Amnesty International at 60: Are they staying the course or has mission creep led them astray from their founder?

 We remember

On the 28th of May 1961 an article appeared in The Observer that captured the imagination of people around the world. This text was taken from an Amnesty statement on the 50th anniversary and adapted for the 60th.

Written by London lawyer Peter Benenson, The Forgotten Prisoners called for an international campaign for the release of thousands of people who had been jailed because of their political or religious beliefs. They were given the name ‘prisoners of conscience.’That call for justice a six decades ago was the birth of Amnesty International, a human rights group which has since grown into a global organization with over three million supporters in 150 countries. In recognition of their human rights campaigning, in 1977 they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Peter Benenson said that the impetus for The Forgotten Prisoners was a newspaper article he read about two students jailed for seven years in dictator Antonio Salazar’s Portugal simply for raising their glasses and toasting freedom. At the time he said he wanted to “mobilise world opinion” about the human rights abuses being committed by governments around the world against those citizens whose opinions differed to theirs.

Amnesty International's first meeting where it came into existence in London in July 1961 with Peter Benenson and six other men that included a Conservative, a Liberal, and a Labour Member of Parliament. It was an initiative that had a broad consensus, but that has changed over the past six decades.

The Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decades to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the pre-existing international human rights consensus. For example, Amnesty International's campaign beginning in 2007 to conflate the right to an abortion with its worldwide campaign to stop violence against women alienated many Catholic supporters, and has been described as anti-Catholic. 

Catholic bishops, who had been members of Amnesty International, resigned over the abortion issue because the human rights group had become an abortion lobby group. Catholics generally have been encouraged to boycott the organization. Independent Catholic News reported:

Cardinal Martino, who served as the Holy See's permanent observer at the United Nations, says that this change of position is part of the "pro-death" agenda in modern culture. The cardinal said that Amnesty International's decision means Catholics and Catholic organizations should no longer financially support the group. "The promotion of abortion opens the door to the slippery slope of evil and death, where human rights are taken away from the most innocent and vulnerable children of God," he said. "I believe that, if in fact Amnesty International persists in this course of action, individuals and Catholic organizations must withdraw their support."

Furthermore Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to life, and this is not accidental. This is because this human rights document drafted and signed on December 10, 1948 was not a compromise between liberalism and socialism but lobbied for and drafted by Christian Democrats with the active support of the Catholic Church and all the world's great faith traditions.

Jacques Maritain

Catholic roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Pope John Paul II recalled the Roman Catholic Church's role in 1991 in the Papal Encyclical Centesimus Annus published on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:

...[A]fter the Second World War, and in reaction to its horrors, there arose a more lively sense of human rights, which found recognition in a number of International Documents⁵² and, one might say, in the drawing up of a new "right of nations", to which the Holy See has constantly contributed. The focal point of this evolution has been the United Nations Organization.

One of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was a profound Catholic and anti-modernist inspired by Christian humanism:

There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.

The formation of the United Nations was an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was the first international human rights instrument signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948 eight months prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial role, among them the Cuban delegation. The first draft of the Declaration was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them "a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation, and the earlier Panamanian draft."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood that began to be formulated in the Middle Ages, and developed into a universal concept in the 1500s.

Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas

The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this important document that was embraced by the major faiths around the world that shared its common truths achieving a unanimous human rights consensus with that document.

This is all the more ironic because the founder of Amnesty, Peter Benenson, "in 1958, he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, and his new faith became a dominant influence in his life. He ceased to look to politics for a solution to the world's problems, and concluded that the answers lay in individual regeneration", reported The Guardian on his passing in February 2005.

 

The Christian Resistance to Communism in Cuba

The truth is a desire of the human person, the search for which always supposes the exercise of authentic freedom. Many, without a doubt, would prefer to take the easy way out, trying to avoid this task. Some, like Pontius Pilate, ironically question the possibility of even knowing what truth is (cf. Jn 18:38), ... There are too many who, like the Roman governor, wash their hands and let the water of history drain away without taking a stand. - Pope Benedict XVI, in Cuba on March 28 , 2012 

 Cuba is much more than the Castro regime.
Geography and population are important considerations. Cuba is just 90 miles south of the United States with a population of approximately 11.39 million people. It is 780 miles long and has a land area of 40,369 square miles and is the largest island in the Caribbean and 17th-largest island in the world by land area.

History not only informs the present and the future but past actions lead to future ones. Therefore to glimpse the future of Cuba one should not only look at the wreckage of Cuban society that is the legacy of Castroism but also what came before it. Out of 525 years of history the Castro regime's 59 years constitute 11% which is a lot, but one must look at the other 89% to gain a better understanding of longer term trends.

Fort of Saint Charles and the  Morro Castle (Havana, Cuba)

An outpost of the Spanish Empire
Columbus’s second stop in the New World was on October 28, 1492 when he landed in Cuba. (The first place he landed on October 12 was the Bahamas). Cuba was a Spanish colony from Columbus’s landing in 1492 until 1898 when Spain lost Cuba in the Spanish-American War.

The indigenous tribes that existed in Cuba did not survive Spanish colonialism due mainly to small pox. Cuba's main crops throughout more than five centuries have been coffee, tobacco and sugar. In 1517 the King of Spain granted a contract for 4,000 African slaves to be introduced to Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Jamaica of which 300 were allocated to Cuba. Over 600,000 Africans would be taken from West Africa and brought to Cuba over 350 years. Slavery would continue in Cuba until 1886. 

Alejandro Anreus in the August 2, 2016 article "Catholic Cuba: From Las Casas to the Castros"published in Commonweal magazine describes how Catholicism arrived in the island as follows:

Catholicism came to Cuba with the Spanish colonization, and reflected the religious zeal shaped by crusades against the Moors and the expulsion of the Jews in Spain in the 1490s. The church’s agenda on the island ranged from converting the natives (mostly Taínos) to combating immorality and resisting English buccaneers. As a church of the Spanish empire, it was a defender of the Iberian monarchy and its divine right to “civilize” its subjects. The Franciscan and Dominican orders arrived first, followed by Jesuits and Augustinians. By the time of the Cuban wars of independence, the spiritual autonomy of these religious orders would be compromised by their loyalty to Madrid (excepting the Franciscans). 

However there are deep linkages in the Cuban national character with the faith. For the sake of brevity will only focus on two.

Image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre

The oldest link is the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre and her appearance 400 years ago. Smithsonian Magazine in the October 27, 2016 article "The Surprising History of Cuba’s Patron Saint" authored by Emilio Cueto, as told to John F. Ross provides a brief account and how it ties into Cuban nationalism:

In 1612, in a bay to the north of Cuba, a 10-year-old black slave named Juan and two indigenous young men had found her while rowing out to an island to harvest salt. Despite bad weather throughout the previous day, the 15-inch-tall wooden Virgin figurine bobbed serenely upon a plank on the sea, her dress miraculously dry and unruffled. The story of her discovery spread quickly. The faithful carried the wooden figure to the economic hub of El Cobre, where they constructed a shrine to hold her. The Christian iconography is hard to miss: She came to Cuba bearing the greatest of gifts—her own child—and appeared not to a priest or bishop, but to common men. She spoke not just to the aboriginal people, but also to the Spaniards, Creoles, and African slaves. The latter would assimilate her image into their Afro-Cuban Santería faith many years later. When Cubans fought the Spanish for independence in the late 19th century, she became a national symbol of the small island’s struggle against a mighty European superpower.

Pope Benedict XV in 1916 granted the request of veterans of the war of Cuban Independence to name her the patron saint of Cuba. It also underlines the fact that Cuba's catholic roots long predate the current totalitarian communist nightmare.

The image is enshrined in the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, built in 1926 and situated in the village El Cobre, near Santiago de Cuba. The feast day of Our Lady of Charity is September 8; the solemn Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Pope John Paul II during his visit to Cuba gave a speech at the Great Hall of the University of Havana on January 23, 1998 were he spoke about Father Felix Varela, a Catholic priest credited with teaching Cubans how to think and an individual that through his writings and teachings formulated what it is to be a Cuban for the first time.

A pre-eminent son of this land is Father Felix Varela, considered by many to be the foundation stone of the Cuban national identity. He is, in his own person, the best synthesis one could find of Christian faith and Cuban culture. An exemplary priest of Havana and on undeniable patriot, Father Varela was on outstanding thinker who in nineteenth century Cuba renewed the method and content of teaching in philosophy, law, science and theology. To generations of Cubans, he taught that to assume full responsibility for our existence we must first learn the difficult art of thinking in a right way and with our own mind. He was the first to speak of independence in these lands. He also spoke of democracy, judging it to be the political project best in keeping with human nature, while at the same time underscoring its demands. Among these demands, he stressed two in particular: first, that people must be educated for freedom and responsibility, with a personally assimilated ethical code which includes the best of the heritage of civilization and enduring transcendental values, so that they may be able to undertake decisive tasks in service of the community; and second, that human relationships, like the form of society as a whole, must give people suitable opportunities to perform, with proper respect and solidarity, their historic role giving substance to the Rule of Law, which is the essential guarantee of every form of human concourse claiming to be democratic.

Three Popes would visit Cuba beginning with John Paul II in 1998, Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 and Pope Francis in 2015. Pope John Paul II's visit saw the return of Christmas and out of the three visits marked a before and after in Cuba. More Cubans turned to the Church and a greater amount of civic, nonviolent activism was seen following the visit. This did not occur during the other two visits. Pope Benedict XVI's visit marked the return of Good Friday observances to Cuba. Pope Francis worked to push through the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.

Pope John Paul II in Cuba in January of 1998

Cuban Bishop Agustín Román on December 16, 2006 addressed the origins of the Cuban dissident movement in Cuba and its Christian roots. Bishop Román had been forced out of Cuba at gun point with 130 others on September 17, 1961. Here he describes the link between the first prominent and nonviolent dissident group resisting the Castro regime.

Underlining its membership in the historic struggle of the Cuban people for justice, the Cuban Committee for Human Rights comes to light on the anniversary of the birth of Martí and cite Father Varela as one of the inspirations of their founding document. It's the same struggle, but it is boldly different: it seeks justice, but by peaceful means. 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.

 The Christian Liberation Movement, led by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, was founded on September 8, 1988 on the feast day of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre.  It was made of a group of  catholic laymen who attended a parish in the El Cerro neighborhood in Havana.

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas was the chief spokesman of the movement and the chief strategist behind initiatives such as the Varela Project, the Heredia Project and the Peoples Path.

Oswaldo Payá, Tony Díaz Sánchez, and Regis Iglesias deliver petitions

The Varela Project, named after a 19th Century Cuban priest, sought to reform the Cuban legal system working within its own laws via referendum. According to Article 88(g) of the Cuban Constitution Cubans can push through a legislative initiative via a petition with 10,000 signatures. In May of 2002 Oswaldo Payá along with Regis Iglesias Ramirez, Tony Diaz Sanchez and others turned in 11,020 signatures to the rubber stamp Cuban National Assembly.

The Cuban government's response was to organize its own mandatory petition drive to make the Cuban Constitution "unchangeable" and on March 18, 2003 it launched the Cuban Black Spring rounding up 100 activists and sentencing 75 of them to long prison terms of up to 28 years in prison. The dictatorship thought that this draconian response along with the execution of 3 young Afro-Cubans who had tried to hijack a ferry out of Cuba would shut down dissent.

Within days of the crackdown the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the 75 activists formed the Ladies in White. Meeting on Sundays they would go to Mass at the Catholic Church and then march silently carrying white gladioli demanding that their loved ones be freed. They would also hold literary teas at the home of the chief spokeswoman of the movement, Laura Pollán, a former school teacher. Ten years later they are still marching, their loved ones now out of prison, they continue to walk demanding that all political prisoners be freed and the laws changed so that new ones not replace them.

Laura Pollán, founder of Cuba's Ladies in White

Months later Oswaldo Payá delivered another 14,384 petition signatures on October 5, 2003 to the National Assembly.

 The leaders of the nonviolent civic resistance movement have paid the ultimate price in their struggle for freedom. Laura Pollán after years of suffering beatings, a fracture, injections from government mobs, became ill and in the space of a week died on October 14, 2011. A Cuban dissident doctor who examined her treatment described it as "purposeful medical neglect."

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and the youth leader of his movement, Harold Cepero, died on July 22, 2012 following a car crash under suspicious circumstances. The Payá family has called for an international investigation into the deaths of both Oswaldo and Harold. Rosa María Payá, Oswaldo's daughter, continues her father's struggle today for a free Cuba as well as pursuing justice for her dad in the Cuba Decide campaign.

Eduardo Cardet Concepción, successor to martyred founding leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Paya, and unjustly jailed since November 30, 2016 was badly beaten, subjected to a political show trial, sentenced to three years in prison on March 20, 2017, and stabbed twice by three prisoners on December 19, 2017. This attack was most probably engineered by Castro's State Security in order to permanently silence him. The seriousness of the attack was only learned on January 15, 2018 when his wife was finally able to visit him in prison and see the extent of his injuries.  His health has been worsening and he has been refused religious assistance. It is feared that an injury on Eduardo Cardet's nose may require surgery because it could be cancer.

On April 5, 2018 Rosa María Rodríguez Gil, member of the Coordinating Council of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), went with her husband, Alejandro Febles, to the Council of State to deliver 10,000 signatures for the freedom of Eduardo Cardet, leader of the MCL currently in prison.Several State Security agents detained them and seized the signatures. [Rosa and Alejandro were held for 24 hours.] 

The struggle for a free Cuba continues in and out of Cuba and the Christian roots of this resistance stretch back centuries and will outlast the communist dictatorship. 

Remembering some of the victims of Cuban communism: Harold Cepero, a former Catholic seminarian

"Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world." - Mishnah  (1135-1204)

Harold Cepero Escalante

Some psychologists argue that as the number of victims increase into the hundreds, and thousands that compassion collapses out of the human fear of being overwhelmed. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin put it more succinctly: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." In the case of Cuba the communist regime has killed tens of thousands, and many have become numb in the face of this horror. Therefore on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first communist regime in Russia, that caused so much harm around the world, will focus on an infinitesimal sampling of some of the victims of Cuban communism.

The fourteenth entry remembers a young martyr: a former seminarian, who became a nonviolent human rights defender in a movement founded by lay Catholics, and was killed together with the movement's founding leader on July 22, 2012. He was just 32 years old.

Previous entries in this series were about Cubans trying to change the system nonviolently, Cubans who tried to leave the island, a student shot to death for walking down the wrong sidewalk in Havana, a young Ethiopian woman murdered in a red terror in her homeland for unknown reasons in 1978, and the eleventh entry three young black men executed by firing squad in 2003 for having hijacked a ferry in an effort to reach the United States. The thirteenth entry remembered two young men shot by firing squad in La Cabaña on April 18, 1961. They had been arrested on March 27, 1961 by Cuban secret police when they were found with weapons.

In this entry one explores how a Catholic youth, inspired by his faith defended human rights and dignity, took part in a national petition drive for the reform of the Cuban regime only to be killed under suspicious circumstances, involving Cuban state security.

Harold Cepero Escalante was born in the town of Chambas, then in the province of Ciego de Ávila ( but had been Camaguey until 1977), on January 29, 1980. He was drawn to his local Catholic Church in Chambas while in High School. In 1998 at age 18 he moved to Cuba's third largest city, Camaguey, and began his studies at the University of Camaguey. He also began, along with other university students, to take part in informal conversations with Father Alberto Reyes Pías.

In 2002 Harold together with other university students signed the Varela Project.

The Varela Project, named after the 19th century Cuban Catholic Priest Felix Varela who resisted Spanish colonialism, was a citizen initiative that gathered signatures to hold a referendum to change existing laws in order to reform the Cuban legal system to bring it in line with international human rights standards. The Christian Liberation Movement (CLM) had followed the letter of the law in organizing the campaign.

 On May 10, 2002, after CLM turned in 11,020 signatures exceeding the 10,000 required by the regime,  the dictatorship's response to the nonviolent citizen's initiative was to first coerce Cubans into signing another petition declaring the Constitution unchangeable.

Harold knew that this regime pushed petition drive was a direct reaction to the Varela Project and refused to sign it. He also began to explain this among students at the university in the dormitories and hallways without fear. This is when the threats of expulsion from the university began.

The dictatorship's "petition" quickly passed through the rubber stamp legislature without debating the Varela Project, which according to the Cuban law drafted by the regime meant that it should have been debated by the National Assembly.

On November 13, 2002 State Security organized a mob to judge and expel Harold Cepero and Yoan Columbié, another youth who signed the Varela Project. They were screamed at, insulted, threatened and finally expelled.

This is the letter that Harold wrote in protest following his expulsion from the University.

 With all due respect and the sincerity that they deserve, I think the arguments abound for our defense. Apparently the motive for this act, or I do not know how to call it, is our bad attitude towards the politics that prevail in our country today. The other, our approval of the Varela Project.I will start by saying that said project is a project of law signed by over eleven thousand Cubans (electors) and gathers up the fundamental needs of our people. I do not know why they are attempting (you who are now in a privileged situation with respect to us and those who think like us) to repress something that is not motivated by, nor has its origin in the hatred of the people, but rather in  openness, mutual respect, and dialogue.

They from their condition as: students, professors, PCC, UJC, etc., are breaking the law of the Republic. They are trying to trample on our dignity, that is of equal worth to theirs, a recognition and legal status to develop fully. Therefore, I think it totally unfair what they are attempting to do. This is a violation of international law, the Constitution and above all against our people.

The Varela Project is totally legal and recognized publicly by Fidel Castro. Also, if we support it because we believe it is just and so I would like them to consider it. The things we ask for do not exclude anyone, we simply want a space (which belongs to us) in the social life of Cuba.

Expelling us is not the solution neither for them or for us, it would be better to ask yourself why are there young people who are filled with concern and worry for the welfare of the country. It would be good that they explain to the students and to the people what the Varela Project is, what does it ask, and so give everyone the right to think and choose.

Today we are kicked out of the university for this. Tomorrow it could be one of you for just being different, for permitting yourself to think.

They are wanting to perpetuate something that it is not even known if it is fair, and in this manner they are denying the progress of a society that wants something new, something that really guarantees a dignified place for every Cuban. They are pressuring people or preventing them from expressing their true feelings, they are cultivating fear in the nation.

Under the pretext of defending freedom they are attacking it. Martí would say it like this: "The knife that is stabbed in the name of freedom is plunged into the chest of freedom". They should think if at the bottom of this attitude there is a real respect for freedom, because to say freedom, to be free, is not to snatch the freedom of others. I therefore ask that before they expel us ask themselves how long can they keep silent the mourning and the reality of Cuba, and remind them that the damage they can do to us is damage that they do to themselves. And more: it is a direct threat to every Cuban.

Those who steal the rights of others steal from themselves. Those who remove and crush freedom are the true slaves. 

Scores of Varela Project activists were arrested less than a year later in a crackdown that started on March 18, 2003 and became known as the Cuban Black Spring. Within days 75 human rights defenders, independent journalists, and Varela Project organizers were sentenced to long prison terms and recognized as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International. Other Varela Project petitioners were threatened with the death penalty.  

In 2003 Harold entered  the Seminary of the City of Camaguey and spent the next two years there. In 2005 he is transferred to the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary in Havana. In 2009 Harold leaves the seminary and joins the Christian Liberation Movement and begins to coordinate its youth group and became a member of the Coordinating Council of the CLM.  He organized workshops on leadership training.

Three years later on July 22, 2012 Harold Cepero Escalante was killed along with Oswaldo Payá, the founder of the Christian Liberation Movement.

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante

On February 23, 2016 at the 8th edition of the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy Rosa María Payá  addressed what happened to her dad Oswaldo Payá and friend Harold Cepero, on July 22, 2012: 

"On July 22, 2012, my father was extrajudicially  executed by agents of the political police, together with my dear friend Harold Cepero, staging a car crash that never took place, in a location of Cuba that remains to be  determined. Not satisfied with this double crime, my family was threatened with death..."In the summer of 2015 a special report was released by Human Rights Foundation, where all  evidences indicate that this was a crime against humanity, with the involvement of Cuban  authorities.  We’ll never give up on justice, because there can be no reconciliation without the recognition  of the whole truth. A nation that pretends to forget the violence against its innocent people  will remain a captive nation. And it will be a nation condemned to suffer such violence over  and over again."

In 2013 Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for the Democracy when posthumously awarding the 2013 Democracy Award addressed the character of Harold Cepero Escalante:

"A friend of Harold’s recalls that on an organizing trip for his Movement, the two of them were once at a bus station when a hungry man asked for money to buy food. Although they themselves had very little, Harold not only gave him his own spending money but also brought the man to the table to sit and eat with them. Such was his compassion and generosity of spirit."

Harold Cepero understood the dangers of advocating for freedom in Cuba under the Castro regime. In 2012, shortly before his death he explained the cost of resistance:"Christians and non-Christians who have the courage and the freedom to consider the peaceful political option for their lives, know they are exposing themselves to slightly less than absolute solitude, to work exclusion, to persecution, to prison or death."

Harold Cepero Escalante