Cubanet, René Gómez Manzano, Havana, 5 Abril 2017 — In recent days, the absence of a true rule of law has become evident in the two countries of “Socialism of the 21st Century,” an absence that reached the highest levels of arbitrariness and injustice: Cuba and Venezuela. In the second of these the iniquity took place at the highest level, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court.
The brand new Chavista magistrates ruled: “As long as the contempt and invalidity of the proceedings of the National Assembly persist, this Chamber will ensure that the parliamentary powers are exercised directly by this Chamber or by the body that it designates.” In short, the court replaced the parliament with itself.
And in passing, the High Court also withdrew immunity from the country’s parliamentary deputies. It was a coup d’etat pure and simple; only not one undertaken by the military or the congressional branch, but by the judicial. Of course, it didn’t happen on the judges’ own initiatve, but because Maduro ordered it, because it is already known that the supposed independence of that power is now a fiction in the homeland of the “Liberator,” Simon Bolivar.
The voices of protest did not hold back: in Venezuela, National Assembly President Julio Borges called the shameful ruling “trash” and ripped it up in front of the television cameras. The protests of students and others who disagree began. At the international level, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States was convened, and Peru withdrew its ambassador from Caracas. Even complacent the mediators Torrijos, Fernandez and Rodríguez Zapatero rejected the gross maneuver.
But not only democracy supporters weighed in. A character as little suspected of being anti-Chavez as the Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega (yes, the same person labeled the “Eternal Commander” as “the most humanist man that has ever existed on the planet” and totally supported the unjust imprisonment of Leopoldo López) described what happened in his country as a “rupture of the constitutional order.”
Urgently convened, the Venezuelan Defense Council called on the Supreme Court to “review” the statements that left Parliament without functions. The obedient magistrates, in a fulminating manner, applied “what I meant to say was…”
In Cuba, on the other hand, recent illegality had a lower level, in both directions of the word. Lady in White Lismerys Quintana Ávila, also urgently, was subjected to a spurious trial and sentenced to six months in prison — the maximum allowed penalty — by a docile Municipal Court.
As a precedent for this injustice, we must remember the new trick that the political police use against these admirable women: At the outset, they impose a fine for a misdemeanor that does not exist. After the refusal to pay the illegally imposed penalty, the defendant (in this case, Lismerys) is taken to a Municipal Court to be tried.
Now the offense charged is “breach of obligations arising from the commission of misdemeanor,” and is provided for in article 170 of the current Penal Code.Under this provision, “anyone who fails to comply with the obligations arising from a resolution that has exhausted its legal process, issued by a competent authority or official, relating to contraventions” may be punished.
According to the final sentence of that rule, “if before the sentence is pronounced, the accused meets the obligations derived from that resolution, the proceedings will be archived.” The purpose of this, obviously, was not to establish a mechanism to send one more person to prison, but to dissuade her from not paying the imposed pecuniary penalty.
But it is already known that, in Cuba, “whoever made the law, set the trap.” In the case of someone who disagrees and says so, any misrepresentation of the correct sense of the rules is valid for the Castro regime’s authorities. What real chance to pay the fine had Lismerys or her loved ones if she were detained and the latter did not know what her situation was?
We know that the repressor who “cared for her” (who calls himself “Luisito”, but whose real name is known (unusual in itself) — Ariel Arnau Grillette) was truthful in the text messages with which he harassed this Cuban mother. We know what they said thanks to the inventiveness of the brave fighter Angel Moya Acosta: “the desicion to send you to prision is in my hands,” he wrote. A phrase in which we do not know what to admire more: his creative spelling or the confidence with which he says what everyone knows, but usually shuts up about …
However, what is decisive in this case is not what the murky State Security intended, but the submission of a court to the design of that repressive body. This is how the “organs of justice” of Cuba and Venezuela, once again, have become brothers in ignominy.
Translated by Jim