14ymedio.com

Juan Goberna, one of its founders, woke up one morning and was not even aware that it was daylight. After several operations that failed to restore his sight, he decided to start using a cane. In those early days in the dark he approached Anci hoping to take a Braille course and receive a computer program that read texts aloud.

Accompanied by his wife, Goberna arrived at the NGO’s office in the municipality of Central Havana with his identity card in his pocket, five pesos in stamps and a certificate that declared him “legally blind.” “What revolutionary organizations do you belong to?” asked the clerk filling out his form.

The activist still shows indignation when he remembers the scene. “I told her I did not belong to any and from there everything changed,” he explains to 14ymedio. The official informed him that his case had to be referred to the Ministry of Justice to verify if he belonged to any “human rights” group.

Two weeks later they told him that he could not be a member of Anci because the statutes do not allow the disaffected in its ranks. After several attempts and appeals to different entities claiming his right to membership, Goberna has only had silence for answer.

Last year luck smiled on him. During a trip to Peru, organized by the Institute for Political Freedom (IPL), the idea arose, along with other activists, to create an independent entity to “visualize the difficulties faced by people with disabilities and promote a change of thinking towards them.” The organization does not discriminate against anyone because of “their physical, sensorial, intellectual, cultural or ideological characteristics.”

Today, the network has 15 active members and has managed to have representation in several provinces. In September of last year, some of these pioneers attended the VIII International Congress of Persons with Disabilities, held in Medellín, to learn about the work developed in different countries of the region.

The Network collects testimonies from people who are in a precarious situation and are victims of institutional or family neglect and has also identified at least six cases of violation of the right to join Anci, Aclifim or Ansoc for ideological reasons.

Last Saturday, during their last meeting, the members of the independent group proposed to disseminate the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Cuba is a signatory and whose content is scarcely known on the island. In addition, they want to disseminate updated concepts about disability, accessibility and inclusive culture, among others.

For Susana Más, an independent journalist and member of the Network, “it is unacceptable that people working in the media, intellectuals and artists who are supposed to be up to date in the use of language, work outside these concepts.” The reporter opts for a “sensitization campaign” around the term “person with disability, instead of disabled.”

Relative to the NGOs set up by the government, The Inclusive Culture Network does not consider itself an opposition organization or an enemy entity. “What we would most like to do is to cooperate with these entities, not in the spirit of disqualification or competition, but as something complementary,” insists Goberna.

For the moment, the Network is dedicated to highlighting attitudes and denouncing the existence of architectural barriers, so that those with a disability are not seen as sick, and for those around them to shed their discriminatory prejudices, indifference or pity.

The biggest difficulty they have encountered so far is the negative attitude of the institutions they go to in search of information or to file complaints: the first thing they are always asked is whether they are authorized or if they belong to an official entity.

The call for citizens to participate in these assemblies is traditionally issued by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) Organization, with a clear political origin and a strong ideological affiliation. From wall signs, personal reminders, to written citations, all are a part of the strategies to call people to vote.

In the days leading up to the meetings, the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) militants who live in each zone meet to agree on the positions depending on the directions that come from the higher levels. In these meetings they are warned how they should act in case any disaffection toward the Revolution is proposed, and which candidate enjoys the PCC’s sympathy.

Only voters of the district have the right to propose and be proposed in the assemblies of each area. In order to do so they have to ask for the floor, speak in the order granted to them and briefly explain the reason for their proposal. The nominee must show his agreement with being proposed and only then will he or she be put to a vote.

All voters may express their opinion for or against the candidate and the vote is made directly and publicly, in the same order in which each candidate was proposed. Each attendee has the right to vote for only one nominee and in the event of a tie a new nomination is initiated.

When the Electoral Law in its article 83 remarks that the vote is “public,” it minimizes one of the most important keys of the electoral system of the Island and that make it more controllable by the powers that be. At that initial stage of nomination, voters must express their preference by show of hands, that is with their faces uncovered. In a country full of masks and fears, few dare to show their neighbors a preference for a critical citizen.

When in one of these assemblies an elector proposes a candidate with a reputation of being politically uncomfortable, he knows that, immediately, the militants of the neighborhood will request the floor to discredit the nominee. The mechanism of “cauterization” of any nomination that does not conform to the tastes of the ruling party will be activated immediately.

In the midst of the meeting, a member of the PCC will warn in a loud voice, “this man is in the pay of the empire,” and someone else will speak up to express his doubts because someone “who feels himself to be Cuban votes in favor of this mercenary…” The performance seldom has to be carried out, because the instinct for self-preservation dissuades the majority of voters from suggesting a dissident for delegate.

They find it so difficult to encounter someone who, from dissenting positions, aspires to be a delegate, or to find another who dares to propose one to the assembly. How many will raise their hands in favor of a dissident after the militants make it clear they do not like the nomination? Almost nobody. This simple trick will have ensured the first and most important purge of the electoral system.

To ensure the minimum secrecy required by the vote, it would be enough to distribute a simple piece of paper among each of the participants so they could write the order of their candidate preferences. But that would add the privacy that the ruling party wants to avoid at all costs.

This variant would have the added value of eliminating the chance that someone, in the midst of counting the raised hands, violates – consciously or otherwise – the provision that allows each person to vote for only one candidate. In short, it would smooth out the process and make it more democratic and effective.

Not for nothing, was the elimination of voting on the nomination of candidates by a show of hands one of the proposals most repeated by those who believe that the current electoral process would be governed by new legislation as promised by Raul Castro in February 2015.

Changing what looks like a detail of slight importance, a methodological pedantry, would open a space for the plurality of citizen participation; it would allow us to express ourselves without fear on a critical topic: the presence of different thinking among the base.

Keeping the first piece of the Cuban electoral framework as it is now is only a way of perpetuating the fear that harms the civic action of a good part of the population. It is precisely the suppliers of this fear who prefer to leave things as they are.

Perhaps the fear its becoming irrelevant led its drafters to prefer the present tense to formulate precepts and principles for future application. A grammatical style that has confused more than one naïf, who took what they dreamed of achieving and projected it as already done.

To avoid pressures, the managers of the document also clarified that it isn’t about a “finished and static template,” but rather an “active and perfectible pattern.” This condition avoids dogmatic interpretations, but it also gives the Conceptualization a very comfortable elasticity for those who implement it.

Despite the vagueness of certain concepts, one of the statements in the text provoked strong arguments from the beginning. Item 104 of the original version read: “The concentration of property and wealth in natural or legal persons is not allowed.” A bucket of cold water for the entrepreneurs.

During the months that the document was discussed at Communist Party headquarters and among other chosen ones, no other matter provoked more debate. Some warned of the dangers of categorically denying this accumulation of wealth, and others pointed to it as the end of the present system. The latter just lost the game.

The new version softens the prohibition and clarifies that the concentration of property and material and financial wealth in non-state natural or legal persons will be regulated. The change in nuance shows that pragmatism prevailed above orthodoxy.

However, there is also no carte blanche so that a citizen can create a restaurant franchise or purchase numerous homes for rent. The Conceptualization is not deprived of the excessive scrupulousness of the official discourse that praises humility and stigmatizes the prosperous, but nor does it allow itself to be owned by those who promote strict egalitarianism.

If in the initial version of a starring element of the text was the absence of the concept of “exploitation of man by man,” whose eradication is the main objective of the socialist system, now it continues to be present through a euphemism.

In Cuba, “ownership by non-state ownership and management of part of the surplus of the work of contracted persons is allowed,” it reads; but immediately clarifies that “socialist relations of production prevail.” Something very different from what happens in “social systems based on the exploitation of the work of others,” according to this new version.

With its patches and changes, the Conceptualization has ended up being a demonstration of the different tendencies of those who participated in its final development. A sequence of ideas to please both reformers and conservatives, to sit well with both dogmatists and innovators. The editors intuited that Thomas More did not get his head cut off for writing Utopia, but for being disloyal to the King.

The concept of privatization that is presented in its pages is a good example of these contradictions. It talks of “temporary transfer of ownership or management of certain means of production owned by all the people to non-state economic actors” and goes on to warn immediately that such a transfer should not “compromise the principles of our socialism.”

To calm those who fear the distribution of the pie, the document pointed out in its first version that the state retains the capacity for strategic decision or domination over these means. Something softened in the final version, where it “maintains the exercise of the principal powers that correspond to him by virtue of the status of representative of the owner.”

The changes in the text show the fluctuations in the coming course and also its anchors in the past. The current Conceptualization presents as “particularly relevant antecedents” the Programmatic Platform born from the First Congress of the Communist Party and the Program of the Cuban Communist Party that was issued in 1986. At first, however, the document only recognized as precedent “History Will Absolve Me.”

The nuances introduced in the new version are the result of what has happened in the last year: the death of former President Fidel Castro, the crisis of the leftist governments in Latin America and the coming to power of an unpredictable actor in the United States. The document that was born to be letters chiseled in marble now looks like an elastic canvas full of patches and gaps.