14ymedio, Havana, 7 November 2020 — The Cuban Conference of the Clergy (Concur) points to the list of voices of the Catholic Church that have recently criticized the plight of the island. In a letter that circulated this Friday, its president and superior of the Daughters of Charity in Cuba, Sr. Nadieska Almeida Miguel, expresses her concern about “the daily deaths that we are witnessing.”
Therefore, she asks to reflect on five points. The first, the growing dollarization. “What is happening with the supposed currency exchange is not fair, which has become an almost permanent and threatening shadow,” she says in her letter. “Do you buy in one and are paid with another? This must be modified, it is fair to be able to buy or pay what is due in the currency each person receives as remuneration for their work.”
Second, it demands “that the people have real access to food… If the supply were real, would our people have to stand in endless lines? Or do they do it because they like it? Of course not.” For this, Nadieska Almeida holds the Government responsible. “It hurts me to hear it when they say: there are many people on the street and this is a question of responsibility, yes, but whose? Of everyone, especially of those who have in their hands the commitment and obligation to take care of, to seek what is necessary and to defend their people.”
“How to ensure that life is not only today, but to offer a stable future, that we can glimpse a horizon that sustains the hope so necessary to walk and remain in our land and rely on it?” asks the nun in the third point, alluding to the thousands of Cubans who emigrate to improve their living conditions.
She then refers to reconciliation and unity: “How can we stop fostering mistrust, fear, and confrontation between us, as an old friend said: all Cubans, all brothers?”
Finally, she demands a right “vital for all”: after exercising the right in the constitutional reform process, “to participate more in the broad legislative process that is being carried out in this country.”
The letter concludes with a clear call: “Let us not extinguish our longings to give the new generations a better Cuba, where they feel a part of it and do not renounce their dreams of giving this, their beloved country, the best and most genuine of each one, many children and young people are very close to us, let us not disappoint them with our complaints, burdens, let us give them reasons to live.”
The Concur, which brings together the nuns and consecrated priests of the Catholic Church, thus joins several priests from the Island and the diaspora who in recent weeks have raised their voices to blame the Government for the lack of freedom and food that the country suffers.
The first was the priest Jorge Luis Pérez Soto, parish priest of San Francisco de Paula, in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, in Havana, who in October claimed in a homily that the Church should get involved in politics.
A few days later, another priest, Laureano Hernández Sasso, lamented the deafness of the Cuban leaders. “Why do we have to beg? Why does President Miguel Díaz-Canel talk and talk and never say anything? Or do we have to tell our president that we cannot continue like this?” the priest wrote in his account of Facebook.
On November 1, it was the Camagüey priest Alberto Reyes, who spoke of the fear of the regime and the situation that exists on the island. “Cuba is a large jail where, if you behave badly, they put you in a smaller one. And like a jail in the end, we feel controlled,” he denounced on his social media.
With him, from Miami, the rector of the Hermitage of Caridad, Fernando Heria, commanded the bishops of Cuba to speak out against the regime, as Cuban priests “are tired of living under two types of dictatorships: the ecclesiastical and governmental.”
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