Rolando Against the Impunity in Guantanamo / Luis Felipe Rojas

Photo/Luis Felipe Rojas

I’ve been avoiding writing this post for a few months. I was afraid I might not be objective enough, being close to Rolando Rodríguez Lobaina, to sound the alert to the world. Even so, my duty towards justice and truth is more important.

This young man, a computer engineer who graduated from Havana’s university system in the nineties, is being publicly hunted down by the political police, from the headquarters of the G2. His propensity to civil disobedience, his capacity to lead some thirty activists from every corner of eastern Cuba (Banes, San Germán, Contramaestre, Songo-La Maya, Baracoa, Manatí, Moa, Velazco, Antilla) and to take them to Camagüey where Orlando Zapata Tamayo agonized, proved his worth, but has made him a target. None of the more than a hundred transitory detentions of the last couple of years has been an accident.

The repressive system of my country doesn’t need any pretexts to jail anyone. They just apply the judicial puzzle. In the last few months Rolando suffered one attack after another, from the extreme-left web site Rebelión as much as from Military Counterintelligence high officials sent from Havana to eastern Cuba, on the pretext of “stopping subversion in eastern Cuba”. From his humble cabin in Baracoa to the many places where he has had to live, everywhere he’s been trying to avoid being arrested so that his peaceful activities won’t be disturbed. He’s been leading the highest profile public protests of the last 10 months in six eastern provinces, but his philosophy has always been “More united, being united is key”.

The decision by my country’s authorities to put a police poster in every town so that if he shows up he’s to be deported to Guantanamo, proves the absolute arbitrariness of the state towards its citizens. Even so Rolando doesn’t stop. Bravery and fearlessness are the flags he raises in order to gain liberty for Cuba. He directs the underground bulletin Porvenir and is a co-author of the collective blog Cuban Palenque. From Cuban Palenque he tries to draw attention to the use of torture and arbitrary acts of the state in the eastern part of the island. Punishments and convictions for trying to leave the country, social dangerousness and contempt for authority are the legal charges which are lodged against thousands of youths from eastern Cuba, and which Rolando has denounced on countless occasions. This enrages those who hold power. His last term in jail, 24 days, was a play to punish and frighten the latest generation of Cuban freedom fighters.

Meanwhile Rolando, an incurable rebel, starts the little engines of civil disobedience, a laxative the gorillas in military garb don’t swallow easily.

Translated by: Xavier Noguer

September 16, 2010