duranty. He is at it again in his December 18th essay smearing the San Isidro Movement, and the dissident movement generally. 

He targets Denis Solís González's language while the young dissident confronted a police man illegally entering his home, and fails to provide the Cuban context. A society where there is no independent mass media, and local, national, and international news are provided to Cubans with a slant dictated by the Castro regime. 

It is also interesting that the language used by Denis Solis, that the dissident later apologized for, was used by Fidel Castro when Miami DJs tricked him into thinking he was talking to Hugo Chavez, the Cuban dictator shouted the same anti-gay slurs over the phone in 2003. Unlike Mr. Solis, the late Cuban dictator had a decades long record of persecuting Gays and Lesbians. Mr. Erlich fails to mention this history.

Political prisoners Denis Solís González

Hostility to Gays began early in the Revolution. On March 13, 1963 Fidel Castro gave a speech 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 warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degenerates.”

In 1964 the Cuban government 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.

 Fidel Castro declared in 1965 that “[w]e 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.” 

Cuban government officials inoculated him with HIV in 2018.

Cuban biologist, environmental activist, and Gay man, Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, documented his case to the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) in Frankfurt, Germany, where he denounced how agents of the Castro regime purposefully infected him with HIV in 2018.

After a staged assault of two policemen Ariel Ruiz Urquiola was arrested on May 3rd, 2018 and sentenced to prison for twelve months by a kangaroo tribunal. He was remanded in jail on May 8th, 2018 and protested from June 16th to July 2nd with a successful hunger strike which led to an early release from prison on July 3rd, 2018. On June 16th, 2019 he got informed that he is HIV positive. He eliminates a natural infection strictly. He believes that he had been infected with the HI virus on purpose in prison.

According to a statement of Dr. Ruiz Urquiola the doctor’s reports show that he got infected during his imprisonment. The lab results also confirm an infection on purpose. That’s how the short time between hospitalization and illness with a high inoculum (infective material or one as an antigen acting part of a germ), e.g. from a lab virus, can be explained.

Castro apologists claimed that the Cuban dictatorship had changed since then, but on May 11, 2019 when Gay activists began their Pride March it was violently shut down by Castro regime regime agents.

The foreign correspondent did not provide any of this context and also failed to mention that Gay Cubans were participating in the hunger strike in San Isidro. 

Reese Erlich repeated this practice of omission  on June 18, 2020 in his article titled "Foreign Correspondent: Police Lessons From Cuba" where he claimed that "Contrary to the image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States."This blog set the record straight at the time.

Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano killed at age 27

Mr Reese failed to report that Castro's Revolutionary National Police shot a black man, Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano (age 27), in the back on June 24, 2020, but there was little or no protest outside of dissidents in Cuba, who were rounded up and roughed up for attempting to protest the killing.