Abandon all hope… / Lilianne Ruíz

State Security milling about outside Oswaldo Payá’s funeral, before moving in and make arrests of those leaving the church.

On the afternoon of Monday, July 30, we could watch on Cuban TV a few edited minutes of a press conference held by one of the two survivors of the event that claimed the life of Oswaldo Payá.

Aron Modig presented himself as a Swedish citizen affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party in his country. He didn’t know when he would be able to leave Cuba and more than seven times he repeated that he didn’t know that the activity he undertook was illegal. Only when he spoke with the police was he forced to accept his delicate situation. It’s difficult for a foreign citizen to understand that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is illegal and a State that considers the exercise of freedoms to be punishable offenses.

Yes, even though it seems incredible in Cuban peaceful political opposition is illegal. The Revolution is a kind of “religion” that purports to be irrevocable. And the issue of money, in an impoverished country and whose only permissible donor would be the State or the licenses it grants, reserving the right to discriminate between good money and bad, revolutionary money and counter-revolutionary money, is the most bandied about by this mafioso organization that ensures power to a single Party and its leaders such as State Security.

And this issue of money is “the great crime,” the “great proof” to discredit the authenticity of libertarian aspirations, anti-Castro yearnings of the Cuban people or of a displaced part of an oppressed people. Perhaps it should also saw that like all previous models, to be a dissident in a Communist country, ruled by a dictator and his disciples, is to have the moral character to recover, to become a moral agent, so that is also what it means to be anti-Castro or libertarian in the Cuba of today.

Once again the BBC echoes the government’s interests. We see again their correspondent defending this demented style of procuring social justice: talking about the graduation of doctors, and “solidarity among people” and leaving in the shadow what matters: the lack of rights for citizens, the political imprisonment, robbery, kidnapping, political assassination on the part of the authorities.

But the correspondent apparently animated to defend the Utopia of the Caribbean Island with more doctors per capita launches his question about whether these opposition activities, to which the Swedish Christian Democratic Party– which is not just any party and seems to be the equivalent of the Christian Democratic party — wanted to donate 4,000 euros, which does not make him a troublemaker as would have been realized in any other country.

Cheap rhetoric from the correspondent of a foreign press agency who refused to be objective and to stand on the side of those repressed by power. How many countries are there in the world who face the same situation as Cuba? Including having a foreign press agency like the BBC, who instead of reflecting the complex situation of the country, serve to support before public opinion a perspective of reality that in other countries would be considered abnormal, and to defend one of the most perverse regimes in the history of our time.

Aron Modig looked scared, and besides having gone through a very violent event he was still in the hands of the political police. We can guess the situation he and Carromero — who was driving the car — find themselves in. The Hospital must have been guarded, indeed, surround by police and State Security agents, and they would have been taken to be interrogated by those agents (very similar to those of the East German Stasi who offered a lot of courses in Cuba), and they would have been made to understand that Cuba is a different country, a lost place, where rights are forgotten. And surely this press conference and the declarations made figured strongly in his fate.

This seems sufficient to me to hold the suspect for the death of Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá. Luckily I still believe in life and death, there is still a God in the Universe. Lately I am reading the Book of Revelations which helps me survive any despair.

July 31 2012