By Wilfredo Vallin Almeida
I always thought that when the situation came to be the present one, the authorities (especially the political police) would behave with a greater degree of seriousness and, above all, of professionalism. The reality ruins my expectations.
Just moments before sitting down to write this post for the Asociación Jurídica Cubana (AJC: Cuban Legal Association), the facts are as follows.
As is known, since we do not hide it at all, the AJC, in collaboration with Estado de SATS, is recording a series of informative programs for the legal education of the population. To those ends we have published: “Detention” and “Searching Inhabited Homes”.* Coming soon another program will be published, this one with the title “Habeas Corpus”.
Once edited, these programs are published by Estado de SATS on the INTERNET so that they can be accessed by all those who want to do so outside of Cuba. For the interior of Cuba, discs are burned or they are recorded in (portable) memory; will we ever have Internet?
The programs to which I am referring have a didactic and informative objective with a very precise subject: that which is established by national law in relation to certain penal, procedural or constitutional topics.
I don’t believe that any government truly democratic nor certain of its people would object to having its legislation spread among its citizens. But, it seems, here we cannot count on either of those two characteristics.
That’s how things are, and so that he would participate in this latest program I have mentioned, I invited a young lawyer from Las Tunas, who takes care of the activities of the AJC in that city in the Eastern part of the country and he, kindly, accepted.
Since we do not feel that deception (in any of its forms) is a decorous way of doing things, it was explained to the attorney Yunieski San Martín Garcés, who furthermore knows well what we do and how we do it, what his stay here would consist of and what would happen once the material in question was recorded. In good faith, Yunieski boarded a bus to Havana.
But… (and in the current state in which we live there will always be a BUT), leaving the municipality, the bus on which Yunieski was traveling was detained by various patrol cars. He was forced to get off, the bus driver was told that he was transporting a well-known counterrevolutionary, he was taken to a police station by State Security and there he was informed that his arrest was due to the fact…he was coming to film with us material to be turned over to USIS (the United States Interest Section in Cuba).
Once again we find State Security, the USIS, the show in the middle of the road, the plot in the shadows against the government, the international intrigue, the treason by nationals against our worried and self-sacrificing patricians (who, incidentally, in 50 years did not fulfill the agreements of their own congresses), etc., etc., etc.
I already stated that we publish what we do on the INTERNET, something the political police does not do with its arbitrary acts and especially, with its illegalities of all types.
The people of Cuba have the right to know their laws and to employ them to defend themselves against those who, incapable of showing themselves with the truth, and hiding their identity, recur to this which is nothing more than resorting to lies.
*Translator’s note: Article 218 of Cuban criminal law authorizes the search of inhabited dwellings even if the inhabitant refuses to allow it.
Translated by: Maria Montoto
May 28 2012
