The Venezuelan opposition, led by Henrique Capriles, surprised us on Sunday April 14, and according to figures from CNE, the National Electoral Council, almost defeated the Chavista candidate Nicolas Maduro. The margin of the declared winner of the elections was narrow: 50.75% for the government candidate and 49.07% for the opposition. As the government authorities apparently expected, Capriles did not accept the results declared by the CNE and called his followers to express their disagreement with the banging of pots and pans and street demonstrations. On Monday the situation remained complicated and Telesur reported moderate disturbances in several states.
If, despite the emotional toll of the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, the official government candidate got this poor of a result, you can almost predict an uncertain political future in the short term for the Venezuelan nation.
Nor did the material promises of every kind, which ranged from wage increases to plans to construct housing, Nicolas Maduro managed to motivate the citizens of Venezuela to support him. And 14 years of Chavism, with forecasts of a new socialism, a 21st Century socialism — which no one actually knows what it is — has been more than enough for the Venezuelan people.
The Real Cuba is very close, and surely, even those Cubans who have been there on “foreign missions” have told them. The fear of losing freedom first, and everything else later, have been the main protagonists of these national election campaign results. Neither leaders nor oligarchies, nor dictatorships, seem to have a future in our America.
The 5 spies, who committed bloody acts and spied for a foreign country, have not been punished like they do with any prisoner in Cuba. Here they humiliate and constantly harass them.
They, the Castros, say that at the Guantanamo Naval Base they commit horrors, but they don’t say what they know because they commit the same abuses they “denounce” daily.
Here the prisoners swallow nails, springs or pieces of spoons to demand their rights, or at least have the opportunity to explain to someone.
Amused, I always have to laugh and respond to my new name, no matter how many times I tell them to call me Ángel or Political — like they used to — but they have baptized me Mandela. I have begun to be their hope despite finding me isolated, although without them letting the two prisoners who helped me get even to the door of my cell; I’m totally isolated.
I asked for my glasses and they also refused me. The only thing I can do is write on the walls, except that there is less space left, and I’ll have to figure out how to reach the ceiling; I’ll have to do something about it. Writing is a mania, a necessity and a duty. When they searched me on my arrival, twelve guards commanded by Major Erasmus did it. And I told them that my weapons were in my mind and they couldn’t get them out of there.
I thank God for giving me the protection and constant companion in my lonely hours, but I’m also grateful to be here, they provide me Literature and complaints against the regime.
God, forgive the dictators and their henchmen.
Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
1580 Prison. April 2013.
Editor’s Note: Ángel Santiesteban-Prats finishes on his ninth day of a hunger strike today.
I already said in two tweets Sunday: “Even after death #Chavez won elections in #Venezuela. Maybe now, his imitator will let him rest in peace.” And I added the following: “The socialist bus driver takes the helm of #Venezuela. Let’s see how he drives from now on, Chavism without #Chavez.”
This April 14 the presidential elections in Venezuela ended with the hard-fought victory of Nicolas Maduro Moros. The leftist TC network Telesur — which we call TeleMaduro these days — constantly favored the incumbent candidate with extensive media coverage, so I could not confirm if the opponent Henrique Capriles followed the same pattern of behavior and showed himself as exalted and disrespectful as Maduro.
It’s true, I saw interviews throughout the campaign on that television network with followers of either presidential candidate: Maduro’s “Chavistas” knew and spoke highly of the candidate’s programs; Capriles’s supporters didn’t know a thing about his projects. It seemed that the respondents had been chosen and it was just like we were in Havana, in the presence of the usual discriminatory traps of the Cuban government.
It is no secret that Cuban authorities had bet on Maduro, no matter if the core of his campaign program was talk over and over again about Hugo Chavez, exploiting its undisputed leadership, charisma and image, giving with both hands — and even with his feet, like a magician king throwing a people’s money out the window of irresponsibility — the country’s resources just to get elected and stay in power. The obvious case is those eternal leaders of the Antillean archipelago who were forced to avoid jeopardizing the advantageous oil commitments made with Venezuela, and the security of continuity that they have provided for the last fourteen years.
On this side, the authorities did their part to give a boost to the driver’s* association. I’m referring to visible aid, as television programs reiterated over the last days devoted to Chavez and the so-called “Bolivarian revolution.”
In the past, in Venezuela, surely they also favored him with supporting the campaign openly on Telesur and with good advise to help the support his path to Miraflores. I imagine that knowing the results of the contested election, having received an alert about the odds advantage of the Socialist candidate, whom we don’t know if he’ll be capable of properly leading the destiny of this South American nation during his presidency.
I imagine that the Cuban leaders focus their gaze with more interest in the cardinal point to the north, focused on the survival of their own model of government, but while they are so intolerant and show no signs of real democratization and respect for diversity and political pluralism, they will not be taken seriously by any first world country.
Returning to Venezuela, I add that I don’t know if there be “Chavism without Chavez” or “immaturity” with “Mr. Mature” — i.e. Maduro – what most concerns us and what we don’t have, is a financially independent Cuba. That, coupled with the destruction that “the most patriotic” have led the country in a general sense — well, if these are good …! — and the stubbornness of the U.S. government to refuse to normalize relations with Cuba, forced many Cubans to express their satisfaction with the electoral victory of the Chavista candidate. To want something different would have been a parody of the popular irony and ask for a rope for our suffering neck…
*Translator’s note: Maduro was previously a bus driver.
Havana, Cuba. There have not been many Cubans since the immigration reforms who have taken a plane to the democratic world, to fulfill the role of true doves or pigeons, messengers from a nation that through them sends a message to each person who is a lover of freedom.
The country is proud to see them sending the message of a nation that for years longed to describe it, and has been forced to do so through alternative media. The real-time Cuba is being told in these moment by those who did not hesitate for a moment to board the first aircraft to, go to fulfill a noble task which, rather than enrichment, we will see what consequences it brings them when they return to our island?
There are many who cackle and try with the old tricks of the past to distort this reality that is already being experienced by the protagonists, followed by countless citizens of this universe and collected in the few media that exist.
People who pose as doves or pigeons have names, and no matter how much time they spend burning the midnight oil like many say, confronting the Cuban regime. The important thing is not only are journalists, writers, administrators, bloggers and human rights activists, above all this. They are courageous Cubans who do not hesitate for a moment, to call things by their name.
Each one is an example of the wider thinking of Cuban civil society, from the intelligentsia to those who peacefully take to the streets to demand the release of their loved ones armed with the unique weapon of a gladiolus.
Berta Soler, Yoani Sanchez, Rosa Maria Paya, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Eleicer Avila belong to different generations and also have different thoughts and political currents. But only one truth unites them and that’s what matters, it is this which makes them the protagonists of what I now want to call a real Operation Truth.
The recognition was not enough to honor these who weren’t even for an instant those who cried, “I won’t travel!” “I’ll want to see what happens to the first ones who travel and who then return, and then I’ll travel!” Words that many repeated although looking at some of those boarding one of those steel birds, which for decades has been the dream of Cubans.
What each expresses during their journey, the way in which they do it, is as if they are fully entitled to exercise the right of freedom of expression. A right that is only paraphrased in the alternative media on the island.
I am also one of those who wish to travel, I am among those who want to narrate our daily lives not only as a communicator, nor as Cuban more than this, I would like to do it from my point of view as a person living with HIV/AIDS for 12 years. I have a passport, but I have no money now, I trust in God and friends I also, at the right time, will be able to leave and tell the truth of the community.
Whoever criticizes, criticize the history already written. We will only achieve part of it when with tears, sweat and blood we can also write our own page.
In my note I do not want to ask a vow of silence from anyone, on the contrary I want to urge them to write beyond any personal grudge or professional envy. We don’t all have to thing and say we have the right to be diverse.
We recognize that these Cubans are in these moments those who are fulfilling Pope John Paul’s words, Open the Doors of Cuba to the World. Making their way through the democratic world.
Jose Marti statue in Pinar del Rio – from Wikicommons
By Juan Carlos Fernández Hernández.
José Martí, the man we Cubans call our “Apostle,” was, and let no man doubt it, a man of vast moral, spiritual and cultural heritage. Qualities that have served as the cornerstone for modeling the thinking of being Cuban.
Well, some years ago José Martí Cultural Societies were set up in provinces and municipalities, designed and created to foster among our population, especially young people, the thought and vision of the Master; this was a vain endeavor by Communist Party leaders to somehow fit Marti within Marx, Engels and Lenin.
It sounds crazy but the effort still persists, although it is fair to say that the Communist ideologues don’t know how to insert the liberal ideas of Marti within those of International Communism, and no one swallows their story anyway because the Complete Works of Jose Marti circulate freely on the streets, and in these works Marti dismisses Marx, Communism included.
But back to the idea of the so-called Cultural Society, as an idea it is very good but, it all depends on the intentions… let me explain.
If this was intended to rescue the thinking of the Apostle from shameless oblivion shameful for new generations, for them to have as a reference in their lives, it would be logical that these institutions would have the social role that the name suggests. But, on the contrary, the organization almost unknown to the ordinary person from Pinar del Rio, passing by its headquarters, dilapidated and unpainted, in an old house located in San Juan Street between Yagruma and Martí. What irony, given that this was the home of a respected and wealthy local family. It is in such a shameful state due to the degree of neglect that is inhabited only by the ghosts of its former owners.
I do not think anyone in Pinar del Rio would be happy with the fate of the José Martí Cultural Society, but the complaints can be put to good use, we have to rely on citizen action, so we can together find solutions to rescue something that can be very valuable and appreciated by all.
A public collection in Pinar del Rio would involve a lot of citizens, taking as its theme something that can’t miss: “With all and for the good of all.” It would be healthy, it would empower citizens and they would feel a part of a city repairing one block for this Society, where the authorities are rushing to repair the hard currency store popularly known as “Bambi.”
I would like to note that material things are important to us, but more important than profit are the healthy and transcendent ideas of the Apostle of all Cubans, who preferred to reach out with the white rose because he could not hate.
by Juan Carlos Fernandez Hernandez. (1965). Pinar del Rio. Co-leader of the Brotherhood Assistance to Prisoners and their Families Pastoral Care of the Diocese of Pinar del Rio. He is a member of the team of Coexistence.
That big red brick chimney always caught my eye. As a girl it seemed immense to me. I imagined goblins living there. It aroused great fascination, especially since it was on a route we had to take — leading to the “scary” iron bridge over the Almendares River, which occasionally would open up like a giant wolf’s jaws to allow yachts to pass through — when we went to visit Aunt Cuca in Miramar. It was always one of my favorite walking paths.
With the passage of time and the sudden takeover the country by incarnate deities, these fantasies and dreams of childhood were abruptly ripped out by their roots in order to make way for a “new reality.” The dream-like tower remained, but it no longer sent out smoke signals. Little by little it came to seem more lifeless. My make-believe creatures disappeared along with the gray puffs that no longer billowed from its long neck. The bridge stopped opening; there were no more yachts. Little by little rust covered the iron structure. We were no longer able to visit my aunt either; she had gone to live far away.
Many years have passed since I felt motivated to overcome my fear of crossing the aged bridge. My old red-bricked friend is still there, mute and inert, towering over its continually decaying surroundings.
After learning a few days ago that it had been converted to a restaurant bar, I was motivated to go see it again. I brought along my Nikon to try to get some photos, hoping also to get the back story from some of the neighbors. Luckily, I found one cleaning the street. When he saw the camera in my hand, he approached me, thinking I was a tourist. After I identified myself, he told me the history of the place. He was born and raised there, so he knew all the details.
“What happened was that, after the factory was abandoned at the beginning of the 1960s, a man moved into the base of the chimney. He later got married but after a few years the marriage ended. Since neither of them had any other options, they divided the space, with her living in one part and him in the other. They were ’sharing’ the space like this until a young man came along with a little wine and offered them two apartments in exchange for the big chimney.”
After interviewing some of his friends who knew about this unusual investment, I found out that, given the new opportunities for acquiring licenses to open businesses, three young friends, who were familiar with the place and its history, decided to pool the resources. They “talked to the former couple” and offered them what they so desperately needed.
The first thing they did was restore the chimney, returning it to its former glory and preserving the original painted sign with the name of “old” cooking oil factory, El Cocinero. At the entrance there is now a well-tended garden where antique objects from the factory itself are exhibited like sculptures. A large bell at the gate greets you. A circular staircase rising two floors inside leads you to the roof and a pleasant bohemian bar where a wide variety of tapas and drinks will guarantee you an enchanting and “offbeat” evening. Everything in the hard currency of CUCs, of course. The restaurant has not yet opened.
Calixto Ramon Martinez Arias, after his release. Image taken from Cubanet
This past Tuesday, the Cuban authorities finally acknowledged Calixto R. Martinez Arias’s right to go free, after he had served more than six months in prison, initially for the crime of “insulting the leadership figures of the Revolution.” He had no trial.
Martinez Arias twice engaged in what is known in the post-1959 history of Cuban political prisoners as “taking a stand” (literally, “planting oneself”): he declared a hunger strike. In the first, he went 33 days without eating, the second, 22. Until, after the second strike, it was reported by state security that his case had been reviewed and they had “understood” his demand for freedom.
“I started the first hunger strike to protest my stay in the Combinado del Este prison,” Martinez Arias said. “I also refused to wear prison garb. When an inmate declares a hunger strike, the guards use many methods to make them quit. The first thing they say is that you are committing a disciplinary infraction, which hurts your eiligibility for rights such as conditional parole, and for family and conjugal visits. And ultimately they take you to the infirmary where the doctor will take your vital signs and issue you a “suitable cell” notice, which means just that: you are fit to be taken to the punishment cells.”
“The punishment cell measures about 6 by 8 feet. It has no light. It has a “Turkish” toilet, and a water basin you can access twice a day, when the guards allow. There were days when they refused me water because a captain who claimed to be the second-in-command of Building 3, where I was detained, said that I could not drink water and took it away from me.
“By day you have to lie on the floor or stand. To that end, they remove the mattress. They left me my clothes, but took away anything with which I might cover myself. I spent very cold days, especially during the first strike. The cells are very wet and very cold, deliberately prepared to be that way. There were times when I had to sleep sitting on the floor, up against the wall, because the guards would come very late to give me the mattress. Lying on the floor you can contract a lung disease from the cold and moisture. The floor is very dirty because the cells are not cleaned. There are many insects: enormous rats, droves of cockroaches. It is a sacrifice that you have to make, convinced that it is all designed to psychologically torture you.
“During the second hunger strike, of 16 days, they took me to what they call ’the increased’ area, which is more severe. Then they took me out of there after one day to an even harsher cell. There the conditions were more brutal. They kept a surveillance camera on me at all times; they never turned off the light.”
In the second hunger strike, Martinez Arias started bleeding profusely from his gums and his teeth began to fall out. He lost 45 pounds. But he says: “I became a lot stronger.”
The “Official Organ of the Communist Party of Cuba,” the newspaper Granma, on Wednesday April 10, published an account of the “good conditions” in which prisoners live in Cuban jails. Regarding this, Martinez Arias said:
“This is an absurdity. I can assure you that they began preparing this article in December. In the month of December they informed us that journalists from the national and foreign press accredited in Cuba were going to visit the Combinado del Este prison. Major Rodolfo, who is in charge of the building where I was, a building for ’pendings,’ explained to us that the visitors would not be given access to our building because of the appalling conditions. Prisoners there live in a state of overcrowding, because every day many ’pending’ prisoners enter.
“It also has many leaks, and the bathrooms are in an extremely unsanitary condition. The building should be declared uninhabitable. Rodolfo explained that he was not going to take visitors there, because of these conditions, and that this was not a bad decision because, and I can almost quote him verbatim, ’when a visitor comes to your house, you want to show him the best, not the worst parts.’ For that reason, he said, they were going to repair a wing of building No.1. The foreign media should not be allowed to have access to the punishment cells. In fact, in none of the pictures they showed are these cells seen.”
In Cuba, the exercise of the right that everyone has to seek, receive, and distribute information, by any means of expression, without limitation by borders—as stated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—may be considered a crime. But on occasion, to put an independent journalist in prison, as in the case of Martinez Arias, the authorities bring charges of common crimes against him, to deflect the political nature of the arrest.
On September 16, 2012, Martinez Arias had been inquiring of some terminal-workers near Jose Marti International Airport about a batch of medical aid provided by international humanitarian organizations to address the outbreak of cholera and dengue and that, because of official mismanagement, had spoiled.
On leaving the airport, as he and others took shelter from the rain, perched on the benches of a bus stop to avoid the puddles, a patrol car arrived and gave them all tickets; but Martinez Arias was transferred to the police unit of Santiago de las Vegas on the charge of being “illegally” in Havana, having an address of the province of Camagüey. Martinez Arias claimed in his defense that “the brothers Fidel and Raul Castro are natives of the province of Oriente.”
“Immediately” said the self-described activist “the police handcuffed me, took me to a dark hallway, and beat me hard.”
The police who detained and beat him then accused him of “insulting the figures of the leaders of the revolution.” He was automatically moved to the Valle Grande prison, and from there, as punishment for continually denouncing through his colleagues the human rights abuses of the prison population, he was taken to the maximum-security Combinado del Este prison.
During the first hunger strike, State Security informed Martinez Arias that the prosecutor’s petition stated that he had been “insulting” and “resistant”, for having offended a policeman.
“If I had reacted during the beating they gave me by dodging a blow, or by landing a defensive blow to the policeman who was giving me the beating, I would have been accused of ’attacking,’” Calixto said. Police in Cuba can feel “offended” and “attacked” if you don’t react with absolute passivity to their arbitrariness and brutality, and then they fabricate the charges of “insult” and “attack”, respectively, resulting in the person’s imprisonment.
Martinez Arias believes that the visibility conferred by having been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, together with the solidarity of human-rights activists, independent journalists in Cuba, and many foreign media with the participation of Cubans living abroad, managed to send a message to the government of Raul Castro that a person imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression is not alone, and you cannot keep them in prison subjected to cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment without paying a high political cost that limits your room to maneuver with impunity.
Tomorrow, at dawn, Rosa Maria Paya returns to Cuba, just as she promised at the Havana airport two months ago. Her word, contrary to what is common in Cuba, is honest.
Rosa Maria will return without bodyguards and without a media scandal, vulnerable and smiling, caressing her tireless cross, back to her already classic humble home on Penon street, near Manila Park, where her father Oswaldo Paya Sardinas (1952-2012) will never return, nor her good friend Harold Cepero Escalante (1980-2012). Both were leaders of the Christian Liberation Movement, both died on a tragic Sunday of last July, passed onto the hands of strangers and in a place in Cuba that is still uncertain, given that the official version has become unsustainable after all the evidence and testimonies exposed to the world by Rosa Maria Paya, without even having to raise her voice. Before the grotesque screaming of all forms of State Totalitarianism, the voice of a Cuban, an orphan of friendship and love.
Rosa Maria Paya will return to the land where the mortal remains of the martyred leaders of the Christian Liberation Movement rot. She will return alive and with a wish to resuscitate the sacred desires of living in truth in a socialist society, so panic-stricken and full of hypocrisy. Rosa returns and will sprout in Cuba without any accomplice disease of our octogenarian regime. She will return without any pretensions of violating travel laws or declaring herself on hunger strike. She returns inflamed with life and freedom. She returns, with an L (for ‘Liberty’), just like she left on a Friday this past February.
Cuban State Security did not care, at all, about her 24 years of age, grown into them with resistance in the face of horror. The Paya-Acevedo family is a family that still receives anonymous threats of “before the Revolution ends, we are going to kill you”. And, in effect, there is lots of that in the rheumatic rhetoric of the Revolution: anonymity, fear of having a face beyond Fidel and Raul (our Nuremburg trial will be in a minimal format).
Tomorrow morning Rosa Maria Paya will step out of media’s hands, out of the hands of f Human Rights organizations and parliaments, NGOs and democratic governments that have joined in solidarity. Because in Cuba, only bodies count, and the new face of the Christian Liberation Movement, without vocations of sacrifice, will return to a perverted nation which possibly may not let her travel again. It’s possible that we may never see her paused gesticulation, without the improbable arrogance of our caudillos. We may never again hear the vehement tenderness of her valor. In this sense, we should bid a soulful farewell to Rosa Maria Paya.
The main thing here lies, of course, not in her virtuoso image, but in the legacy of a work that is still powerful and possible in the citizen initiatives of the Varela Project, the Heredia Project, and the Path of the People, and many other concrete propositions which reduce the impunity of the Cuban government, as it forces it to comply with its own legality to transform itself according to popular will. An effort of dozens of thousands of citizens which continues to be ignored by our inoperative National Parliament, governmental organ which apparently prefers to opt for its own suicide instead of facing a future transition.
It is precisely this intimidating silence, that insulting impunity on the margin of morality, it is the malicious muteness of lies and death, that’s the welcome with which the authorities of Havana will now spy on Rosa Maria Paya. The Cuban State continues to be deaf, up to the point of insolence. Their operational logic is in no means institutional. Instead, it is like a secret sect.
Consequently, any abuse of power is expected against her and her family, both in and out of the island, now or in the survival of a decade in which they tortured her own father in her childhood eyes. Nothing is insignificant in that criminal boiler where the most ‘problematic’ activists of the Cuban opposition have been, are, and will be converted from bodies to corpse.
Rosa Maria Paya calls for an international inquiry into the death of father Oswaldo Paya at the Geneva Summit For Human Rights and Democracy. Photo: Human Rights UN via Youtube.
Rosa María Payá is visiting the United States from April 3 to 16. She lives in Havana and is the daughter of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, the Cuban dissident who won the Andrei Sakharov Prize in 2002 and founded the Christian Liberation Movement. He died alongside young Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012, in what the Cuban government classified as a “traffic accident,” convicting Spanish politician Ángel Carromero –who was driving at the time of the tragedy– of “involuntary manslaughter.” Carromero has now been deported to his own country, where he recently told The Washington Post that what happened may have been a State-sponsored assassination.
Rosa María is hoping to win the support of the US media and authorities for an international campaign demanding an independent investigation of both deaths. She will visit New York, Washington and Miami. To honor the memory of her father and Cepero, on Saturday, April 6, exiled Cuban artist Geandy Pavón projected the image of both martyrs onto the sinister façade of Cuba’s diplomatic mission to the UN, at the corner of Lexington and East 38th Street, in front of the only military sentry box that I’ve seen in New York, and in the presence of Rosa María herself and twenty or so other companions in exile.
Geandy Pavón’s project is called Nemesis and has already paid homage to Cuban social activists who have died in suspicious circumstances, such as prisoner and hunger-striker Orlando Zapata Tamayo (in 2010) and the leader of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollán (in 2011).
During this peaceful political protest to honor his father, Rosa María announced that, “just as this light illuminates the walls of the consulate, I hope the light of truth illuminate the hearts of Cubans, and we can pave the way of reconciliation together, towards the peace, happiness, and democracy that we seek.”
Yoani Sanchez and Rolando Pulido, March 2013, New York City
Rolando Pulido is currently helping us clean up the look of Translating Cuba (stand by!) as well as the foreign language versions of Yoani’s Generation Y, translated the all-volunteer army.
Here are some other recent examples of his volunteer efforts on behalf of his native land:
