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.

 

Improper Conduct 40 years later: A portrait of Communist persecution of homosexuals and its ideological foundation

“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.” - Fidel Castro, 1965

Film poster for the 1984 film Improper Conduct

Forty years ago on March 21, 1984 in France the film "Mauvaise Conduite" was released. The film was made by Néstor Almendros (1930-1992)  and Orlando Jiménez Leal.  The title of the film in English is Improper Conduct and it examines the "moral purges" of the Cuban Revolution that began in 1964 with the creation of 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. 

This systematic repression of homosexuals had an ideological component that first impacted policies in Communist China and the Soviet Union. 

In the USSR homosexuality was criminalized on March 7, 1934, "punishable by prison and hard labor, and Stalinist anti-gay policies persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s." The Soviet anti-homosexual laws were on the books until 1993, two years after its dissolution.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia which claimed to be "the first Marxist–Leninist general-purpose encyclopedia" offered the following information on homosexuality in 1930.

"Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest ... while recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development ... our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective."

Ekaterina Mishina  in her November 10, 2014 article "Who is Troubled by Gay Propaganda?" reports on how a prominent Soviet intellectual responded to the criminalization of homosexuality.

"In March 1934, a new article criminalizing homosexuality was introduced to the 1926 Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Two months later, the USSR’s most celebrated writer at the time, Maxim Gorky, ardently supported the innovation with a slogan published in Izvestia newspaper: “Destroy homosexuality, and fascism will disappear!” Article 121 of the 1960 Criminal Code of the RSFSR also upheld criminal liability for homosexuality, and remained in effect until 1993."

In 1949 upon taking power in Mainland China the communists declared homosexuality a symptom of "bourgeois decadence" and set out to eliminate it.

Amy Villarejo in her book,  Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire in the notes section on page 222 provided the following excerpt on how Beijing solved their "homosexual problem."

"In Improper Conduct, the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante tells an apocryphal story linking post-revolution Cuba to Shanghai: [Cuban leaders] were all obsessed with homosexuality when visiting Communist bloc countries. Ramiro Valdes, Minister of the Interior, went to China and asked to meet the Mayor of Shanghai. Why did Valdes want to meet him? Shanghai had always had a large homosexual population, dating back to Imperial China. It had very few morals, it was the capital of Westernized China, as opposed to Peking, the cloistered capital. So he met the Mayor of Shanghai and asked how they had solved their homosexual problem. The mayor replied through an interpreter, 'There are no homosexuals here.' 'You no longer have a homosexual problem here?' 'No, we took advantage of a traditional holiday where homosexuals gathered in a park in Shanghai on the banks of a river. Party officials went there carrying clubs to eliminate the problem once and for all.' They clubbed  them and threw them in the water. The bodies were carried downstream as a grim warning! It was the end of homosexuality in Shanghai."

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 degeneracies.”

Fidel Castro went further in 1965 declaring: “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 Castro regime 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.  

This history should be taken into account when considering other policies that negatively impacted members of the LGBTQI community in Cuba.

For example the quarantine of HIV positive Cubans from 1986 to 1997 through mandatory testing, and isolation. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic it was associated with the Gay community.

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

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.

On Saturday, May 11, 2019 gay rights activists were beaten down, arrested and taken away for attempting to carry out a Gay Pride march in Havana.

Mariela Castro, General Raul Castro's daughter, led efforts to Pinkwash the Castro dictatorship. Saul Landau, a Castro apologist who passed away in 2013, worked on a project that highlighted her efforts, Mariela Castro's March: Cuba's LGBT Revolution. In light of what happened in 2019, the documentary screened by HBO in 2016 has aged badly. Bottom line what Mariela Castro, the dictator's daughter says goes, but if she decides there will not be a Gay Pride march there will not be one. At least not one without government repression.

Gay rights activists condemned the cancellation and then organized their own demonstration. More than 100 demonstrators took to the streets of Havana. After setting out on Havana's Paseo del Prado, the marchers came up against a large number of police and state security forces. Beatings, detentions and several arrests ensued.

This assault by Cuban government authorities against Cuba's LGBTQI community took place on the 35th anniversary of the release of Improper Conduct, the film that revealed how Gays and Lesbians are treated in Cuba, and documents what happened during the first 30 years of the Castro regime. 

In a 2019 interview published in the Spanish publication, Faro y Vigo Jiménez Leal explained how a restored version for a 35th anniversary screening  at that time came to be:

It was restructured, the titles were changed, the colors were fixed; It is a shorter version now because they were edited out about twenty minutes. We left it at an hour and a half but it is still a feature film, "said Jiménez Leal in an interview with Efe. "A filmmaker friend, Eliecer Jiménez, and I discovered a master that was here in my office in good condition; We saw that (the discovery) coincided with the 35th anniversary and decided to make a restored version of the film," details the Cuban filmmaker of 77 years, of which, he said, he has spent 57 exiled." 

Orlando Jiménez Leal explained the continuing importance of this documentary, "It's a film against intolerance. Intolerance will always exist, and therefore, Improper Conduct will always be relevant."

This documentary came into being out of an event that first inspired the filmmakers to make a fictional comedy. Ten dancers of the National Ballet of Cuba defected in 1966 during a tour stop in Paris. The filmmakers started to interview the ballet dancers, and the people who had helped them to develop the script. The interviews were so powerful that they decided to make this documentary instead.

Below is the original full version of the documentary. There is a better viewing quality version for the 35th anniversary out there.

#Tiananmen35: Remembering the Tank Men

"The heroes of the tank picture are two: the unknown figure who risked his life by standing in front of the juggernaut, and the driver who rose to the moral challenge by refusing to mow down his compatriot." - Pico Iyer

Nonviolent moment: Tank Men face off in Beijing on June 5, 1989

On June 5, 1989 in Beijing, following the Chinese Communist Party's massive and bloody crackdown  on thousands of Chinese students and workers on June 3rd and 4th after six weeks of protests that began in Tiananmen Square and spread across 400 cities in China something remarkable happened in the midst of all the horror and terror. 

A man risked all to protest what had taken place. Wearing a white t-shirt, black trousers, and carrying what appeared to be a shopping bag he walked out on the north edge of Tiananmen Square, along Chang'an Avenue and faced down a column of Type-59 tanks.

Wider perspective of the Tank Men protest with the full column of tanks

Jianli Yang, a Tiananmen Massacre survivor and former Chinese political prisoner and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China in his important 2022 article in Newsweek provides the full significance and context of what happened.

"I was near Tiananmen Square in the early morning on June 4, just as gunfire began. At one point, I was so close to the soldiers that I shouted to them in their trucks and told them not to shoot. We even sang songs that every Chinese knows, trying to touch their hearts. But when they received the order, they just opened fire. I saw many killed, including 11 students who were chased and run over by tanks on that fateful day."

Photos appeared of what remained after a tank ran over a student, and this is what Tank Man was in danger of becoming.

Human body crushed to pieces by PLA's tanks.

 In the video of the confrontation, the lead tank tried to drive around him, but the lone man repeatedly ran in front of the tank to prevent its passing. The tank driver turned off his engine and the rest of the column of tanks followed suit. 

The protester climbed on top of the tank and began to talk with him. Eventually he climbed back down and the tank driver turned the engines on but the protester once again blocked the tank column.

Jianli makes a powerful observation about this dynamic between the two men in the same OpEd in Newsweek.

"The Tank Man photo was taken the next day, on June 5, the morning after, when the massacre was still ongoing. By any measure, this image is one of heroism. But how many heroes do we see?

Nearly nine years after the picture was taken, the writer Pico Iyer said: "The heroes of the tank picture are two: the unknown figure who risked his life by standing in front of the juggernaut, and the driver who rose to the moral challenge by refusing to mow down his compatriot."

Not only did the driver refuse to kill, but he undoubtedly disobeyed orders and risked—and perhaps received—punishment in order to save a countryman's life."

We do not know the identities of either Tank Man, or what happened to them, but we do know that for one moment, in the midst of a blood bath perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party, humanity and dignity triumphed over repression in this particular case.

For more information visit:

Standoff At Tiananmen
How Chinese Students Shocked the World with a Magnificent Movement for Democracy and Liberty that Ended in the Tragic Tiananmen Massacre in 1989
http://www.standoffattiananmen.com/

Virtual Museum of China '89
http://museums.cnd.org/China89/

http://www.cnd.org/June4th/

Screams for help at China's secret 'black jails' - 27 Apr 09 AlJazeera
https://youtu.be/NsN4-A1G5zc

Seeking Justice, Chinese Land in Secret Jails / NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/asia/09jails.html

A piece of red cloth by Cui Jian (music video - song sang by him in the Square)
https://youtu.be/l8UPST1ZKSw

Frontline Documentary Tankman
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/

Lessons from Tiananmen Square

 How it started, and how it ended.

Chinese students march under a banner of late Chinese reformer Hu Yaobang

When Chinese reformer Hu Yaobang died suddenly of a heart attack on April 15, 1989, students responded angrily, with the majority of them assuming that his death was related to his forced resignation. On the day of this reformer's sudden death, small, spontaneous gatherings to mourn Hu began around Tiananmen Square's Monument to the People's Heroes.   

The death of Hu gave the motivation for students to congregate in large numbers. Posters sprouted on university campuses eulogizing him and demanding for Hu's legacy to be honored. Within a few days, the majority of posters addressed bigger political themes such as corruption, democracy, and press freedom, and the protests continued.

On April 27, 1989 soldiers try to stop students entering Tiananmen Square.

On April 26, 1989, the People's Daily published an editorial aimed at scaring students into submission, but it had the opposite effect, enraging them and rallying thousands more to demonstrate in Tiananmen Square.  It was a strategic error of the first order committed by the Chinese Communist regime's highest echelons.

Imagine for a moment that for 51 days of demonstrations beginning on April 15, 1989 thousands of students gathered nonviolently to protest and demand reforms. Protests had taken place before in China in 1986, but had not been sustained.  This time, in part due to the regime's demonizing of the student demonstrators, the protests grew and did not dissolve. 

At the height of the student movement in China, over one million people marched in the streets of Beijing. This movement ended with the government's crackdown and the Beijing massacre of June 4. 

Below is the documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, that captures the days of protest leading up to the crackdown and the massacre.

Nonviolent resisters should learn as much as they can about this important movement. Finally, the struggle for a free China continues to the present day and needs our solidarity.

It is also important to challenge the official narrative that nothing happened, or worse that it was a "vaccination." Thousands were killed, and it was not just students, but also workers in solidarity with student protesters.

At least 10,000 killed during the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Chinese Communist Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on June 2, 2019 at a regional forum defended the Tiananmen Square massacre claiming "[t]hat incident was a political turbulence and the central government took measures to stop the turbulence, which is a correct policy." 

The official newspaper, The Global Times, doubled down claiming that the mass killings and crackdown were "[a]s a vaccination for the Chinese society, the Tiananmen incident will greatly increase China's immunity against any major political turmoil in the future." The message is clear the Communist Chinese regime in China is willing to kill large numbers of Chinese to remain in power.

Bodies at Shuili hospital mortuary. All died from bullet wounds. Credit Jian Liu

A 2017 declassified British diplomatic cable revealed that "at least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989."

The Pro-Democracy Movement that had taken to the streets in April of 1989 was violently crushed by the Chinese communist dictatorship beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989.

Between June 3 and June 5, 1989 other tank drivers ran over protester

By dawn on June 4, 1989 scores of demonstrators had been shot and killed or run over and crushed by tanks of the so-called People's Liberation Army.

On June 5, 1989 in Beijing, following the massive and bloody crackdown after six weeks of protests that began in Tiananmen Square and spread across 400 cities in China, a man risked all to protest what had taken place. 

Wearing a white t-shirt, black trouser, and carrying what appeared to be a shopping bag he walked out on the north edge of Tiananmen Square, along Chang'an Avenue and faced down a column of Type-59 tanks.

We must also remember the courage of the late Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo who saved the lives of many young Chinese in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 obtaining safe passage for them and persuaded these students to leave before the massacre unfolded.  This courageous and nonviolent human rights defender was jailed in 2008 and died on July 13, 2017.

Below is one of his last interviews prior to being unjustly imprisoned.