Biscet's prayer for Pope Benedict XVI published in The Wall Street Journal

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION

March 20, 2012

A Cuban's Prayer for Pope Benedict
What will the Castro brothers hear during the first papal visit in over a decade?

By OSCAR ELIAS BISCET

Havana, Cuba

Next week, Pope Benedict XVI is coming here to Cuba, marking the first papal visit to my country in over a decade. During the planned three-day trip, His Holiness is set to meet with both Castro brothers and their subordinates, and to bring his spiritual message to the Cuban people.

The stakes couldn't be higher. This trip is a unique opportunity for the leader of the Catholic Church to leverage his considerable prestige and influence to support the oppressed and help the Cuban people claim our liberty and establish democracy.

My country continues to be run by a brutal regime that oppresses the people, systematically violating our basic freedoms. That regime is a relic of the Cold War, and there's little hope for change without substantial international pressure.

Cuba is a police state. Government agents spy on and harass anyone advocating for human rights. They beat and imprison anyone seeking peaceful political change. They arbitrarily arrest and detain Cubans for Orwellian infractions like "disrespecting patriotic symbols" and "insulting symbols of the fatherland."

Cuban state security closely monitors citizens' daily life, including all of our incoming mail, telephone calls and emails. The only legal press and the only newspaper are run by the dictatorship. Independent journalists who seek to challenge state propaganda are threatened and jailed.

Cuban jails are living hells in which flagrant violations of human dignity occur daily. I've spent over 12 years incarcerated, most recently for "crimes against state security"—that is, asking the Cuban state to respect the fundamental human rights of every Cuban citizen.

The prison system in Cuba flagrantly violates the minimum requirements for prisoner care established by the United Nations. During my years in prison, I personally witnessed prisoners left for 12-24 hours with their hands and feet handcuffed behind their backs, stripped naked in groups without any regard for human modesty, tortured physically and psychologically with tasers, beaten to death for requesting basic medical attention, and kept for months in cells without ventilation, natural light, drinkable water or restroom facilities.

If prisoners attempt to push for better treatment, they risk death. In one case in 2010, on the second floor of the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, a young prisoner who suffered from two chronic medical conditions—asthma and cardiac problems related to valve pathologies—was beaten and died after complaining that he was not allowed to see a doctor. While I was imprisoned, three prisoners tried to assassinate me on different occasions. Two of them later told me that they had been hired to do so by military officials.

I continue to witness the personal ruin that the regime inflicts on anyone who offers an alternative voice. For me, the harassment started in 1998 when, while giving a conference at a hospital on the right to life, I was violently attacked and expelled by a mob dispatched by the Communist Party. Since then, I've been denied the ability to practice medicine.

My wife and son have had their lives threatened and have been pressured to abandon me. We have been evicted from our house. I had my right foot fractured from a beating by state police.

Yet there are still thousands of brave Cubans standing up to the Castro brothers and demanding their basic rights, even under threat of torture and death. Our ranks are growing. But we need the help of the international community.

The Arab Spring is simply the latest demonstration that organic, people-driven democratic change is possible. In past years we have seen peaceful, democratic movements succeed in the rest of Latin America and in the former Soviet bloc. In most places, their advent has brought freedom, national reconciliation and prosperity. We can achieve the same results in Cuba, and we will do just that—building a Cuba where the people are free and sovereign.

The international community, for its part, has the responsibility to provide the attention and diplomatic resources that the movement can't muster from here.

The Pope's visit is important because the Catholic Church has played a crucial role in expanding and protecting Cuban freedoms in the past. My own most recent release from prison, along with that of other dissidents, was chiefly negotiated by the Catholic Church.

For those of us desiring a free Cuba, our demands are simple: free speech, freedom of association and assembly, free and fair multiparty elections, and a country from which no person will ever again be exiled for political beliefs.

Pope Benedict's visit represents a unique opportunity for the Cuban people to pressure their tyrants to hold elections in which all Cubans can unite with the free and democratic countries of the world. I ask Pope Benedict to focus on this idea so that there can be rapid change in my country, and so we can live in freedom. I pray that he will succeed.

Dr. Biscet, a physician, is president of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights. While in prison in 2007, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577293681582420986.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Nine years later: Another Cuban Black Spring?

Nine years to the day after major March 18 crackdown on nonviolent activists 70 Cuban women arrested including Cuban human rights leader Berta Soler (pictured below)

Berta Soler

The ninth anniversary of the Cuban Black Spring providentially fell on a Sunday just 8 days before Pope Benedict XVI's arrival in Cuba on March 26. Today, approximately 70 members of the Ladies in White were arrested by the Castro regime and taken away. A majority of the 70 women were detained while trying to attend Mass.

The Cuban Spring: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3


The Ladies in White and the Cuban Black Spring

In March of 2003 following a crackdown on nonviolent opposition activists, known as the "Black Spring", their wives, mothers, and sisters formed the Ladies in White and begin their weekly Sunday pilgrimages to attend Mass and march through the streets of Cuba demanding their loved ones freedom. The women would suffer harassment, beatings and detentions over the next nine years.

Many of the activists who had been unjustly imprisoned had been organizers of nationwide petition drive called the Varela Project , named after Father Felix Varela, that sought legal and constitutional reforms to bring the Cuban regime in line with international human rights norms.



Today, nine years later thanks to the sacrifice of the Ladies in White the men unjustly imprisoned in 2003 are no longer in prison. Most of them were forced into exile while a small number remain on the island. The founder of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollán, died under mysterious circumstances on October 14, 2011. The new head of the Ladies in White "Laura Pollán" , Berta Soler was arrested today and remains detained tonight. They continue to demand the release of the remaining political prisoners in Cuba and that human rights be respected.

Elements within the Catholic Church in Cuba have been accused of not defending human rights on the island and on occasion siding with those in power there or ignoring evils perpetrated by the regime which has led to frustration in some opposition circles.

Hopefully, in addition to his important pastoral message, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI will address the importance of human rights as he did on April 18, 2008 in his address to the United Nations General Assembly:

Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity. It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God’s creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.

Catholic layman and Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya tweeted today that the "arrests and mistreatment of the Ladies in White were part of the regime's maneuvers in its murky preparation of the Pope's Cuba visit." Hopefully the arrest of 70 nonviolent women attempting to attend Mass and march peacefully through the streets of Cuba on the ninth anniversary of the crackdown that brought the Ladies in White into existence will serve as a bright beacon for all observing the situation in Cuba.

Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina calls on dictatorship in Cuba to be expelled from the UN Human Rights Council

CENTRIST DEMOCRATIC INTERNATIONAL

Human Rights Council UN
Nineteenth section from February to March 2012

Thank you Madam President:

On behalf of the Centrist Democrat International, I come to give my testimony. I am Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina, former Cuban prisoner of conscience and survivor of the prisons of the totalitarian regime.

I served 10 years and 5 months in prison for opposing the violation of rights of expression, association and movement in my country. I suffered torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the prison of Guantanamo. In 1999, I was subjected to a mock execution by state security officials in the Sierra Maestra. I suffered fractures to two bones in my face in the summer of 2001, an attack carried out by a common offender under the orders of Colonel Juan Gonzales, chief of operations at Guantanamo and Lt. Col. Jorge Chediak, head of the prison. I was confined three years and six months in solitary confinement and punishment cells including 47 days without clothes and in inhumane conditions in a dark cell. I spent 8 months and 20 days with common criminals with tuberculosis. On many occasions I had to resort to hunger strikes to demand my rights. The last time was in January 2011 when exile or facing penalties of 12 years in prison were imposed on me

My case is not an isolated one. There exists a system of annihilation against those who dare to ask for changes. In the past year, three human rights defenders were killed by that system: Juan Wilfredo Soto García, beaten to death by two police in Santa Clara on May 8, 2011. Laura Pollán Toledo, leader of the Ladies in White dies under suspicious circumstances on October 14, 2011 and Wilman Villar Mendosa, dies on strike hungry after being confined in a cell with no water, no clothes, causing pneumonia and kidney failure on January 19, 2012.

So far this year, there are more than a thousand arbitrary arrests. The brutal beatings and sexual assaults against women human rights defenders are multiplied by days. The houses of the opponents are attacked by mobs directed by the regime endangering the lives of women and children.

Mr. President, the dictatorship in Cuba must be expelled from the Council because it does not fulfill the commitments it made to join it.

Thank you very much.

Cuba and Tibet's shared calendar of hope and tragedy

Free Tibet demonstration on March 10, 2012 in London, UK

Cubans and Tibetans share two things in common despite our profoundly different histories and religious traditions that bring us together in shared misery. We both have suffered under tyranny since the early 1950s and over a half century later continue to struggle for the restoration of our freedom. China became a communist regime in 1949 and immediately began asserting territorial designs on Tibet. Communist China invaded and occupied Tibet in 1950. Cuba was a free and independent republic with a constitutional democracy until March 10, 1952 when Fulgencio Batista overthrew the democracy in a coup d'état against the last democratically elected president Carlos Prio Socarras.

Both Cubans and Tibetans looked to 1959 as an opportunity for democratic restoration and liberation. Instead tyranny entrenched itself. The Cuban nightmare began amidst the hope on January 1, 1959 that the departure of Fulgencio Batista into exile would mean a democratic restoration and an end to authoritarian tyranny instead it was the beginning of a new totalitarian communist tyranny headed by Fidel Castro. Cloaking itself in the legitimacy of nationalism and anti-Americanism it justified the systematic denial of human rights in the rhetoric of anti-imperialism and the “Yankee threat.”



Tibetan hopes that a national uprising that erupted in Lhasa on March 10, 1959 would drive the Chinese occupiers out of their homeland. Instead His Holiness the Dalai Lama had to flee to India to avoid imprisonment or assassination as the Chinese communists crushed the uprising.

However, as first witnessed with the regime’s support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and later its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 their so-called anti-imperialism demonstrated ideological exceptions. The same holds true for Tibet. Fidel Castro in his March 31, 2008 “reflection” titled “The Chinese Victory” denies that Tibet was ever independent justifying and defending the Chinese occupation of that small country. It is a shameful rewriting of history.

It is time to hold both Fidel Castro and the Chinese communists accountable to the truth.

On February 24, 2011, Students for a Free Tibet at Florida International University co-sponsored with the Free Cuba Foundation the 15th anniversary silent vigil of the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot down. Today, March 10, 2012 in London we participated in a march from White Hall 10 Downing Street to the Chinese Embassy protesting 62 years of Chinese occupation and repression.

Overcoming Fear in China: The Life of Artist and Activist Ai Wei Wei

"Only by encouraging individual freedom, or the individual power of the mind, and by trusting our own feelings, can collective acts be meaningful." - Ai Weiwei on 31 May 2010 and 1 June 2010


The Miami International Film Festival will be screening the film documentary AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY at 7pm tonight (March 9, 2012) and again on Sunday, March 11, 2012 at 7:30pm. It is a film about an artist who is also a human rights activist in China. He has criticized the Chinese government's stand on democracy and human rights while also denouncing government corruption. He has been arrested and held in custody for over two months in 2011.

Watch Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei? on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

In the Frontline Documentary Who's Afraid of Ai Wei Wei? the artist/activist made clear that he is not fearless: "I was so fearful, that’s not fearless. I am more fearful than other people, may be, then I act more brave because I know the danger is really there. If you don’t act, the dangers become stronger."

The director, Alison Klayman, will be available to answer questions about the documentary Never Sorry following the screenings.



The Sundance Film Festival provided the following synopsis of the film:

Ai Weiwei is known for many things—great architecture, subversive in-your-face art, and political activism. He has also called for greater transparency on the part of the Chinese state. Director Alison Klayman chronicles the complexities of Ai’s life for three years, beginning with his rise to public prominence via blog and Twitter after he questioned the deaths of more than 5,000 students in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The record continues through his widely publicized arrest in Beijing in April of 2011. As Ai prepares various works of art for major international exhibitions, his activism heats up, and his run-ins with China’s authorities become more and more frequent.

In this unprecedented look at Ai and those close to him, Klayman’s camera captures his forthrightness and unequivocal stance. She gives a larger picture of the artist as an individual, a symbol of China’s oppression, and a powerful voice against a country that still denies its citizens many basic freedoms.

Award Winner
U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance - K.Y.