The news about Calixto Ramon Martinez is worse and worse. We have to jump out of our chairs and agree it could be us or one of our brothers. The last thing we know, thanks to Hablemos Press, is that Calixto is continuing his hunger strike and refusing medical care. According to reports from some inmates in Combinado del Este prison, yesterday the agent “Rodolfo,” chief of Unit 3, ordered that he be given a savage beating. He is still confined in the punishment cells, naked, beaten and on hunger strike. He is demanding to be treated with respect, respect that includes his immediate release.
Woe be it to Fidel and Raul Castro that someday, if they escape from the Courts of this world, they cannot escape God’s judgment. Eternal death is too small to punish those who in life have produced so much pain and the deaths to so many people, so many families. So much terror in a population, so many lies, so much physical and spiritual harm to a nation. Calixto can have screamed in rebellion for the treatment he was given by the agents of State Security and the police: “Down with Fidel and Raul Castro!!” As a universal citizen is entitled to do so, but in Cuba these two figures, so reprehensible, in order to protect themselves have declared it crime. It is a shame and a scandal, they are both so small that they have to retaliate for so little against that which merits greater acts of rebellion and civil disobedience.
But they have achieved something worse than fear in this population: they have achieved that many people don’t have a hint of conscience or responsibility for their acts.
I ask for help from all of you in an explicit way. I have sent an email to Amnesty International, an account so public that I am afraid it won’t be read quickly. Colleagues and friends of Calixto can provide Amnesty International all the information it needs to declare him a prisoner of conscience and give him international visibility so that the Cuban government is pressured to release him immediately. According to data published in October by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation the number of political prisoners on the island is 82.
Regulating the coexistence between citizens and the state is urgent in Cuba. There is a tremendous disparity between the two powers. And compared to the macro ideas that have been injected into the population, human rights are understated and the sensitivity of many natives is dulled with regards to their ability to recognize the situation in which we all find ourselves.
December 10 2012
