Wednesday, December 9, 2020

For Freedom, Life and Love: Lighting candles to challenge the darkness of the Castro dictatorship in Cuba

"The nonviolent struggle continues. The regime with its violence and we with our nonviolent art will achieve the desired freedom." - Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, December 8, 2020 over Twitter


These are difficult times around the world, and a time of reckoning. Too many sought short term profits over principle and morality, and abandoned responsibility. Over the past 50 years the West engaged with a communist dictatorship in China that killed 45 million of its own people. 30 years ago it made the right noises following the June 1989 massacre of students in Beijing, but doubled down and continued trading with and subsidizing a blood thirsty dictatorship with no regard for human rights. Today, the world is suffering under the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economy has lost trillions of dollars thanks to that same communist regime in Beijing.  

These are dark times, but in the midst of the darkness there are only two options succumb to despair or resist it. However, resistance can take many forms with some more constructive than others. The phrase, "Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness," was first spoken in "The Invincible Strategy", a public sermon, published by William L. Watkinson, a Methodist Minister, in 1907.

The following excerpt taken from pg 218-219 of The Invincible Strategy, A Sermon should be required reading by everyone, but especially activists or anyone involved in public service:

Evil is not overcome by denunciation. It is surprising how much efficacy is supposed to go with denunciation. Real, constructive, aggressive good is of far greater significance than eloquent invective; such invective has its place, but it must be accompanied by active practical effort, or it effects little more than summer lightning. Carlyle, in his review of Elliott the Corn-Law Rhymer, has a most instructive passage. "We could truly wish to see such a mind as his engaged rather in considering what, in his own sphere, could be done, than what, in his own or other spheres,ought to be destroyed; rather in producing or preserving the True, than in mangling and slashing asunder the False." But denunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves a popular temptation. Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness. What this world awaits is personal, positive, constructive goodness. Not by law, legislation, and rhetoric shall we prevail, but by practical righteousness, noble philanthropy, intellectual and spiritual education; by the positive remedy of superior character,action, and institutions do we make it difficult for evil to survive.
The early years of the 20th Century, prior to the catastrophe of World War I, was a culminating point for Western Civilization and the ideas that were circulating in that first decade of the 20th Century reverberate for good or ill to the present day.

On September 11, 1906 in South Africa, as part of a contest, the nonviolent Indian independence leader, Mohandas Gandhi coined the term Satyagraha which translates into English literally as "holding firmly to truth."
 Less than a year later a Methodist minister was embracing an outlook that is profoundly Christian and complements Gandhi's teachings on the relationship between truth, nonviolence and resisting evil with a constructive program, and 40 years later following another terrible conflagration, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Cuban diplomats, representing a democratic republic in Cuba, lobbied with other Latin American diplomats the inclusion of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a human rights focus in the newly created United Nations. 


 Cuban diplomats meet with Churchill in December 1945 to lobby for human rights covenant

Bishop Agustín Román on December 16, 2006 spoke of this chapter in Cuban history and "the important role the delegation of the Republic of Cuba to the United Nations in 1948 in the drafting and promulgation of the Universal Charter, particularly by Drs. Dihigo Ernesto, Guillermo Belt, and Guy Pérez-Cisneros is a historical fact."
The final draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was recognized by these Cuban diplomats as one that would have been “accepted by that generous spirit who was the apostle of our independence: Jose Marti, the hero who -- as he turned his homeland into a nation -- gave us forever this generous rule: ‘With everyone and for the good of everyone.’”

On December 10, 2017 letters to the editor section of in The Miami Herald, Pablo Pérez-Cisneros Barreto, the son of Guy Pérez-Cisneros y Bonnel, wrote of this family and national legacy that is bound up in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    My late father believed that the declaration is the fruit of the great efforts of our civilization and human progress, a unique moment in which humanity came of age in its civic education; that it is also a source of inspiration for the formation of today’s citizens, and not cause for divisions among them. [...] Cuba had the distinction of being the country that proposed the finished declaration be put up for its final UN vote on Dec. 10, 1948. Hard to believe now but Cuba was once a leader when it came to human rights. And it is important to note that nine initiatives proposed in 1945’s Cuba became part of the final declaration, and that Cuba was the country that entrusted the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in San Francisco to prepare the declaration as early as 1946. The third preamble of the declaration is a copy of one of the articles of the famed 1940 Cuban Constitution, and Cuba had the initiative to include in the declaration the right to honor one’s human rights and reputation, as well as protect citizens against arbitrary government interference in their private lives.  Cuba presented the first amendment to the draft declaration which was accepted, adding the right of citizens of any member country to follow the vocation they choose. Cuba presented a second amendment which was also accepted — the right of every worker to receive an equitable and satisfactory payment for their work.

 This democratic Cuba was overthrown on March 10, 1952 by Fulgencio Batista and hopes of a democratic restoration frustrated by the Castro brothers in 1959.
Guy Pérez-Cisneros died of a stroke in 1953.
Ernesto Dihigo, like Pérez-Cisneros, left the diplomatic corps following the 1952 coup, but returned as Cuba’s Ambassador to the United States in January of 1959 retiring in 1960. He left Cuba in 1989 and died in Miami in 1991.

Darkness came to Cuba in 1952, and it grew darker and more bleak after 1959. Mass executions, neighbors spying on neighbors, work camps, and thousands of prisoners of conscience became new realities in the tropical island.

Acts of repudiation were first seen on a systematic level in 1980 during the Mariel crisis when Cubans who simply wanted to leave the country were brutally assaulted and forty lost their lives in lynchings. A refugee at the time of Mariel Mirta Ojito, now a journalist and author, described what she had seen and experienced in an opinion piece for the New York Times:

"Mariel marked the first time socialist Cuba turned against itself. The government staged riots called actos de repudio -- street rallies in which neighbors turned against neighbors, harassing and tormenting those who wanted to leave the country. The victims were often pelted with rocks, tomatoes and eggs. Windows were shattered. Doors were knocked down. Some people were killed, dragged through the streets as trophies to intolerance and hate. Sometimes people trapped inside their homes chose to kill themselves rather than face their tormentors."
Amnesty International recognized that officials were organizing these riots that sometimes crossed the line into lynchings and defined this form of state sponsored intimidation as follows:
Acts of repudiation [Actos de repudio] these are meetings or demonstrations organized by government officials or mass organizations supporting the government at which the person or persons concerned are
subjected to criticism and abuse, sometimes physical, because of their so-called counter-revolutionary views or activities.

Granma, the Communist Party’s daily paper, compiled a list of 100 insults to scream at those who wanted to leave. Meanwhile Fidel Castro prepared to associate these refugees with the worse of the worse. 

Act of repudiation in Cuba 1980

Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Fidel Castro's former bodyguard, wrote a tell all book published in May 2014 of his time with the dictator titled, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo that included a remarkable passage on the events of Mariel.

Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and academic at the University of Miami, in a June 8, 2015 op-ed in The Miami Herald reviewing the above book touched on how Castro dealt with the Mariel boatlift during the Carter presidency:

For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives and to make the crossing to South Florida.

But many of the boats were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded few with his denials of any role in the incident. Yet Sánchez adds an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to bring him prisoner records.

Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.

“I was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen 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.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.
A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.

This is dark business and for those of the Christian faith this darkness has a name: evil.  Some believe that the best way to confront evil is with evil. Hatred with hate, but the Christian Bible declares: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

Over six decades many Cubans resisted this darkness, and through their courageous actions became living candles rejecting despair and inspiring hope. Many were martyred, but their friends and loved ones continued their good works. We know their names: Alberto, Virgilio, Ramón, Armando, Carlos, Mario, Pablo, Pedro, Orlando, Laura, Oswaldo, Harold, and many more but they cannot all be listed here. It is a long list that would take up the entire page.

Others have survived and spent a lifetime defending human dignity and human rights.  Eight years ago, a young woman mourned her father's and friend's murders, but she did not despair or confront hatred with hate but embraced freedom and life and wrote an essay for Cuba's freedom.

“Today, December 10th 2012, Human Rights Day, I want to draw attention to the Cuban people, who currently suffer from not having those same rights." ... "Today, we want to remind the Cuban government and the world that Cubans also have the right to have rights because we are human beings, and we will not rest until we get them." 

The essay closed with the phrase "Freedom and Life” and it was an explicit rejection of the dictatorship's slogan of "Homeland or Death."  More importantly it is an affirmation of that which is good.

Eight years later, Rosa María Payá continues to light candles against the darkness. On International Human Rights Day she is calling for nonviolent protests: "This December 10: Demonstrations for Cubans to have the "right to have rights" and in protest at the presence of the Cuban dictatorship on the United Nations Human Rights Council."

Both Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Rosa María Payá are right we must celebrate love, freedom, and life while at the same time not being afraid to call out the existing dictatorship and the terror it seeks to impose on those that dare light candles in the darkness.

Miami:

Washington DC:  

 

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