Thursday, December 10, 2020

International Human Rights Day: Recovering Cuba's Pre-Castro human rights legacy

"We feel great pride that the first, very modest draft officially submitted to serve as the basis for the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man was written by Dr. Ernesto Díhigo, an eminent professor at the University of Havana and a member of the Cuban delegation." - Guy Pérez-Cisneros

San Isidro protesters in Havana, Cuba in November 2020

Human rights are an intrinsic part of Cuban history that the current dictatorship has spent decades systematically trying to erase and deny, but  every day Cubans for decades have stood up for the defense of human rights and dignity at great cost to themselves.  Below is an essay from two years ago that remains relevant today in light of the San Isidro protest in Havana, Cuba.

The Miami Herald, December 8, 2018

Can Cuba’s human rights legacy be recovered?

Less than a month later, Cuban diplomats led an “act of repudiation“ at the UN to prevent a discussion on political prisoners in Cuba.

Artists are now being arrested in Cuba for protesting Decree 349, a law that would eliminate the few artistic freedoms remaining there.

Prisoner of conscience Eduardo Cardet marked two years in prison on Nov. 30 for speaking critically of Castro’s legacy.

International Human Rights Day in Cuba will be a day that the Cuban secret police harass, detain, and assault human rights defenders attempting to exercise their rights.

It was not always this way.

Seventy years ago, a democratic Cuba helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and establish the UN Human Rights Commission.

Cuba’s last democratic president, Carlos Prio Socarras, was elected in free and fair elections and assumed office on Oct. 10, 1948. President Prio respected human rights, and this was reflected by the actions taken by his diplomats at the founding of the UN.

Cuba, Panama, and Chile were the first three countries to submit full drafts of human rights charters to the Commission. Latin American delegations, especially Mexico, Cuba, and Chile inserted language about the right to justice into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in what would become Article 8.

Cuban delegate Guy Pérez-Cisneros addressed the UN General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948 proposing to vote for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Cuban Ambassador celebrated that it condemned racism and sexism, and also addressed the importance of the rule of law:
“My delegation had the honor of inspiring the final text, which finds it essential that the rights of man be protected by the rule of law, so that man will not be compelled to exercise the extreme recourse of rebellion against tyranny and oppression.”

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.

Democrats should share this history with Cubans on the island to demonstrate that civil and political rights are an intrinsic part of a shared Cuban heritage that in 1948 made world history and that the regime in the island today would like erased.


John Suarez is a program officer for Latin America Programs at Freedom House in Washington, D.C. 

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