By Wilfredo Vallín Almeida
We are at a difficult time in our history. So difficult that even nature seems to have conspired to bring us trouble. You have to be totally blind not to see the continuing and rapid deterioration of Cuba’s social health.
What happens around us is not new for history lovers. Similar situations have occurred in other places and other times. No wonder scholars say that “history repeats itself every so often.”
The deterioration of the environment should not lead, however, to loss of internal values. These values are the only ones that can save us amid the general disaster.
And it can’t happen, that between ourselves we have same situations that we criticize and fight. That is something that should be very clear to all of us in the Cuban Law Association.
Every day we see (and deal with) corruption, crime of all kinds, the little or no integrity of entities which should be paradigms for the country, constant violations of the law, ignorance or evil intention of their agents … all types of misconduct.
It is, moreover, what Cubans have called “to resolve,” that is, to get money by any means, without considering how in order to alleviate the shortages and general need we all suffer.
But beyond all the hardships and vicissitudes, is the legacy left to us by the founding fathers of the Cuban nation and the sense of probity that we maintain at all costs. And that legacy reads verbatim:
When there are many men without decorum, there are always others who bear in themselves the honor of many men. Those are the ones who rebel with terrible strength against those who rob a people of their liberty which is to rob men of their decorum. In those men are thousands of men, a whole people, human dignity.
We will not and cannot renounce these paradigms . This would be to lose everything in this country and to sink the few handholds with which we can rescue the nation tomorrow.
The Cuban Law Association will always require absolute adherence of its members to the previous paradigms at any cost, even that of running out of members. And the lawyers who are not at the level that this time requires and who are carried away by human misery to which we may be exposed, because we are in Cuba, must abandon the Cuban Law Association, without distinction of person.
Because all we need now, greatly need, is LOYALTY AND INTEGRITY
November 5 2012