International Human Rights body denounces assault on Cuban human rights defender Idania Yanes Contreras

Idania Yánez Contreras badly beaten in the past and again recently by Cuban government agents

IACHR CONCERNED OVER ASSAULT ON BENEFICIARY OF PRECAUTIONARY MEASURES IN CUBA

N° 118/11

Washington, D.C., November 10, 2011 - The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expresses its concern over recent attacks suffered by Idania Yanes Contreras in Cuba. She is a beneficiary of precautionary measures granted by the IACHR on June 8, 2011.

Information the IACHR has received indicates that Idania Yanes Contreras was arrested on October 31, 2011, when she was protesting to defend the rights of a political dissident who was on a prolonged hunger strike. Idania Yanes Contreras reportedly was taken to a police unit, dragged by her hair, and severely beaten in the head, abdomen, and back before being released on November 3, 2011. According to the information the IACHR has received, she left the detention center in a fragile state of health and entered the Arnaldo Milián Castro Hospital with injuries to her body.

The Inter-American Commission considers extremely serious the fact that the State of Cuba has not adopted the necessary measures that were requested by the IACHR to protect the life and physical integrity of Idania Yanes Contreras, considering the threats, attacks, and harassment to which she has been subject. The IACHR calls to mind that the State has an obligation to investigate of its own accord the facts that have been reported, and to punish those responsible for the attacks.

The IACHR urges the State of Cuba to immediately and effectively implement each of the precautionary measures granted by the Commission.

A principal, autonomous body of the Organization of American States (OAS), the IACHR derives its mandate from the OAS Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights. The Inter-American Commission has a mandate to promote respect for human rights in the region and acts as a consultative body to the OAS in this matter. The Commission is composed of seven independent members who are elected in an individual capacity by the OAS General Assembly and who do not represent their countries of origin or residence.

Tearing Down Walls: 22 years ago today in Berlin and now in Havana

22 years ago today the Berlin Wall fell. And the wall of control and censorship that surrounds us when will it fall? - Yoani Sanchez via twitter on November 9, 2011

22 years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, while in Cuba there are still walls standing against citizen freedom. - Luis Felipe Rojas via twitter on November 9, 2011

Tearing down the Berlin Wall

22 years ago today the Berlin Wall began to be physically torn down. It was a great day for freedom and the triumph of long years of nonviolent resistance throughout Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall had been constructed beginning on August 13, 1961 with barbed wire fence followed by a 100 mile wall and more than 300 watch towers to spot and shoot escapees and the East German communists called it the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." Minefields were laid in some sectors.



The destruction of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 was not inevitable. It did not fall down. It was torn down.

Tearing down the Berlin Wall

Both Luis Felipe Rojas and Yoani Sanchez in the midst of their identifying the walls of repression that exist in Cuba today are doing their part to ensure that the walls of repression built up in Cuba over the past half century are also torn down.


No+Violence March in Havana, Cuba, November 6, 1989

In Germany, this was not a passive top down process or the Berlin Wall falling as a result of gravity and inertia. It bears repeating that it was torn down by courageous Germans.

Tearing down the Berlin Wall

Remember that between 1961 and the very year it was torn down at least 136 Germans were extrajudicially executed by the East German border guards just for trying to cross the Berlin Wall to freedom. There is The Berlin Wall Museum that offers a complete listing of the 136 known victims with details about them and their deaths.

Chris Gueffroy shot dead on February 5, 1989 at age 20 by East German guards while trying to cross the Berlin Wall

For example one of the last victims, Chris Gueffroy was born on June 21, 1968 and shot dead on February 5, 1989 trying to cross on the Britzer Zweigkanal, near the small garden colonies “Harmonie“ and “Sorgenfrei” on the sector border between Berlin-Treptow and Berlin-Neukölln. Dead at 20 years of age for the crime of wanting to live in freedom. A memorial column commemorating Chris Gueffroy was erected at Britzer Zweigkanal in Berlin-Treptow in 2003 in honor of his 35th birthday. A biography and account of the circumstances that led to his death and the aftermath are available online.

Memorial Column for Chris Gueffroy

As in Cuba today, the process of the Berlin Wall being torn down was both a struggle of ideas and of nonviolent action. Germans crossed the wall seeking freedom in an act of nonviolent defiance. Many escaped but many paid the ultimate price for freedom. The Order to Border Guards from the East German regime was clear:

"It is your duty to use your combat … skills in such a way as to overcome the cunning of the border breacher, to challenge or liquidate him in order to thwart the planned border breach... Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.”

On June 14, 1973, Fidel Castro addressed the men charged with shooting East Germans fleeing to West Germany as "the courageous and self-denying border guards of the GDR People's Army who stand guard in the front line of the entire-socialist community." Later in the evening Premier Castro addressed the Nikolay Bezarin Barracks in East Berlin:

It is very important to know that the people of the GDR have great confidence in you, that they are truly proud of you. The comrades of the party and the citizens of socialist Berlin have told us with great satisfaction about the activity of the border troops, speaking with great admiration for you and for your services.

Some equate nonviolence with pacifism and they are profoundly mistaken. There is nothing passive and often times nothing peaceful about nonviolent resistance. It can be loud and boisterous or as in the case of the Berlin Wall the loud sound of tools smashing against an oppressive structure that denied the East German people the right to freedom of movement.

Those walls are present today in the Cuba of the Castro brothers but they are not only physical walls but also psychological walls. Human rights defenders like Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva of the Council of Human Rights Rapporters, bloggers like Yoani Sanchez and Luis Felipe Rojas, activists like Jorge Garcia Perez "Antunez", Oscar Elias Biscet, Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, and the Ladies in White "Laura Pollán", musicians like those that comprise the punk rock band Porno para Ricardo, graffiti artists like El Sexto and many more are working to tear down both sets of walls in Cuba.

The end of the Berlin Wall was not inevitable it was the product of the courage and sacrifice of many Eastern Europeans. The same holds true for Cuba. In the same manner that Europeans once did under the Iron Curtain, Cubans today are speaking, writing, spraying, singing, marching and protesting truth to power in Communist Cuba. They need the solidarity of people of good will from around the world to tear down the walls of repression that remain in Cuba to ensure that there is not another missed opportunity for a nonviolent transition to freedom.

Tourist Apartheid Persists in Cuba

Apartheid Persists
by Yoani Sanchez

Reinaldo took the side of yes and he insisted and insisted. I, however, am of the generation that thinks ahead of time that nearly everything is prohibited, that they are going to scold me at every step and prevent me from doing anything that occurs to me. So this time the matrimonial discussion was intense. He claimed that we could board that boat to see Cienfuegos Bay from the swells of its waves; while the little voice inside me shouted that so much enjoyment could not be available to nationals. For a couple of hours I believed in my husband’s optimism and like a tropical Candide he got away with it. We went to the marina office near the Jagua Hotel and an official there sold us two tickets for the coveted boat trip. We never hid our breakneck Havana accents, nor tried to pass ourselves off as foreigners, but no one asked for identification. We felt there were already a pair of seats on board the yacht “Flipper” with our names on them and the murmur of skepticism faded in my head.

We arrived at the dock half an hour early. The sun-burnt tourists began to board the boat. Rei and I reached the spectacular corner from where we took photos of that bay as big as an ocean. The dream lasted barely five minutes. When the captain heard us talking he asked if we were Cubans. He shortly informed us that we had to go ashore, “boat rides are prohibited for nationals at every marina in the country.” Rage, anger, the shame of carrying a blue passport makes us guilty — in advance — in the eyes of the law of our own nation. A feeling of deception on comparing the official discourse of a supposed opening with the reality of exclusion and stigma. We wanted to cause a scene and cling to the railing, to compel them to remove us by force, but what would it have served? My husband dusted off his French and told the group of Europeans what was happening. They looked surprised, whispered among themselves. None of them disembarked — in solidarity with the excluded — from that coastal tour of our island; none of them found it intolerable to enjoy something that is forbidden to us, its natives.

The Flipper sailed, the wake of apartheid was visible for a few seconds and then was lost among the dark waters of the bay. The face of the musician Benny Moré on a nearby poster seemed to have exchanged its smile for a sneer. On one side of his chin was the famous refrain from one of his songs: “Cienfuegos is the city I like best…” We left that place. Reinaldo defeated in his illusion and I sad that my suspicions had triumphed. We waked along the road to Punta Gorda while an idea took shape in our minds: “If Benny had lived in these times, he too would have been thrown off — like a mangy dog — from that yacht.”

International communist terrorist says Fidel Castro killed more people than me

"I'm a professional revolutionary." - Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a Carlos the Jackal, on trial in Paris for murders and terror bombings, November 7, 2011

Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause ... Fidel Castro, Memorial service for Che Guevara, October 8, 1967

Carlos the Jackal inspired by Fidel Castro

International terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, who went on trial in France on Monday, boasted in an interview with the daily El Nacional of committing more than 100 attacks that claimed up to 2,000 lives explaining that:

With the means that I have in jail I began to make a rough account and the dead do not reach 2,000. Less than 10% of innocents suffered for it.

Later in the same interview when questioned about the attacks and asked if mistakes were made Ramírez Sánchez gave a candidly brutal answer:

Reporter - But then you, personally, believe that you were not mistaken in anything?
Ramírez Sánchez- Errors one commits all the time. President Chavez makes mistakes and thats normal, it is not a serious problem. Fidel Castro made ​​terrible mistakes.

Reporter- But people were killed in your attacks.
Ramírez Sánchez - Yes, but Fidel killed more people than me.

An interesting side note the Venezuelan terrorist claims that aide sent by both Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the former despot of Libya Moammar Qaddafi did not reach him stolen by their respective underlings.

On December 24, 1997 Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was convicted of murder by a French Court and sentenced to life in prison. He responded to the sentence stating:

"I am satisfied and I am proud I chose my cause when I was 14 and I have never strayed."

According to the New York Times, "his real cause was anti-Americanism, adopted when he was a student in the 1960s looking for a way of defying U.S. domination and capitalist values the way Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had done for Cuba before him."



In France, a life sentence apparently means at least 22 years and now the international terrorist is on trial for the first time for acts of terrorism that took the lives of 12 people in order that he spend another 22 years in prison including "complicity in killings and destruction of property using explosive substances".

The tactics for which Carlos the Jackal is on trial facing a life sentence were and are glorified by the regime in Cuba. In addition, as early as the 1960s the Castro regime recruited, organized and trained terrorists from around the world to make them more effective. Carlos the Jackal is just one terrible consequence of the Castro regime's belief in revolutionary violence.

Electoral Fraud and Irregularities in Nicaragua

Violence is a tool of people who feel weak. Nonviolence is a tool of those who feel empowered. -Cynthia Boaz

Sweep away the corruption: Corrupt Magistrates, Electoral Fraud, Stealing from the State, Decrees

The circumstances leading to the elections on Sunday in Nicaragua where one of the presidential candidates, the incumbent Daniel Ortega, shredded the constitution in order to be placed on the ballot to run for a third term were already suspect. The Los Angeles Times laid out the background:

The Nicaragua constitution forbids a person from serving as president more than twice, and from succeeding himself or herself. Ortega was ineligible on both counts. But since his second election as president in 2007 (after an earlier stint 1984-90) Ortega succeeded in placing supporters in key posts on the courts and electoral bodies. Last year the Nicaraguan Supreme Court, at Ortega’s behest, ruled that term limits were unconstitutional, clearing the way for the 66-year-old to run again.

Depressing enough without taking into account Ortega's and the Sandinista Party's financing by drug cartels exposed by wikileaks and the creation of paramilitaries and state security to repress and spy on the political opposition.

The news at the end of the day describes a stolen election with violence and a lack of transparency. The Miami Herald reported that "voting was marred by scattered violence, including reports of gunfire that wounded four people near the coffee-growing city of Matagalpa and arson attacks on several rural precincts." The Carter Center sent a group to visit Nicaragua during the elections but did not participate as election observers according to CBC due to restrictions placed by the Nicaraguan government. International observers from both the European Union and the Organization of American States expressed their reservations about the electoral process:

Luis Yanez, a Spanish legislator who heads a European Union delegation, said 20 of the group's 90 observers faced "inexplicable" difficulties in gaining access to polling stations.

"I don't understand why there are so many obstacles, so much opacity and so many tricks in a process that should be clean and transparent," Yanez said, adding that some precincts opened late, blocked opposition election monitors and filed vote tallies that were illegible.

Dante Caputo, a former foreign minister from Argentina who heads an observer mission from the Organization of American States, said obstacles were tantamount to a disavowal by the Ortega government of accords to allow election observers.

At least 10 OAS teams arrived at key precincts around the country where they were to monitor voting and ballot counting only to be told they could not enter, Caputo said.

"We faced a series of difficulties ... We were blocked from being where we were supposed to be. This kind of situation has not happened before. It is worrisome," Caputo said.

Both the violence and lack of transparency on the part of the Ortega government are demonstrations of weakness and no doubt that if the elections were properly held he would lose. Mohandas Gandhi's observation that "Truth never damages a cause that is just" is being demonstrated in Nicaragua and that what Ortega and the Sandinistas are doing is unjust. Hence the lies.

With 6% of the vote reported Daniel Ortega obtains 66% of the vote and most likely control of the legislature in order to follow the example of Chavez in Venezuela in undermining democracy in Nicaragua.

The Movement for Nicaragua has placed the above reproduced cartoon on its twitter page calling for sweeping out corruption. Unfortunately, the results tonight indicate that the elections in Nicaragua rather than being a democratic exercise that legitimizes the political system will create greater instability and insecurity in the country. The people of Nicaragua are in my prayers and thoughts at this difficult moment in their history.