Author: Mario LLeonart Barrosa

They undoubtedly ordered the official press panegyrics in honor of the Youth Labor Army (EJT) for its forty years of existence. Between the two national newspapers they share the responsibility and take turns with articles such as, “At the end of the line,” “EJT: an undefeated army,” “Force for youth training,” and “Immersed in the EJT is the transformation of the Cuban economy.”

This same press hasn’t said a single work about the scandalous traffic in arms carried out by the founder (i.e. Fidel Castro) of the Military Units in Aid of Production (UMAP) and its successor, the EJT, in cahoots with his counterparts in North Korea; but that they carry on about a topic that concerns me because in one of those concentration camps they stole eight months of my life twenty years ago.

Colonel Pedro Duardo Mendez, Head of Territorial Headquarters of the Western Railway, quoted in one article, said that the EJT “was forces composed of Active Military Service (SMA) soldiers, usually with family or financial problems.” But they took me for the same reason they mobilized those in UMAP: my condition as an evangelical believer that meant I wasn’t reliable enough to be in the real army, the care and safeguard of the regime.

This same official said that the EJT recruits “have a salary that depends on their monthly production… They work in the interest of developing our country’s economy and at the same time receive a pay package for the solution of their economic problems.” But when I left the EJT I had to pay them a debt of almost 200 Cuban pesos to be released.

He said he also interviewed soldiers “recruited in places near their homes. to facilitate the work and the assistance,” but they took me 100 miles from my house and met young people in those camps who’s been brought from the easternmost areas of the country and could barely visit their homes once a year.

The journalist Eduardo Palomares in the 5 August edition of Granma (which, by the way has not dedicated a single word to the nineteenth anniversary of Maleconazo), said: “For a long time considered the country’s most productive force… they envisioned leading the way to the aspiration planned by Army General Raul Castro, in which the EJT will always be a highly efficient institution.”

And it’s undeniable, just like in the UMAP, the main objective of EJT is to make the most of young people forced to work, especially in forced labor in which it is not easy to voluntarily engage people, at least not with the paltry wages they earned.

It has to be efficient, this consortium provider of cheap labor to other companies, with the additional guarantee of total control of slaves without rights who are subjected to all kinds of abuse and harassment to perform the tasks that nobody else wants to do.

In this regard my twenty years of experience in the citrus groves of Jagüey Grand remains fresh in my mind, producing large gains for an Israeli company in dealings with the regime that served us to them on a silver platter along with our oranges.

But I know for a fact that the forced labor workers today are forced to work laying railway lines, performing specialized tasks of so-called regional companies of the Union of Railways, hard work and underpaid, done by these young people, some of whom, if they mange to finish the two years they “owe to the regime” unscathed, end up with their spines traumatized for the rest of their lives.

They end up “rallying the troops” after forcefully “squeezing them dry” in exchange for a measly cents to be investing in their own food and things which are deducted from their wages. That is our undefeated EJT.

7 August 2013

This week I will dedicate my post to what is called the Youth Labor Army (EJT), on the 40th anniversary of its creation, which is Saturday, August 3, and nineteen years since my release from its “ranks,” which occurred on July 28.

This so-called Army, created in 1973, it’s said, from a merger of the Centennial Youth Column (CJC) and the Permanent Infantry Divisions (DIP), had its true antecedent in the dark Military Units in Aid of Production (UMAP), which were dissolved in 1968 in the face of global condemnation given its undeniable and unmasked reality of being concentration camps in which the Cuban regime committed crimes for which they still haven’t answered, but for which they will undoubtedly have to pay one day, no matter how much they try to erase the traces of that terribly black period.

Five years after dismantling these UMAP camps, they were reorganized with the new euphemism of EJT. Of course, it wasn’t simply a change of initials, five years between death and resurrections were sufficient to draw the experiences and to try to do the same thing but with different appearances.

I experienced it first hand in the EJT, for almost eight months, exploitations and humiliations greater than any I’ve been subjected to in my life. Between 230 November 1993 and 28 July 1994, I felt like a real slave. When people ask me if I was ever a soldier I respond categorically no, but yes, I was a prisoner under the false facade of completing Active Military Service (SMA) in EJT Boom 400, a concentration camp located one mile from the 119 Kilometer mark on the national highway. The nearest community is called Soccoro, which belongs to the Pedro Betancourt municipality in the province of Matanzas.

Despite being there barely eight months I knew two other concentration camps to which we were sent to serve our “mission” on the part of Boom 400, one very close to Torrientes, and the other at San Jose de Marcos, two villages of the municipality Jagüey Grande.

In these three military units in support of citrus production we were cheap and safe manual labor for the regime which at that time had strong business in this area with Israeli companies.

One of the biggest contradictions I experienced, by the way, in those dark days was to constantly wonder why there was this Zionist capitalist complicity with the totally anti-Zionist regime that didn’t even allow an embassy from the State of Israel. For me, educated from my early childhood in a Baptist community that instilled in me a love for the Jews and taught me to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, this was one of the greatest tortures that accompanied every drop of sweat and cursing.

Reading the autobiography “After Captivity, Freedom,” by my friend Luis Bernal Lumpuy, which includes the traumatic experiences of the author in the UMAP camps forced me to remember, by association, my sad experiences in the EJT and therefore I dedicate to him my brief written this week, with the certainty that both of us will finally see a Cuba free of these gross violations of fundamental human rights. And also of tyrants bred to create concentration camps such as UMAP or EJT, taking advantages of the students of Stalin, who highlighted similar experiences in Siberia, and the partners of the current regime, experts in this type of prison where they perform cruel experiments on humans, such as North Korea, our currently favored ally, as confirmed by the warmongering world adventure laid bare in Panama.

5 August 2013

When my wife Yoaxis Marcheco and I not did not find our names on the list of those enrolled for the doctorate in theology (PhD) course to be offered for the first time in Cuba, after a strong year in a preparatory course, offered by the FIET Theological Institute (Argentina) in collaboration with the FTS of Londrina; when we discovered that our two names were the only ones absent; when we realized that we were the object of evident political discrimination; it is likely that our first reaction was human, because none of this is foreign. When we discovered ourselves not even among the guests at the opening ceremony this Sunday, June 9 at 7 pm at Los Pinos Nuevos Church in Calle Suárez, Habana Vieja, is likely that we felt excluded.

Now that July 9th has come the situation has changed unimaginably. Originally we thought of going for the occasion to Havana and at least sitting on the pews of the Church in silent protest. But, what is our situation today?

I cannot be in Havana as I thought because I’m in Gdansk, the place of the shipyards in which the Communist regime in Poland saw the birth of its collapse. In the midst of this we never dreamed, nor much less planned to receive so many proposals in order to achieve our doctorates.

Precisely on this same day the 9^th, as a sign from heaven, an Argentine friend, Micaela Hierro, has come to Gdansk to greet us from Germany where he did his first year of a doctorate. And he came in a hurry because the following morning he must be present in his classroom. And it has left us very encouraged in this regard.

The question for us today is, where to do it? Of the universities that are offering us options which offer so we accept? South America, Europe, USA or Africa? What programs suit us more, us and Cuba? Frankly we wanted no more than what was offered in Havana, in our own land, in this project of FIET and the FTS, but the possibilities and proposals are more diversified than we ever imagined.

Our year of pre-doctoral studies (nivelación) with Professor Alberto Roldán of Argentina was extremely motivating for us. This excellent teacher, who directs the digital magazine “Teologia and Cultura,” guided us to the reading of authors and sources not common to Cuba. Frankly he planted in us “the bug” of the study of theology as a source of empowerment and we were ready for this doctorate which will take us further along the path of the so-called “political theology.”

The stab made by the dictatorship through its Office of Attention to Religious Matters (Oficina de Atención a los Asuntos Religiosos) of the Committee Central of the Communist Party of Cuba has only resulted in our facing, today, the difficult decision of choosing between various and tempting options. It is not that it has eliminated the only option that was offered to us: it is that they have multiplied them for us. And we are going to do it! For the glory of God and for the benefit of Cuba.

9 June 2013

The members of our church are victims of a constant process of pressure, intimidation, blackmail, coercion and even recruitments in the midst of a psychological Cold War, whose ultimate goal would be my long-awaited resignation or recall as pastor.

This shows the double standard of this regime, whose agents, in the arbitrary detention that they put me in on Wednesday, October 12, 2011, and in an effort to pressure me so that I would sign an official written warning, to which of course I did not agree, they officially threatened me so that I would focus on my pastoral activity and leave aside my social concerns, as though these were not two sides of the same coin. The sad thing is that, in practice these are the same agents, sheltered by the highly overrated political Office in Havana, who hinder and obstruct everything I try to do in my community, basically.

 But the epitome that, as pastor I find myself in the painful decision to denounce, is that that Office, not satisfied with this dirty policy of constant interference to my pastoral work, which moreover has not yet given the expected result, taking advantage of its power to grant or reject permits, extend or withdraw privileges, in extreme cruelty, and in the unforgivable stance of “making the believers fight,” in order to interfere with our evangelistic mission to the people (John 17, 21), has extended permissions and privileges to another congregation unfortunately fitting, to the honored Evangelical Pentecostal work known as “Good News,” so that, in a first phase, it would prohibit them from any type of relationship, not only with me or my family, but with any member of our church; they were forbidden to invite us to their activities, or to attend those to which we cordially invited them.

After this discriminatory and segregational posture towards the brothers, worthy of the words of the Second Epistle of the apostle John (verses 9-10) concerning the tyrannical leadership of Diotrophes; the sad thing is that this congregation with privileges easy to see for our community and everyone knows at what cost, has passed through a sad phase which consists of putting a first priority on evangelistic work for which there is more than enough land among our people (“the harvest is plentiful but the workers few”), an aggressive proselytism and without dissimulation obviously addressed to the members of our local church in order to grasp whichever of our brothers it can (that in Evangelical Cuban slang is known as “fishing in another’s pond”), without taking into account either the most minimum rule of ethics, and in which sadly they already have reaped some fruits.

Someday the history of this sad period of Christianity in Cuba will be written, in which our case unfortunately does not constitute an exception, and it will be strong enough to discover information and facts that will leave the skeptics astonished. Then perhaps we will know how much damage this Office caused, what excess, and what never should have been, to the church in Cuba, “Although its gates shall not prevail against it.”

In the meantime I have the most precious thing, that God who is my help and strength and who is also my witness of these brief accusations that constitute only a point at the tip of the iceberg that is the violation of religious freedom in Cuba.

20 May 2013

One of the phenomena I gained insight into on my trip to Poland (June 2-15) is that my spirit and my body do not travel in unison. When I arrived at the Amsterdam airport the morning of Sunday the 2nd, my spirit was still wandering through the Havana streets that my body had left the evening before, and through the Cuban countryside, sites that I have never abandoned in my thirty-eight years of earthly existence.

This inertia of the soul I experienced practically the entire first week of my stay in Poland and I had to make a great effort so that my spirit would arrive before the end of my physical journey of just two weeks. And indeed, I was able to go about in body and soul in Poland for at least the second intense week of my trip.

Only now I have a big problem, I am already present in Cuba in body but my spirit has not yet returned: I sometimes perceive it wandering around by the Warsaw Metro, other times in the port of Gdansk, for some moments I can feel it among the cheerful people in the huge square opposite the Cathedral of Krakow, and also, quite frequently, in some corner inside the barbed wire of Auschwitz.

Can anyone help me find my spirit, lost in the heart of Europe?

22 June 2013

To walk together as two good friends breathing freedom through the quiet streets of Warsaw just a few days ago; to happily chat with the man who today is receiving the Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in Strasbourg, this seemed like an impossible dream just four years ago.

Then, I could barely greet him through the glass window of the intensive therapy room of the Arnaldo Milián Castro Hospital on one of those days when I went to Santa Clara to serve as a chaplain commissioned by my own vocation in the face of an exclusively divine calling.

The prayer I issued forth on those evenings, which added up to one hundred and thirty-five, could be summarized by: “Lord, save this man, and free the prisoners who have decided to die.” I had to endure the advice of many who in vain tried to make me desist from this authentic adventure of faith: Stop going to that hospital – they would tell me – that man is going to die and none of these prisoners will be released.

And when it seemed that Guillermo Fariñas Hernández was indeed dying, and already even the newspaper Granma was preparing for the scenario that friends and foes considered most likely, July 2010 arrived along with his first sip of water, which followed the announcement, published in their own Official Organ of the Central Committee of Communist Party of Cuba (Granma), of the liberation of the fifty-six prisoners that remained from the Group of 75 imprisoned in the Black Spring in 2003.

And time, which does not stop, arrived at June 2013 to lead us to walk together through these magical streets of Warsaw, the striker and the pastor, whose co-belligerence few understood and many considered destined to failure. And finally there has arrived another July in this escalation of triumphs, and today El Coco, as those of us who love him call him, sits in the chair that ceases to be empty, in order to receive, at last, in a special ceremony in the European Parliament, that prize that it offers for the freedom of all Cuba.

And the best thing of all is, that I know that all of this is nothing, “compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” [Romans 8:18]

3 July 2013

It was midnight and Warsaw, if wrongly judged, seemed to be taken only by the good times, clubs and bars. A group of Cubans, enraptured by the magic of the city, proof that freedom can finally rise above the nightmare of authoritarian communism, could not sleep despite the intense schedule of our days, and we went out to take the pulse of the Warsaw night. Seated at the tables next to the street of a bar where a trio did not stop singing Irish songs, suddenly, as in a vision, we contemplated the approach of a character like someone out of a novel.

A bearded Polish man was transporting by hand a bicycle loaded with treasures. The merchandise that he was hawking by night was none other than classical music and select literature. Mariana Hernández, a Cuban-American who confirmed for me that the Cubans of the exile and those within Cuba are are same people, and I went out to meet him to verify that in Warsaw, the same by day as by night, literature and culture walk the streets.

He wasn’t carrying Bibles among his books, but upon knowing of my interest in getting one in Polish, he let me know that the Bible Society was not far, and demonstrating that he had it among his frequented sites, he drew me a map with detailed directions of how to get there. And smiling as only a Polish angel can, he disappeared into the night giving us one of the most exact lessons which we received about the amazing nights of Warsaw.

4 July 2013

To visit the site in Warsaw of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights on the afternoon of the historic June 4, anniversary of those first elections with which Poles inaugurated their new period of democracy; to be received there with so much emotion by its President Danuta Przywara, and to hear her from her own mouth the narrative of her experiences in those crucial years the ‘80s, as well as the raison d’être of such a laudable Foundation, this alone would have completely justified my presence in Poland.

The fact that its predecessor organization, the Helsinki Committee, was founded during, and in protest against, the martial law of 1982, made me reflect on how the bad ends up becoming the good. Already it was a long time ago that that repressive wave is past history, but in Poland one finds very active this Foundation that the Committee organized in 1989 as an independent institution to monitor, educate and promote human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights is one of the reasons why, on my return to Cuba, I felt stronger that when I had left. One of the four fundamental purposes of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), of whose family I am honorably a part, is exactly the defense of human rights, and for that its Commission on Justice and Peace. In the difficult implementation of this mission for which God has put me in Cuba, international organizations such as Amnesty or Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) have been my main support. Now I also count on this prestigious Foundation of Poland. Human Rights in Cuba win, their violators lose,increasingly at a greater disadvantage, predestined to disappear.

2 July 2013