"The Student" and #ShameOnUnitedNations / Mario Lleonart

Poster for the campaign #ShameOnUnitedNations. By Rolando Pulido.

The beginning and end of yesterday were inextricably linked.

I woke up to the publication on Facebook, by my brother Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo of the recently initiated campaign, and we’ll be waging it as along as the United Nations remains occupied by regimes tied to terrorist, or which are guilty of State Terrorism.

Independently of each of the faces on this poster, my soul is touched by all the martyrs, the victims of the feudal government that reigns in Cuba. The first of them, Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia, nicknamed “The Student,” moved me deeply, for being the face of a friend, whose story of life and death God involved me in during the last year of his life, the irrevocable proof of which is my tweet of May 5, 2011 at 11:55 a.m., a few minutes after the he was fatally beaten.

At the closing of the night I was sent “The Price,” by its composer, Ciro Javier Díaz Penedo dedicated to my assassinated friend.

The death of “The Student” — nicknamed this for his early imprisonment when he was only sixteen — invalidates the bad government in Cuba, not only for a seat on the UN but also for the chair that it occupies there. The worst thing is that there are many more deaths, a multitude of faces far beyond those shown on the poster; and the worst of the worst is that 148 States have become accomplices.

14 November 2013