Category: Oswaldo Paya

Paya’s Funerals / Mario Barroso #Cuba

I always had the dream of getting to know that worker whose speech on receiving the Sakharov prize I heard live from Hapsburg, vibrant with excitement thanks to the magic of radio. I never thought of a future post-Castro Cuba with Payá physically absent.

Much less did I imagine it on that Sunday morning of July 22, while rejoicing in our church as we concluded a week of intense work in what we call Bible School, but that afternoon when I intended to rest from physical fatigue an text message came to my mobile with the unexpected news that would take me off my normal path, just like the car had been made leave the road, the car in which I was unaware that in the eastern part of this island they were then removing the inert body of my admired Paya.

It is impressive that the rhythm of a life and of a whole nation can be so drastically altered. If someone had told me that Sunday morning in church that in barely 24 hours I would be traveling as clandestinely as possible from Villa Clara, the province of my residence, to Havana, to participate in the funerals of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, I would not have believed it. But so it was.

Prevented from attending, in October 2011, the brief funeral tribute to the leader of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollan, due to the huge police cordon around my house, I was forced, this time, to take extreme measures to escape Villa Clara. But I especially had to do it because I woke up on the morning of the 23rd listening on a short wave broadcast from abroad to the ragged voice of Oswaldo Paya’s daughter, Rosa Maria, which reached the depths of my soul.

Not only did she confirm the death of her father, but also called into question the official version of an chance traffic accident. She was clearly that young girl who had been shown happily playing on the beach with her father in those pictures released by the regime. I also woke up to the harsh reality that it was not a nightmare, and that the news of the inconceivable death of Paya had not been a false rumor the previous day.

And I managed to undertake the sudden journey, and also arrived, although I knew that many others were arrested along different parts of the national highway, and forcibly returned to their homes, especially at the point called Aguada de Pasajeros where many opponents were caught, as was the case with my friend Javier Delgado Torna from Caibarien.

Just ten minutes before the arrival of the body the heavy-hearted crowd had been waiting hours for, and that had been dazed by the hand of God itself, I was already on the esplanade that surround the Savior of the World Parish, at Santo Tomas and Penon, in the el Cerro neighborhood, an historic site and nest of all the spiritual and political battles of the martyr.

The same church where the Paya family had celebrated many significant dates, had now become the grounds to say goodbye to the lifeless body of someone who took as paradigms  Christ, Varela and Heredia Varela, claimed and in fact opened the way to change the sick and betrayed history of Cuba.

The experiences I had in this church between three in the afternoon of July 23 and the morning of 24 consolidated in me all the influence that at a distance and for so many years I had seen exercised in an epic civic project, a Movement and a Man who had the virtue of facing one of the most totalitarian regimes clinging to power the chronology of the Americas has suffered.

The scenes, so full of different emotions and feelings left no place for the physical fatigue of those who had made the long journey, and the night that would separate us from the following day, the 24th, when the burial would take place, was too short to contain both reunion and solidarity.

All of the different trends in the political opposition were present, as never before, as I had dreamed of seeing Payá in life and as so many had sought to recall if there were concrete examples as demonstrated by the manifesto “All United”, written by him in 1999 to turn his Varela project into a project of all Cuba, beyond himself or his movement, as indeed came to pass.

Far beyond his church as well, he become a bridge to change for all Cuban Catholics, Protestants, other believers, or unbelievers, because ultimately the same totalitarian power affects us all.

I cannot forget an inner strength that is impossible to describe, the same as accompanied me on the journey from Villa Clara allowing me to break the cordon of those confused State Security agents who dared to try the door of the temple when the coffin entered, and block passage to those who remained outside.

I remember in front of me seeing the freelance journalist Ignacio Estrada whose neck was detained by the burly arms of one of those agents; that’s when I fell to the floor and crawled through his legs to make my way into the enclosure literally running, surprising those guardians who vainly stretched out their tentacles to catch me when they realized I was part of the crowd that was pushing into the church, and advanced at the same rate along the crowded aisle on the left side near the alter where no one could stop me.

Once inside I applauded Paya with all my strength as part of an immense multitude for about ten minutes that could have been multiplied into ten hours if one of the bishops present hadn’t given the word about the Catholic rituals appropriate for the occasion.

A few minutes later we were already a multitude and sang with all our might the National Anthem, which at the end was followed by the cries of innumerable slogans that came together into a united and overwhelming cry of “Freedom!” A word that honors God and the country to which Paya dedicated the major efforts of his life.

We would still be shouting “Freedom!” if Paya’s widow Ofelia had not reminded us from the alter of the imperious and comprehensive need to pray and to say goodbye to the face so loved in life.

A sea of people of all political and religious persuasions then paraded before the coffin and gave their condolences to the grieving family.

5. Paya and the Catholic Church in Cuba

The Catholic Church dedicated to Payá all the honors he undoubtedly deserved. The number of lay and religious men and women present were uncountable. The church hierarchy was also present. Not only the auxiliary bishops of Havana, Bishop Alfredo Petit and Bishop Juan de Dios, also Bishop Alvaro, Bishop in Granma, where the fateful events took place, had come to Havana, after playing a key role on the previous day because of the disinformation surround the death of an extraordinary man; it was he who showed up at the hospital in Bayamo where the body of Payá was taken and made the final confirmation of the tragedy.

Personalities as relevant as Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and many others with dedicated chairs were there. The Apostolic Nunciature, at the end of the Mass celebrated by Cardinal Jaime Ortega himself on the morning of the 24th, before leaving for the funeral, delivered a note of condolence sent by the Vatican Secretariat of State, which was read to all present.

There is no denying that the family felt accompanied by its church from the very moment the rumors of his death started and I suppose until this moment. This was reiterated by Rosa Maria and Ofelia in every public statement they were allowed to make, both in the parish and in the cemetery, on behalf of the whole family.

I can not help but confess, however, I found counterproductive all the undeniable support of the Catholic hierarchy with the contradictions that in recent years they had had with Paya, demonstrable in such controversial statements in Lay Space magazine, as in the recent editorial “The Commitment to Truth” which is heard in the voice of Oswaldo himself refuting through radio interviews, and with a firmness no at odds with his unquestionable and always present Christian ethics, because he was, like other Catholics, committed to the justice of the Kingdom of Heaven and therefore logically contrary to the totalitarianism that rules in Cuba, as do people such as the Lay Catholic Dagoberto Valdes and the priest Jose Conrade, followers of a line of lay and religious people that continue the work of those who came before, Pedro Meurice, Perez Serante, up to heroes like the knight Jose Agustin, Varela, or Bishop Espada.

I myself was one of the hundreds of victims of repression during the papal visit of Benedict XVI in March, placed under house arrest in the house of a friend in Alamar under a scandalous siege by the political police, and I am still waiting for a single word of regret from the Vatican, or at least from the senior hierarchy of the Cuban Catholic Church.

I imagine the immense pain that Payá must have felt, in notable contrast to the visit of John Paul II in 1998, when if he thought about it, he had literally been thrown aside this time.

I find it very strong and contradictory that we throw aside people in life when we have at least the opportunity to spend at least one second, to greet him, and then in death we grant him every honor he was denied in life. Of course, I refer to sections of the hierarchy, not the church that Payá always loved and defended, and that until the last moment was voice and part of and which is he now a martyr of.

November 3 2012

Oswaldo Paya Was Also Sentenced in the Black Spring / Mario Barroso #Cuba

In 2003 José Oswaldo Paya Sardinas received the greatest tyrannical onslaught that preceded this other well-calculted and final one of 2012. Even without being on the list of those imprisoned, he was the grewatest victim of the so-called Cuban Black Spring.

The greatest part of those affected in this witch hunt , at least some fifty of them, were involved in the collection of signatures for the opposition project led by him, the Varela Project, that had the capability of hitting Fidel Castro as no opposition project had managed to do, to the point of forcing him to reform the constitution; only the genius of Oswaldo could exploit these cracks.

The fact that they left him out of the well-planned operation was an ignominious affront to the great pacifist strategist. The clear objective was to demoralize the opposition and to generate divisions and murmurs — as happened in some cases — but the majority was not fooled and did not fall into the trap.

While the prisoners took up residence in punishment cells hundreds of miles from their homes, the regime published one of its typical libels, this time called “The Dissidents”, in which it’s possible to find Paya in the injurious mouth of each one of those interviewed, while perniciously selected documents try to distort his image, or feed the unfounded divisions.

One of the most grotesque attacks in that publication was to maliciously display Payá family photos showing him in good health enjoying the beach with his family as if it were a sin he should not allow himself.

Two pages with this sequence of photos were aimed like a dagger to direct relatives of victims of the Black Spring that had very fresh wounds from the imprisonment of their loved ones, the message was clear: Payá is enjoying on the beach while your family members languish in prisons.

Thus was fulfilled with the sinister objective of generating jealousy and mistrust and provoking questions in a population that was beginning to doubt the Paya name. Family members as well as prisoners today testify how much agony the arrest of his friends caused Oswaldo, his constant travel throughout the island visiting their families, his calls and letters.

Regardless of all the rumors and smear campaigns articulated by the regime he could say categorically that if it had been in his hands as the leader he would have changed places with any of them, and still would have given his life for the condemned. The sentence to remain in “freedom” while the rest were imprisoned was the worst torture someone could infringe on a person with the human qualities of Paya.

During the funeral of Oswaldo, Librado Linares, a former prisoner of the group of seventy-five told me that if thinking aloud and this was the conclusion I reached after a deep meditation: – “Look for when they saved Paya.”

And the words of the direct victim of that Black Spring, one of those who had collected signatures for the Varela Project, even my signature, made me think hard. The suspicious deaths that preceded Paya’s, and the fact that they were already thinking about the modus operandi and launched targeted assassinations and killings, of which I am fully convinced, made me reflect on the macabre of the procedures of this regime that do not hesitate to qualify as horror, but the way they acted against Paya, not only for his death and the dark days that have happened, but throughout his political activism, are a powerful symbol of the excesses to which a beast like that which seized Cuba more than fifty years ago has come to, the confluence of the most murky and gangster of the whole Republican era.

October 31 2012

The Worst Evil of Bad People is the Silence of Good People / Lilianne Ruiz

Antonio Rodiles (left) leading a panel discussion at Estado de Sats

Antonio Rodiles continues to be held in the dungeons at Acosta and 10 de Octubre streets, for 9 days now. Perhaps the political police won’t free him before they trial they intend to hold, to avoid the bruises from the beating they gave him becoming public.

Socialist legality is a set of traps to bring down anyone who does not follow the path of the regime. A peaceful protest can be translated by a prosecutor into “disorderly conduct.” Similarly, if a man does not passively allow three State Security officers to beat him — officers in plain clothes who never identified themselves as authority before the blows began to fall — “revolutionary law” translates an action of legitimate self-defense by the victim into “resisting arrest.”

But it was not an arrest which State Security (DSE) agents carried out against Rodiles and a dozen people waiting outside State Security’s Department 21 — after having exhausted other avenues such as calling 106, the police information number — for the authorities to give them information on the whereabouts of Yaremis Flores, who was arrested with similar arbitrariness that same day.

It was an attack and not an arrest that the DSE agents carried out.

They did not communicate to Rodiles who they were, nor that they were going to arrest him. No police officer with a badge and arrest warrant showed up. Simply three men in plain clothes without the mediation of words attacking Rodiles who, according to Revolutionary law, “shouldn’t resist.”

There are too many cases of opponents of the regime who are driven to jail through some legal trap: Darsi Ferrer, Jorge Vázquez Chaviano are just a couple, there are many more.

Rodiles is the leader of Estado de Sats. As Ailer Gonzalez, his partner, explained to me once, the space took the name Estado de Sats from the Anthropology of the Theater, by Eugenio Barba (Odin Theatre). Estado de Sats is the movement of negation that leads to action: to cast the first stone you have to pull back your arm. The action takes place in an organic way. In a country uprooted from its vital centers, to talk and exchange ideas, images — art and thought — is an alternative that the powers-that-be recognize as “dangerous.”

Since last August, just after the arrest of Rodiles during the funeral of the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement Oswaldo Paya, the repressive organs of State Security have tried to block the realization of Estado de Sats in multiple ways. From a siege around the site to block the audience from attending, to the arbitrary arrest of Professor Dimas Castellanos and of the poet and photographer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.

Rodiles himself went, at the time of those arrests, to State Security’s Section 21 to demand the release of those arrested. In the words of a member the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) who was arrested by this same Department 21 of State Security, the agents told him “Even if Rodiles turned out to be the second coming of Padre de las Casas*, he was going to jail.”

This is how they intend to do it: through traps and sheltered by a “legality” that always protects the State and never the rights of the citizens.

On Wednesday, November 7, when they arrested Rodiles a wave of mass arrests of opponents took place in Havana, with virtually no communication because they cut off the phones of many of the detainees and their families and friends.

Rodiles’ father appeared before the police in a T-shirt bearing a decal for the liberation of his son and this caused a scandal for the authorities.

Faced with the pain of others, we must remember that if we do not share the responsibility of preventing the purposes of those who are creating the human rights crisis in Cuba, the deceptions of these regimes could continue to thrive in the heyday of dictatorships.

There is no State, no Church, no institution, no ideological, political or religious excuse to violate human rights. The extreme left-wing communist States have found a systematic way,  protected by their Constitutions, to carry out these violations of human rights which are their only guarantee for perpetuating their own political power.

*Translator’s note: Padre de las Cases was an early hero of Cuban history.

November 16 2012

Repression at Paya’s Funeral / Mario Lleonart

Regrettably, I did not have the honor of being part of the repression that was not lacking this time, either.  I long suspected that the time to depart for the cemetery would be the most propitious for the flock of buzzards to throw themselves over the innumerable prisoners.  And it was precisely this that saved me this time: the enormous quantity of potential victims. I was surprised that before arriving at Necropolis I was already receiving on my cell phone reports about detentions of individuals who minutes before had been very near me. The Reverend Ricardo Santiago Medina Salabarria, for example, was barely a few people away from me trying to board the same bus as I, but he could not and remained available to the violence.

During the burial, and even during the return trip on the highway to Santa Clara, among tweets that I sent and received with names of dozens of people that had been subject to detention and that included friends like Antonio Rodiles of Estado de Sats and his wife Ailer.  They even dared to attack the Sakharov 2011 Prize winner, Guillermo Farinas, without taking into account or maybe precisely because of having done so, that in October they had cast off Laura Pollan and that now they were considering getting rid of Paya, the other two prizes awarded by the European Parliament.

Knowing that I left behind so many detained people, and being home now and knowing that including around forty people found themselves asking for the liberation of Rodiles at the police station of Infanta and Manglar, they provided me the sensation that it has stayed very low of the duties that in those moments Cuba demanded, but like always, we are prisoners of time and space, as the absent sense reminds us now forever of a man in our human trial should still be here, as happened to us already in the past with famous citizens like Cespedes, Marti or Chivas.

November 13 2012

The Influences of Paya Over My Life / Mario Lleonart

Away from the capital and without any contact with the Christian Liberation Movement I thank God who made use of small signs of liberty that came to me from here and there in order to guide me in the middle of the sad and confused Cuban reality.  Even in reading from a book as poisonous as “The Dissidents” I realized where good and evil were really found.

Maybe the most significant and influential for me have been the so-called spiritual leaders in exile, Cuban pastors and priests who in Miami, and beyond religious differences, kept very alive their love of Cuba and shared it like a fire in periodic prayer meetings and through joint projects and whose news and messages arrived at the island through radio programs like those conducted by Francisco Santana such as “The Cuban and His Faith” or “Cuba, Your Hope,” or Lenier Gallardo, pastor of the Lutheran Church “Prince of Peace” in spaces like “Yesterday, Today and Forever” or in his classic Sermon of the Seven Words each holy week.

As part of that faith group and representing the Baptists was Marcos Antonio Ramos, very influential as pastor and intellectual in exile and of great reputation among Cuban Baptists.  They not only defended the validity of the Varela Project in exile, in the middle of many instances of misunderstanding and confusion but also in an indirect way and thanks to the broadcasting helped to inform many like me on the island.

Whatever happens from here on I will be eternally satisfied that I will not be able to say that they did not knock on my door, and when they knocked I accepted the challenge:  I am a signatory of the Varela Project and I refused to endorse the reform of the Constitution that declared the irrevocable character of socialism in Cuba, a clumsy reaction of the regime before the mastery of Paya, celebrated by Carter in his visit to the island as well as various figures from around the world.

The correctness of my citizen decisions I owe in great part to the influence that notwithstanding such obstacles came to me from one Paya with whom I never had the honor of shaking hands, but from whom I always had the joy of finding myself spiritually near, and now more.  The arguments that were heard from this brave man, opposing all the useless indoctrination of the regime’s propaganda to which I was exposed during all the years of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, made me react to the reality that I had a right to rights, and with me my fellow man, the totality of my fellow citizens, with all and for the good of all.

Translated by mlk

November 1 2012

The Inheritance of Rosa Maria Paya / Mario Lleonart

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

My first direct contact with the Payá family was very unfortunately this. I was totally dissatisfied when during the confused seconds before the coffin I offered brief and protocol words of sympathy they received as from one more stranger among the immense line offering tribute from so many hearts.

Because of that I did waste another fleeting moment and in the morning, well near dawn on the difficult day of the funeral, but that was one of the most solemn moments and this time far from all protocol. Rosa María Payá, that young girl from the photo on the beach, now without her loving dad, was alone for a moment in the first bench on the left of the parish, which was always occupied by the immediate family, all wearing black clothes sign of intense mourning that covered their souls.

I went with the same unwavering strength as the day before, this time not to break a police cordon, but to deal with a young soul shattered by the loss of her irreplaceable privileged father. My words were brief but came from the depths of my soul, this was more or less my message: “You don’t know me Rosa Maria but my name is Mario Felix and I’m simply a Baptist pastor in a remote village of Villa Clara. I am here because yesterday at about this same time of the morning I heard on the radio your words expressing your dismay and dissatisfaction with the way your father died. They were so shocking to me that made me cross the distance to get here. I think you inherited the same light that your father reflected and I just wanted to say: Let it shine.”

And that was it. But amid her grief she seemed to appreciate through her tears a strong flash of light to which I had just referred. A few hours later Maria Rosa illuminated the entire parish overshadowing all the words, including the homily that Cardinal Jaime Ortega had just pronounced.

Dead silence, broken only by the countless cameras flashes showed the attention that everyone focused on her. The content of her words and the way they broke through in the middle of so much pain proved to me that morning that I was right and I knew at once that if someone had thought that with the physical death of Oswaldo they could put an end to his legacy they were totally wrong because we were looking at the representation of the generation that shall reap the fruit of the seed of liberation he had so deftly planted.

November 8 2012

There are no free elections without free people, free citizens, free men and free women / Oswaldo Paya

We are on the eve of new elections in Cuba. And I am reminded that the first law issued in Sierra Maestra during the anti-Batista insurrection before the elections scheduled in 1958, was a death penalty law. It was designed to punish with death those who took part in the elections. It also punished those who voted because the elections were corrupt. The Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) and the opposition do not kill people, nor sabotage, nor exclude, everyone knows it. Our motto is Freedom and Life. We do not want power for ourselves; we want peace and civil rights for all, because where there are no rights there is no justice.

We seek only power for the people, popular sovereignty, as did Martin Luther King, remember? Power to the people! …

We denounce institutionalized corruption. The one that has the power declares us enemies and does not compete with the opposition but the sentences, stigmatized and annihilates it.

In 1954 there was a campaign in Cuba that promoted amnesty, the promoters were those who claimed there is no such thing as free elections while there are political prisoners. The current regime does not recognize or respect the right of individuals, Cubans, and the opposition to defend political differences. The difference between government and opposition in Cuba is much different from any that exists in a democracy. The contradiction between the opposition and the government in Cuba is based precisely on the lack of democracy respect towards the political rights of citizens, it is more than a contradiction, it is an antagonism between the people and the totalitarian system. We do not antagonize the people that govern and those identify themselves for some reason with the government, we do not call other “worms” or treat anyone with hatred, but we do claim that neither they nor we, nor anyone in Cuba is free under this system.

Will they claim that the Communist Party and other areas of the government are not preparing the candidates and ensuring they only they are represented by the delegates in each district? Tell that to the protagonists of these pre-election conspiracies.

In 1992, when Aldana (before Robaina, Lage and Perez Roque) said that the opposition could compete in the elections, I said I would. What did they do? The police came to my house and took me to the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) in Zaragoza and Carmen on the neighborhood of Cerro, there was a circus prepared with a tribunal chaired by one of the Communist party local leaders, the same one who had assaulted and looted my house on July 11, 1991 and who died in the United States (he received his visa to meet with their children in the US, something that the Cuban government has denied my family for years, but that’s a different topic…). State Security participated in this circus. There were many uniformed officers, and a lady told me that if I was a Christian and did not want see blood run I should not to disturb the assemblies by submitting my application for candidacy. That was intimidation against citizens so that they would know what it meant to support me. The message reached everyone; nevertheless, the day of the assembly they placed agents in the neighborhood, many of whom were visibly armed, they said they were waiting for Paya to show up.

On July 6, 2006 they prepared a similar operation, during which they wrote on a wall a few feet from my house: “In a besieged plaza, dissenting is treason” Who did they want to intimidate, me? As a human being I have felt fear, but ir does no dominate me. I am still a dissident although I have never been part of the oppressive regime, but I identify myself with that term proudly because my family has always defended democracy. Dissent is a right and the Cuban government categorizes it as treason, as does Chavez back in Venezuela. This is a permanent violation of civil liberties. There are no free elections in such an environment, and with such laws.

If there is no legal recognition of the right to exist, participate in politics, dissent and work without persecution there are no elections, no pluralism. We denounce that the people cannot decide, we do not make laws like the ones they made before 1958. The people are not free and it does not make any sense for them to participate in elections that are only a contradiction to democracy. I think it’s a way to delay and divert the real change that Cuba wants and needs. The lack of freedom of association, expression and free elections are the barriers to political participation from the people. If Cubans do politics, they become victims of political exclusion and other injustices.

The peaceful, logical and fair solution that can lead to changes and genuine dialogue is to recognize those rights. Enough with reactionary justifications that say the people are not ready do not want change, do you think fifty-four years without freedom and rights are not enough? Others say that people do not want rights, what an insult! Others may say that many Cubans want this government. I don’t think so, but in any case no Cuban can decide what they want in this environment, with these laws and with this system Cubans cannot chose who they want to govern them, which system to have. We demand rights for all, without hatred or offense, with justice; everyone knows that not even the People’s National Assembly can decide freely, they also receive orders. This will change only when they are elected by the people, only then they will obey the people.

That is our demand, we keep calling all Cubans, no matter how they think or what background they come from, to be part of the solution and changes, this can only be done by the people. Why say no to our rights? Why the elitism? Philosophies and theologies? What oppresses us is fear, intolerance and the determination of a group to remain in absolute power. Abandon the simulation! Take the path of the people which is the path of democracy.

On behalf of the Christian Liberation Movement.

Oswaldo J. Paya Sardinas

July 20, 2012

Note: Only two days later, on July 22 the National Coordinator of our Movement, Oswaldo Paya, tragically died with our brother Harold Cepero in suspicious circumstances not yet clarified. We issue this message, due to its relevance to current events in Cuba and in memorium to them. Through this article we show that his example and legacy remain alive in each of us, and it continues to lead the Cuban people across the way of the people and the conquest of their rights, a people and path so greatly loved by Harold and Oswaldo.

Board of coordinators of the Christian Liberation Movement.

October 17, 2012

Ofelia Acevedo Maura                                                                               Narviel Hernández Moya

Juan Felipe Medina                                                                                     Eduardo Cardet Concepción

Ernesto Martini Fonseca                                                                         Andrés Adolis Chacón Aroche

They Tried to Strip Me. I Resisted and Paid the Price.* / Yoani Sanchez

Photo from El Pais. Yoani Sánchez in Cuba in an archive image. / JOSÉ GOITIA

They wanted to keep me from attending the trial of Angel Carromero, the Spaniard who was driving when a car crash killed Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero. Around five in the afternoon a big operation on the outskirts of Bayamo stopped the car my husband, a friend, and I were driving in. “You want to disrupt the court,” a man dressed completely in olive-green told us, as he immediately proceeded to arrest us.

The operation had the scale of an arrest against a gang of drug traffickers, or the capture of a prolific serial murderer. But instead of such threatening people, there were just three individuals who wanted to participant as observers in a judicial process, looking on from within the courtroom. We had believed the newspaper Granma when it published that the trial was oral and public. But, you already know, Granma lies.

However, in arresting me, they were actually giving me the chance to experience, as a journalist, the other side of the story. To walk in the shoes of Angel Carromero, to experience how pressure is applied to a detainee. To know firsthand the intricacies of the Department of Investigations of the Ministry of the Interior.

The first were three uniformed women who surrounded me and took my cell phone. Up to that point the situation was confused, aggressive, but still had not crossed the line into violence. Then these same hefty ladies took me into a room to strip me.

But there is a portion of ourselves no one can rip from us. I don’t know, perhaps the last fig leaf to which we cling when we live under a system that knows everything about our lives. In a bad and contradictory verse it might read, “you can have my soul… my body, no.” So I resisted and paid the consequences.

After that moment of maximum tension came the turn of the “good cop.” Someone who comes to me saying they have the same last name as me — as if that’s good for anything — and they would like “to talk.” But the trap is so well known, has been so often repeated, that I don’t fall into it.

I immediately imagine Carromero subjected to the same tension of threat and “good humor”… it’s difficult to endure this for long. In my case, I remember having taken a breath after a long diatribe against the illegality of my arrest where I repeated one sentence for more than three hours: “I demand you let me make a phone call, it’s my right.” I needed the certainty the reiteration gave me. The chorus made me feel strong in front of people who had studied the diverse methods of softening human will at the Academy. An obsession was all I needed to confront them. And I became obsessed.

For a while it seemed my insistent nagging had been in vain, but after one in the morning I’m allowed to make the call. A few phrases to my father, through a line obviously tapped, and everything was said. I could then enter the next stage of my resistance. I called it “hibernation,” because when you name something you systematize it, believe it.

I refused to eat, to drink anything; I refused the medical exam of several doctors brought in to check on me. I refused to collaborate with my captors and I told them. I couldn’t get out of my mind the helplessness of Carromero over more than two months of dealing with these wolves alternating the role of sheep.

Much of the time all of my activity was filmed by a camera operated by a sweaty paparazzi. I don’t know if one day if they’ll put some of these shots on State television, but I organized my ideas and my voice so that they would not be able to broadcast anything that infringes on my convictions. Either they will keep the original audio with my demands, or have to make a hash of it with the voiceover of an announcer. I tried to make it as difficult as possible for them to edit the material later.

I only made one request in 30 hours of detention: I need to use the bathroom. I was prepared to take the battle to the end, but my bladder, no. Afterwards they took me to a dungeon-suite. I had spent hours in another with a rare combination of curtains and bars, terribly hot. So to come to a larger room, with a television and several chairs, opening onto a room with a tantalizing bed, was a low blow. Just looking at the pattern of the curtains, I had the presentment that it was the same place where they’d made the first recording that circulated Angel Carromero’s statement on the Internet.

This was not a room, it was a stage set. I knew it immediately. So I refused to lie down on the freshly made bed and put my head on the tempting pillow. I went to a chair in the corner and curled up. Two women in military uniforms watching me at all times. I was living another deja vu, the memory of the scene that transpired in the early days of Carromero’s detention.

I knew it and it was hard. A hardness not in the beating or in torture, but in the conviction that I could not trust anything that happened within these walls. The water might not be water, the bed looked more like a trap, and the solicitous doctor was more snitch than physician. The only thing I had left was to submerge myself into the depth of “me,” close the gates to the outside, and that’s what I did. The “hibernation” phase let to a self-induced lethargy. I didn’t utter another word.

By the time they told me I was “being transferred to Havana,” I could barely raise my eyelids and my tongue was practically hanging out of my mouth from the effects of prolonged thirst. However, I felt that I had won.

In a final gesture, one of my captors offered his hand to help me into the minibus where my husband was. “I do not accept the courtesy of repressors,” I fulminated. And once again I thought of the young Spaniard who saw his life turned upside down that July 22, who had to struggle among all these deceptions.

On arriving home I learned from the other detainees that Oswaldo Payá’s own family was not allowed to enter the courtroom. Also that the prosecutor asked for a seven-year sentence against Angel Carromero, and that the trial had been “concluded, awaiting sentencing” on Friday. Mine was just a stumble, the great drama continued to be the death of one man and the imprisonment of another.

*Translator’s note: Yoani lost a tooth.

From El Pais

6 October 2012

For Those Who Are Worried About Yoani Sanchez, Under Arrest in Bayamo…

Site manager: Many inquiries have been received by this site expressing great concern for what might be happening to Yoani, who was arrested in Bayamo on her way to cover the trial of Angel Carromero who was driving the car in which Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero died. Below are audio recordings of Yoani being arrested in 2010, which may give us some idea of what could be happening now.

ADDED TEXT: Again, in response to questions, the reason for posting this was to give readers confidence that Yoani knows how to “stand up for herself”… !

Note: There is no video on the “videos”… only audio.

Post from Generation Y: My Last Bit of Faith on 14 May 2010

Note to English-speaking readers: The transcript for these videos in Spanish and English can be downloaded below.

We will reduce them to obedience to the law.
Julio, lawyer

More than 60 days ago I sent several Cuban institutions a complaint for illegal detention, police violence and arbitrary imprisonment. After the death of Orland Zapata Tamayo, successive illegal arrests prevented more than one hundred people from participating in the activities surrounding his funeral.  I was among the many who ended up in a jail cell on February 24, when we went to sign the condolence book opened in his name. The level of violence used against me, and the violation of the procedures for detaining an individual at a Police Station, led me to file a claim with little hope that it would be heard in court. I have waited all this time for the response of both the Military Prosecutor and the Attorney General, holding back this revealing testimony, painful evidence of how our rights are violated.

Fortunately, my cell phone recorded the audio of what happened that gray Wednesday, and even after being confiscated it recorded the conversations of the state security agents and the police – who wore no badges – who had locked us up by force at the Infanta y Manglar station. The evidence contains the names of some of those responsible, reveals the background of the police operation against dissidents, independent journalists and bloggers. I have sent copies of this dossier of a “kidnapping” to international organizations concerned with Human Rights, protection of reporters, and all those related to abuse. Several attorneys from the Law Association of Cuba have advised me in this endeavor.

Although there is little chance that someone will be brought to account, at least those responsible will know that their atrocities no longer remain hidden in the silence of their victim. Technology has allowed all of this to come to light.

——————
* Some elements that complete this dossier of a “kidnapping”:
– The female voice on the tape with me is that of my sister, Yunia Sánchez.
– Transcript of the recording, in Spanish and English.
– Acknowledgments of receipt from the Military Prosecutor, Attorney General, National Assembly of People’s Power, Police Station where the incident occurred, the Council of State and the National Headquarters of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR).

Update on Arrest of Yoani Sanchez, Reinaldo Escobar, Agustin Lopez (and others?) in Bayamo

Police blockades outside the court. Source: EFE

Site manager’s note: The following excerpts are translated from an article in Cubaencuentro.  In addition, an official government blogger reported that Yoani traveled to Bayamo intending to disrupt and put on a “media show” at the trial of Angel Carromero, who was driving the car in which Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero were killed.

For those who are unaware, Yoani is a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Pais, and was intending to cover the trial. Oswaldo Paya’s children also traveled to Bayamo, and according to tweets from Rosa Paya, his daughter, they have been prevented from attending the trial. Also note, Agustin Lopez has been reported in some tweets to be Agustin “Diaz.” Finally, the Paya and the Cepero families have specifically stated that they do not hold Angel Carromero responsible for the car crash.

From Cubaencuentro:

The well-known Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez and her husband, thejournalist Reinaldo Escobar, among other activitists, have been arrested this Thursday in Bayama, reported the official journalist Garcia Ginarte and it has been confirmed in Twitter by several sources on the Island.

…Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo on his account on the social network, who says he received the information from Teo, Sanchez and Escobar’s son. According to what Teo Escobar told the blogger, the activists were detained at 6:00 in the afternoon and were not permitted to make telephone calls until 3:00 in the morning, the time when his parents called him to report their arrest.

5 October 2012

 

When an Opponent Dies / Rafael Rojas, Voices Magazine

This past Sunday, July 22, Cubadebate, the Cuban Communist Party’s digital page Cubadebate published a police blotter style note in which was reported an auto accident in the eastern city of Bayama, which an individual of the name Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, “resident of Havana,” had lost his life. This was all the information Cubadebate offered to it readers. Not even on the day of his death could the Cuban government concede to Payá the rank of dissident or opponent.

A few hours later, on the Facebook page of the same Cuban Communist Party, there appeared a doctored photo of Payá in which instead of holding the portrait of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, also an opponent who died on a hunger striker in 2012, there was a sign that said “Oswaldo Payaso” (Oswaldo Clown), and above an identification of the Catholic leader as “gusano” (worm). These epithets evidenced what the Cubadebate note did not say — out of hypocrisy more than reality — which was that Payá was not a dissident nor an opponent, but a “worm” and a “clown.”

Payá showed a tenacity and consistency unusual within the Cuban opposition. Since the late 80s, when he created the Christian Liberation Movement, he proposed to peacefully defend the freedoms of association and expression for all Cubans, supported by the laws of the Socialist State itself. More than a decade later, in 2002, he presented to the National Assembly of People’s Power an initiative signed by 11,000 people demanding a referendum and constitutional reform.

That citizen demand, which was protected by the Constitutions of 1976 and 1992, was ignored by the authorities. In response, the government mounted its own initiative, which established the “irrevocable” character of socialism and entrenched still further the criminality of the opposition. The Varela Project gave Payá an extraordinary international visibility, which resulted in the award of the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament in 2002. In the spring of 2003, most of the members of his organization were imprisoned. Seven years later they were released in exchange for exile in Spain.

When an opponent dies, in any democracy, they put aside hatred and respect the dignity of the deceased. In a dictatorship like Cuba’s this doesn’t happen. The death of Payá has been grossly celebrated in various official Cuban media. Behind this irrational behavior lies the moral insecurity of those who cannot admit that an honest person, convinced of his ideas, would defend them with peaceful methods and within their own existing laws.

Originally published in La Razón. Reprinted in the independent digital magazine VOCES No. 16.

To Paya / Baltasar Santiago Martin

Your last name lends itself

to jokes of the kind that Cubans

are masters of

but you, luckily,

are the opposite

of your last name,

the jokes,

and what’s more important,

everything that smells of dogma,

eternal socialisms

and redundant death,

collecting the signatures

that will unveil

the tomorrow

that won’t be long.

—

Translator’s note: Payá sounds like “pa’llá” which is a very Cuban contraction of “para allá,” and is part of the phrase “pa’llá y pa’cá (para acá)”  which translates as “coming and going.” A Miami based radio personality who opposed Payá used the phrase “Ni pa’llá ni pa’cá” (neither coming nor going) to refer to him and the Varela Project, which Payá founded, led and gathered signatures for.

—

From the digital independent magazine Voces (Voices) No. 16, which is an issue in tribute to Oswaldo Payá

El Sexto in Honor of Oswaldo Paya / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo


The graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado EL SEXTO (Phone +53-53798491) is tatooed with the a living tribute on his skin of the image of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñias (1952-2012), leader and founder of the Christian Liberation Movement and author of the Varela Project to reform the Cuban socialist system. The music is from the CD Concepts and Principles by Silvito The Free, son of the singer-songwriter working in the past, Silvio Rodriguez.

September 13 2012