The Church should ask for those rights not only for themselves, but they should ask for all their people. Dagoberto Valdés Hernández
It seems that The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam remains in effect.
Much of his paragraphs, as well as his original illustrations came to life in a context apparently as distant in space and time from the Europe of the XV and XVI centuries as it appeared to be from the Caribbean Cuba in the days that elapsed between 26 and 28 March 2012.
On one side the world beheld another of those generals-turned-chief-of state declare with all calm, as he welcomed the Bishop of Rome: “Religious freedom is respected by the Revolutionary Government which I head.”
On the other hand the pontiff was heard emitting a phrase as magisterial as it could be taking into account the theologian who also embodies a task to which he should have been devoted: “God not only respects human freedom, but it appears to need it.”
The irony is that while all the protocol loaded with hypocrisy and compliments took place in public spaces, hundreds of dark, damp dungeons throughout the island were crowded, not with brutal criminals or delinquents conspiring to do damage to either of the two octogenarian politicians, but peaceful people, writers, artists, journalists, and some even faithful Catholics, deprived of participating in the masses held, a practice that indeed continues to take place every Sunday to dozens, if not hundreds, as it did during the Pope’s visit to Cuba.
Added to all those literally detained, dozens of others were immobilized and incommunicado in their homes under strict surveillance. The media monopoly on the island, including of the telephone systems, took advantage of its unjust hegemony to extort and breach agreements with their hundreds of their own customers who were thus affected by the improvement of operating technology that had been implemented recently in Cuba, carried out by the authorities themselves, and that silences fixed and mobile phones in what has come to be called Operation Vote of Silence, ordered and directed by the criminal Organs of State Security.
In this way this misrule of Cuba incurred in the violation of its own laws that they trampled, always to the detriment of the individual, ignoring Law No. 62/87 of the Penal Code (Updated) included in Book II, Title IX, Chapter 1, Section III, Article 286 where it warns that anyone who commits violence without legitimate reason over another or makes threats in order to compel them at that moment to do something they do not want to do, whether right or wrong, or to tolerate someone else doing it, or to prevent them from doing what the law does not prohibit, or by other means prevents another from doing what the law does not prohibit or exercising their rights, will be punished and sentenced to imprisonment or fines as the case.
12 May 2013
