Feast Day for Cuba's Our Lady Charity, the founding of the Christian Liberation Movement and the importance of truth

“María, Faro de la Libertad / Mary, Beacon of Freedom,” - Archdiocese of Miami

Virgin of Charity and the three Juanes

For the past four centuries, since the Virgin of Charity appeared to the three Juanes in the Bay of Nipe in 1612, She has been a source of popular devotion among Cubans and on May 10, 1916 forever linked with Cuban independence when Pope Benedict XV proclaimed Her Patroness of Cuba in response to a request by veterans of the Cuban war of independence. Since then She has also been known as the Virgin Mambisa. 

Since 1959 She has accompanied the Cuban diaspora.

The Virgin of Charity has remained a powerful force in Cuba over the past 65 years, despite efforts to impose atheism.

Jesús Mustafá Felipe at Solemn Mass for Our Lady of Charity

37 years ago on September 8, 1988, the Feast Day for Cuba's Our Lady Charity, a handful of Cubans, lay Catholics, consisting of Oswaldo Payá, Ramón Antúnez, Dagoberto Capote, Santiago Cárdenas and Fernando Arvelo, inspired by their faith, the strength of their ideals and love for their country, founded the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), to work for the recovery of popular sovereignty and national reconciliation in Cuba.

 "Liberation is our purpose, liberation carried out by the people, who will not be a spectator of the moment in which their destiny is decided. We do not call all against each other, but all for a new Cuba. We reject violence, offense, lies and destruction as means of struggle. We do not believe that the end justifies the means. Our goal is to achieve freedom, justice and this is achieved only moved by love. Freedom is true only if it emanates from love. "

 Since then, many Cubans joined the Christian Liberation Movement and given their best for their homeland. Some are no longer physically here, and some of them were murdered by the dictatorship.

37° aniversario de la fundación del Movimiento Cristiano Liberación 8 de septiembre de 1988 pic.twitter.com/ucn8OKS98X

— MCLcubaoficial (@mclcubaoficial) September 1, 2025

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas described how the Christian Liberation Movement, a democratic opposition movement, came into existence and explained how it was related to the birth of his first child, Oswaldo José.

“When our first child was going to be born, we have three children, we said that our children cannot live in a country without liberty and we are not going to another country to seek freedom. Therefore we have to fight for our children to live free here in Cuba and everyone else's children and their parents too.”    

Oswaldo José was born on February 17, 1988 and the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) was founded that same year on September 8, 1988.   Oswaldo Payá was killed on July 22, 2012 along with the movement's youth leader Harold Cepero. 

The Castro dictatorship has a hostile relationship with religion since the beginning when it officially declared itself an atheist state and expelled scores of priests from Cuba on September 17, 1961, canceled Christmas in 1969 under the pretext to prevent work shortages for the 1970 ten million ton sugar harvest but continued the ban until 1997, and sent mobs to intimidate Cubans attending religious services.

Priests were taken at gun point and forced out of Cuba in 1961

 This is not what was promised by the revolutionaries when they took power in Cuba.  Fidel Castro on January 11, 1959 went  on Face the Nation and promised free, multiparty elections within 18 months. Richard Bate of CBS News pressed the Cuban dictator.

Richard Bate: Dr. Castro you said that in 18 months or so there will be free elections in Cuba. When this time comes will all political parties be able to run candidates in these elections?

Fidel Castro: Yes, of course

Richard Bate: All political parties including the Directorio?

Fidel Castro: Of course, if we don't give free to all the political parties to organize we are not a democratic country. We have fought for the democracy here, and for the free ... for the the freedom of our people. We don't want to stop and to put any difficulties to anybody. We believe in democracy. 

Richard Bate: Why would it be necessary to wait 18 months before free elections to be held?

Fidel Castro: Well, do you think it is good for the Cubans When all the people want peace. When all the people is that the government repair the mistakes and the barbarity of the before government. Don't you believe that our country at least one year to work? Do you believe that between... in the fight of the political parties is it possible to do anything? If we give a free election tomorrow we win because we have almost all the people ...

In Matthew 7:15-7:16 the Gospel states "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits." From the very beginning, truth has often been a casualty of the communist regime in Cuba.

Father Miguel Angel Loredo (1998)

 

Father Miguel Angel Loredo was a prisoner of conscience of the Castro dictatorship because he refused to go along with the lies of the regime. Father Loredo understood that one of the most formidable weapons against injustice is objective truth, and here he explained why.

"I believe we should denounce the evils of both the right and the left. I find selective denunciation, that has political roots repugnant. If you believe in the integrity of the human being you must believe deeply in objective denunciation. Without objectivity, there is no hope."

Monsignor Agustin Roman in an essay on the importance of the Cuban dissident movement in Cuba described the role that the truth played in its genesis:

The concept of nonviolent civil resistance is introduced into the history of Cuba. Take the truth as a weapon, placing it in practice in the civic field, what Scripture proposed in the spiritual realm: "the truth shall make you free". Hence its importance at that time and its transcendence for the future of Cuba.

If the truth shall make you free then what does the lie offer? The Ochoa case offers a dramatic answer. In June of 1989, General Arnaldo Ochoa is arrested. 

He had been declared a “Hero of the Revolution” by Fidel Castro in 1984 but by 1989 was deemed too dangerous by Castro because he feared that General Ochoa had been contaminated by the ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika while visiting the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era. 

He was also popular within the ranks of the military due to his exploits in Africa. General Ochoa was accused of conspiracy and treason. He was also tied to drug smuggling and corruption. Ochoa was approached by Fidel Castro with the offer that if he confessed to everything he had been accused of and did not mount a vigorous defense that he could go home into retirement.

General Ochoa  went along with the lie and pled guilty in an abject fashion reminiscent Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. He was executed days later by firing squad on July 13, 1989, with a tainted reputation.

Father José Conrado and Father Juan Lázaro Vélez officiate at Mass for Matanzas victims

During a special mass for the victims of the Matanzas oil fire in Miami on September 6, 2022, Father Conrado acknowledged that "although we are far from the Homeland, those of us who left to find freedom, also feel and suffer for Cuba, because the Homeland belongs to everyone" paraphrasing José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence. Father Conrado issued a call in the name of Jesus and the Virgin "so that we Cubans break the spell of evil that has taken over the island" and for this he called for the unity of all Cubans, "those of the two shores”.

¡Virgen de la Caridad, ruega por nosotros!

Our Lady of Charity, pray for us! pic.twitter.com/duDN3MxQA8

— Archdiocese of Miami (@CatholicMiami) September 8, 2025

On September 7th, at 5:00 pm, Christian Liberation Movement members met at 800 West 29th Street, Hialeah, where they presented a wreath at the monument erected in memory of Oswaldo Paya and commemorate the 37th anniversary of the founding of the Christian Liberation Movement, to which he dedicated his life. 

Christian Liberation Movement members in Hialeah on September 7th.

Today is a also good day to remember Václav Havel's hopeful call: "May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred." 

May it be so. 

 

On This Day in 2010 Franklin Brito Became a Martyr for Liberty and Human Rights in Venezuela

"I’ve learned of the death of hunger striker Franklin Brito. It appears that Hugo Chavez now has his own Orlando Zapata" - Yoani Sanchez, August 31, 2010 on twitter

 

Fifteen years ago on  August 30, 2020 Franklin Brito died on a hunger strike in Venezuela. Franklin was a farmer and a biologist whose land was expropriated by Hugo Chavez in 2000 according to CNN. Other news agencies place the date of expropriation anywhere between 2003 and 2004. 

Brito exhausted every recourse and was repeatedly driven to the extreme option: the hunger strike. El Universal out of Caracas offers a chronology of the expropriated farmer's odyssey. 

In the video below, published on October 28, 2009, after over 90 days on hunger strike that Franklin was carrying out, he explains how all of this began. 

Hunger strikes are the ultimate recourse in the arsenal of non-violent resistance, and over the years around the world it has succeeded at times but in places like Cuba, Ireland, and now in Venezuela human beings have died on hunger strikes.

In Cuba the names of Pedro Luis Boitel and Orlando Zapata Tamayo are remembered as is Bobby Sands of Northern Ireland (who the Castro dictatorship built a memorial to in Cuba) and Venezuela's Franklin Brito is part of this select grouping that demonstrates the ultimate price when engaging in a hunger strike.

The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man by the Organization of American States and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations both recognize the right to private property, despite the fact that it is frequently violated. It is a human right that is acknowledged on a global scale and is expressly stated.

Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article XXIII of the American Declaration states: "Every person has a right to own such private property as meets the essential needs of decent living and helps to maintain the dignity of the individual and of the home."

When Franklin Brito's family said that he stood for "the struggle of the Venezuelan people for property rights, access to justice, for living in freedom," they were simply stating the facts of the matter. Brito states in the video below, which was shot on November 19, 2009, that he is defending human dignity.

"I am not doing this strike for something material or because persons have behaved badly towards me - that one could say are corrupt. I am doing this strike for dignity and justice. I believe that these are the greatest values that a human being should have."

 The Venezuelan government said that Franklin Brito was mentally unstable and took him to a military hospital, and placed him under an armed guard.. The Red Cross, Caracas Clinical Hospital and the Venezuelan Psychologists' Association said that Franklin Brito was of sound mind.

The tactics Mr. Chavez is using in questioning the mental stability of his adversaries, and smearing them, even in death, is straight out of his Cuban mentor's repertoire. Friends and family of Franklin Brito had best organize the facts and evidence surrounding his case protect it and duplicate it so that it cannot be seized and destroyed. They should engage in speaking out anywhere and everywhere to counter the avalanche of slander and libel from regime apologists against a man who can no longer defend himself.

Hugo Chávez nationalized 2.5 million hectares as part of a “land reform drive.” The so-called reform, combined with increased government control over the economy, exacerbating food shortages in Venezuela with Chavez forced to step up imports despite abundant land and a tropical climate just like Cuba did decades ago.

It is not madness to take extremes in the defense of liberty and justice, but it is madness to repeat the same failed policies that have bankrupted and destroyed nations the world over and expect a different outcome in your own homeland.

Franklin Brito was a sane man confronting an evil system, and through his protest embarrassed the Venezuelan dictatorship. The regime sought to disappear him and drove him to his death.

Three years later Hugo Chavez was dead. Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver trained in Cuba before embracing Chavismo, became the Venezuelan dictator's successor.   

Fifteen years have now passed, and Franklin Brito is not forgotten, and the evil of the regime in Caracas is now recognized around the world.

Earlier today Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado tweeted in remembrance of Franklin Brito and his importance in Venezuela's history.

Franklin Brito is a name that Venezuelans WILL REMEMBER FOREVER. The man who challenged the regime, stood firm, and gave his own life to defend what was his, his PROPERTY, his DIGNITY, OUR RIGHTS. Today marks 15 years since his death, which has a culprit: Hugo Chávez and his obsession with EXPROPRIATING, WHICH IS STEALING.

Below is the original Spanish text. 

Franklin Brito es un nombre que los venezolanos RECORDAREMOS SIEMPRE. El hombre que desafió al régimen, se paró firme y entregó su propia vida para defender lo suyo, su PROPIEDAD, su DIGNIDAD, NUESTROS DERECHOS.

Hoy se cumplen 15 años de su muerte, la cual tiene un culpable:… pic.twitter.com/ruRH4Q2VSm

— María Corina Machado (@MariaCorinaYA) August 30, 2025

Call for solidarity with protesters marking three years since Mahsa Amini was beaten to death in Iran with global rallies.

 Please share hashtags: #MahsaAmini #WomanLifeFreedom #SayHerName

 

Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by morality police in Iran.

 

 Morality police in Iran beat Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, to death for not complying with Tehran's hijab regulations. Mahsa was arrested on September 13, 2022 badly beaten, left in a coma, and she died three days later on September 16th.

Mass protests erupted in Iran, the Iranian regime periodically shutdown the internet and carried out massacres, and executions against demonstrators over the past three years.  The world has not forgotten, and songs continue to be sung by artists in remembrance of Mahsa Amini.

The folly of replacing short wave radio transmissions of uncensored news with online broadcasts was made evident once more, as it was in Egypt during the Arab Spring.  

The previous time this happened in Iran was in 2019, when the Mullahs killed 1,500 people, and I didn't know about it. 

This time the suppression was successful, but the Iranian diaspora ensured that the repression was not repeated without worldwide attention and condemnation.

On the third anniversary of Mahsa Amini's untimely death global rallies are planned to ensure that the barbarity of the Islamic regime in Iran is not forgotten.

Global rallies are being organized to mark the 3rd anniversary of Jina #MahsaAmini’s death at the hands of the regime and to support the ongoing Woman, Life, Freedom revolutionary movement, the Iranian people’s fight for freedom, democracy, and human rights. Find a rally in your… pic.twitter.com/5sETrgVrqT

— Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay (@NazaninAJ) August 30, 2025

Please visit the Global Network for Woman, Life, Freedom and keep up to date as new locations are added around the world.

 

Dear friends of freedom reading this blog entry, please amplify these Iranian voices, let your elected representatives know that you are watching, and that this is unacceptable.

This has been going on for far too long in Iran, and the terror tactics have been copied elsewhere with Iranian help.

The Basij, formed in 1979 in Iran, murdered nonviolent demonstrators like Neda Agha Soltan in 2009 during the Green Revolution. 

Hugo Chavez copied the Basij and formed Colectivos in Venezuela. Both are pro-government militias with long track records of repression and murder. The Colectivos in 2014 did the same thing in Venezuela murdering nonviolent protesters like Génesis Carmona during mass anti-government protests.

Neda Agha-Soltan and Génesis Carmona shot in the head.

Note to Western policy makers: the regime's in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela are not your friends.

Cuba and Iran have regime's with different ideological formations. Cuba has a communist dictatorship run by the Castros since 1959 and Iran has a Islamist regime run by the mullahs since 1979. 

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani meets with General Raul Castro (2016)

However they have three things in common: a profound anti-Americanism that portrays the U.S. as the great Satan,  a fossilized revolutionary tradition based in terrorism that systematically denies human rights to their respective peoples, and a desire to destroy the state of Israel. 

Robin Wright referred to Cuba and Iran as "melancholy twins" in The New Yorker in 2015. They are both state sponsors of terrorism, and Iran has been linked to a mass killing of Jewish people in Argentina. 

Venezuela is an off shoot of the Cuban revolution and shares both its anti-Americanism and warm relations with Tehran.

They do not hide their intentions, even if they lie about it afterwards.

The late Fidel Castro visited Iran on May 10, 2001, four months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, where he was quoted by the Agence France Presse at the University of Tehran stating that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." ... "The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."

Eleven years later on January 12, 2012 in Havana, Cuba the controversial president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared "Our positions, versions, interpretations are alike, very close. We have been good friends, we are and will be, and we will be together forever."

Iran's Ahmadinejad with Fidel Castro and Klansman David Duke

Even closer to home, the relationship between the Iranian regime and white supremacists such as David Duke and anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan should not be forgotten. 

We must remember the brutal attack against Salman Rushdie here in the United States on August 12, 2022. He suffered stab wounds to the stomach, chest, eye, hand and thigh.

Iran sought out asymmetric means to achieve maximum damage against Israel through their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah killing over 1,200 in Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking a terrible war that continues today.  Tehran's decades long alliance with Cuba cannot and must not be ignored at such a time of ongoing peril.

Martin Luther King Jr. was right: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 

 

Please share the following Tweet from The Washington Times: "Sanctions against Cuba work"

 "History demonstrates that sanctions work to constrain Havana’s ambitions and protect U.S. taxpayers." - John Suarez in The Washington Times, August 28, 2025 OpEd "Sanctions against Cuba work."

  

Sanctions against Cuba work @WashTimesOpEd https://t.co/HVfsdYAAwd

— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) August 28, 2025

Black Ribbon Day 2025: The Hitler-Stalin Pact that started WW2 which communists want to erase.

 "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera

Eighty six years ago on August 23, 1939 the world learned that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was named after their respective foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. 

RT #VoCommunism: RT RFERL: 80 years ago today, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union changed Europe's borders in secret. #MolotovRibbentrop80 pic.twitter.com/PxU7Rs2RRY

— Fundación Víctimas del Comunismo (@Ant1Comunismo) August 23, 2019

Observers would have been even more horrified had they known of the secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian regimes. What they called a "peace treaty" in reality was a war treaty.

Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. 

Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).

Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland.

Nazi and Soviet soldiers greet one another in Poland (1939)

On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together.

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a October 31, 1939  speech spoke candidly about the Nazi-Communist alliance, and ridiculed its victims.

"The ruling circles of Poland boasted quite a lot about the ‘stability’ of their state and the ‘might’ of their army. However, one swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty which had existed by oppressing non-Polish nationalities."

Approximately 230,000 Polish soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Russians. The Soviet precursor to the KGB was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.

Thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders were taken into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, shot in the back of the head or in the neck and buried in mass graves.

August 23 is #BlackRibbonDay, a day of remembrance in honour of all those affected by the events that followed the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939.

Join us on August 22 for a ceremony of remembrance for the millions of people who suffered at the hands of Soviet… pic.twitter.com/vVE3HMskQ7

— Legislative Assembly of Alberta (@LegAssemblyofAB) August 15, 2025

Secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact not only partitioned Poland but also divided up Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania into Nazi and Soviet "spheres of influence." The Soviet Union invaded and annexed the Baltic States in June 1940.  

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov meets with Adolf Hitler (1940)

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a speech delivered on August 1, 1940 while the Soviet Union was then still allied with Nazi Germany continued to describe their military alliance as a "non-aggression pact."   

 "A radical change for the better in the relations between the Soviet Union and Germany found its expression in the non-aggression pact signed last August. These new, good relations between the USSR and Germany have been tested in practice in connection with events in former Poland, and their strength has been sufficiently proved."

Another sign of Nazi-Soviet cooperation was the Soviet Union’s deportation of hundreds of refugees to Nazi authorities. Most of them were German anti-fascists, communists, and Jews who had sought asylum in the Soviet Union.

Soviet and Nazi soldiers fraternize in Poland. Their alliance ended in 1941.

This alliance ended on June 22, 1941 when Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, betraying his ally Josef Stalin.

"Stalin was shocked; he had received a plethora of warnings of an imminent invasion – notably from Winston Churchill, informed by British intelligence briefings. The communist dictator had refused to believe them," reported Agence France Press. Stalin preferred to rely on Hitler's assurances.

 

Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet foreign minister, Molotov

Communist apologists continue to defend Stalin and attempt to cover up this history of collaboration between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It may also explain the real reason behind attacks on the legacy of Winston Churchill. His observation on the relationship between the Communists and the Nazis in his book The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948) is damning and accurate.

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the reckless strategy pursued by Stalin and the Communist International cost 22 to 28 million Russian lives alone in World War Two, and nearly led to the Nazi conquest and occupation of the Soviet Union.