Center for a Free Cuba

Viva Zapata: A Cuban dissident is murdered while Latin leaders schmooze with Castro.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón wore a broad smile as he warmly greeted Cuba’s Raúl Castro at the Rio Group summit on the posh Mexican Riviera last week. The two men, dressed in neatly pressed guayabera shirts, shook hands as Mr. Calderón, with no small measure of delight, gestured to his audience to welcome Mexico’s very special guest.

A mere 300 miles away, in a military prison hospital in Havana, political prisoner Orlando Zapata lay in a coma. For 84 days the 42-year-old stone mason of humble origins had been on a hunger strike to protest the Castro regime’s brutality toward prisoners of conscience. His death was imminent. Read More..

BY MIRTA OJITO
mao35@columbia.edu

Was it the song? Jama y Libertad. Food and freedom, croons Boris Larramendi.

The Madrid-based Cuban songwriter wrote the tune as part of the campaign to free Pánfilo, imprisoned last month in Cuba after he drunkenly declared in a YouTube video that there is hunger on the island.

Pánfilo was reportedly released Thursday night and sent to a rehab program for 21 days. Then, the government says, he is free to go home, which is not the same as being free.

Veteran human rights activists have long maintained that publicity and pressure work, even in Cuba, one of the few places in the world where a man can go to prison for announcing in an 81-second YouTube video that he is hungry. A campaign to free Pánfilo, www.jamaylibertad.com, was launched on August 26, about three weeks after his arrest, by a group of Cuban exiles with no experience as human-rights activists.

More than 3,000 people — from Paris to Havana and from New Jersey to Chile — signed a letter urging the Cuban government to free Pánfilo and to respect the right to basic freedoms for all its citizens. The letter was delivered Thursday in Miami to a representative of Juanes, the Colombian singer who is scheduled to perform in a pro-peace concert in Havana Sunday.

Was it Juanes? It wouldn’t do to have a Latin American star in a government-sponsored concert in La Plaza de la Revolución, while Pánfilo sat in a cell and the international campaign raged on.

We may never know why he was released. What is now apparent is that the Cuban government has quickly — quicker than ever before — rectified a grievous mistake. That is, if Pánfilo is treated as an alcoholic and not as a mentally disturbed patient.

“It must have caught the government by surprise,” said Enrique Del Risco, a writer and lecturer in New York, and one of the organizers of the campaign. “It was too quick. It moved too fast for them and there was a lot of enthusiasm around. Some people asked me, `Why Pánfilo?’ and my answer was, `Why not Pánfilo?”’

Juan Carlos González Marco, 48, who calls himself Pánfilo, became a YouTube sensation in late Spring, when he walked in front of a camera to state a simple but fundamental truth: What we need is food, only he said “jama,” [pronounced HA-ma], using Cuban slang.

Pánfilo quickly went from being the archetype of the town drunk to a symbol of all that ails the Cuban people. In June, in a second video, a sober Pánfilo asks to be left alone. If it was possible for some people to laugh with the first video, it was impossible not to be moved by the second. You can’t ignore the fear in Pánfilo’s eyes. He is a man afraid of the state.

And then there is the third video. The spontaneity of the first video is gone, and so is the soberness of the second one. In their place is a grotesque performance of a shirtless drunk ranting about hunger and the police.

Days after the third video was posted on YouTube, on July 28, Pánfilo was arrested and charged with “dangerousness,” a draconian concept which means that he has the potential of committing a crime, but hasn’t yet. He was sentenced initially to two years in prison, which was cruel, short-sighted and absurdly out of step with the modern world.

For years Cuba has reacted to outside pressure to release political prisoners. European presidents, members of the U.S. Congress, famous writers have all interceded on behalf of political prisoners, such as Armando Valladares, Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, and Angel Cuadra, who were brought to their attention by campaigns orchestrated by a handful of human rights activists. Still, it took decades to free most of them.

That was pre-Internet. Pánfilo is a different story. He may have been both doomed and saved by the Internet. His YouTube video was seen by more than half a million. But so was the news of his sentence and imprisonment and, more important, a quick thinking campaign that incorporated the best that technology has to offer.

It took days to collect more than 3,000 signatures on his behalf. Back in the ’60s and ’70s and even the ’80s, when activists like Frank Calzon, now with the Center for a Free Cuba, were campaigning to free political prisoners, communication between Cuba and Washington could take months.

“First we had to hear about the case from someone who brought it to our attention,” said Calzon. “Pánfilo was known to the world before he was imprisoned.”

He was also the perfect victim. Pánfilo was not a human-rights activist, a dissident or an intellectual. He is, simply, a man. A black man who is hungry and drinks too much. Therein lie his power and his weakness.

The government has always been intolerant of dissent, but it is particularly vicious when the dissenter is black. The most recent victims of execution in Cuba were three young black men attempting to steal a vessel to escape the island six years ago.

Pánfilo has escaped that fate. He’s never said he wants to leave Cuba. What he wants is food. What he needs is food, rehab and freedom. But when he walks out of rehab, Pánfilo will still lack food. And freedom.

Mirta Ojito is an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

The Miami Herald, September 20, 2009
© 2009 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.miamiherald.com

WASHINGTON: The arrest this afternoon of a former State Department official charged with spying for the Castro’s dictatorship “for nearly thirty years,” is a wakeup call for the U.S. government, according to Frank Calzon, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba. “The arrests coincide with increasing pressure generated by opponents of current U.S. policy in the Obama Administration to give the benefit of the doubt to the Cuba. The arrests of Kendall Myers, and his wife Gwendolyn Myers, who, according to press reports worked as a Congressional aide, should be a matter of great concern to the Congress because of the ongoing efforts by Cuban diplomats and others to influence the perception of both Congressmen and Senators about U.S. Cuba policy.

The Myers are not the first U.S. government officials to be accused of spying for Cuba. Ana Belen Montes, a high intelligence officer at the Defense intelligence Agency is currently serving a 25- year sentence for spying for Havana. She was very influential in the Pentagon assessment of Havana’s level of anti-American hostility. Havana’s diplomats in Washington have unimpeded access to Congressional hearings, Congressional offices, think tanks and universities, while American diplomats on the island are harassed and denied similar access.

While the Department of State has sought to improve relations with Havana for more than two years, Havana continues to implement policies that would be considered totally unacceptable if carried out by other governments, including the arbitrary delays and even the breaking into the United States diplomatic pouch.

The Center for a Free Cuba, a non-partisan pro-democracy organization, called today on Congressmen Silvestre Reyes and Peter Hoekstra, chairman and ranking member respectively of the House Committee on Intelligence “to hold hearings as soon as possible about both Cuban intelligence operations in the United States, the hostile efforts against the United States by Cuban intelligence operatives elsewhere, and the work of “agents of influence” working for Havana in Washington.”

Frank Calzon, executive director, of the Center for a Free Cuba, said that “the Obama Administration is absolutely right to monitor carefully the work of Cuba, North Korea, Iran and other regimes which have associated themselves with international terrorism.” The FBI should be congratulated for their undercover operation which brought to light the pernicious work of Mr. Myers who, according to the FBI, had access to more than 200 secret and top-secret intelligence reports about Cuba.

Perhaps this announcement will encourage American government officials, including Congressional staff, to report to appropriate government agencies any approach by diplomats and others working for those regimes.”

ISHR: Small concessions by Raul Castro cannot hide the facts of continuing repression and violence against dissidents.

Placetas-Frankfurt am Main (May 27, 2008): Over this past weekend, Cuban police forcibly disbanded a meeting of Cuban civil rights activists. The International Society for Human Rights declares that at least two people were injured by the police. This deployment of police is the most severe show of force in the past month. The ISHR calls on the government of General Raul Castro to promptly cease using force against civil rights activists and followers of the Cuban democratic movement.

The meeting took place in the town of Placetas in the home of the well known human rights activist and previous political prisoner Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, often called “Atunez”. The Afro-Cuban member of the ISHR in Frankfurt am Main continues to be one of the most prominent non-violent civil rights activists against the communist dictator in Cuba. Although he sat 19 years in prison for publicly criticizing Fidel Castro he still fights for human rights in Cuba, explains the ISHR. He protests with sit-ins, hunger strikes and silent vigils.

The civil rights activist Martha Beatriz Roque explained that at least 30 people were temporarily apprehended. Two of them were mistreated by the police and required medical attention. Roque is the speaker for the “Asamblea para Promover la Sociedad Civil en Cuba”, which despite being declared illegal by the Castro regime is one of the leading opposition groups against the dictator.

Moralinda Paneque returned home extremely distressed and worried after her last scheduled family visit to her son on Monday, May 5, 2008, in the Prison of Las Mangas. “ I anticipated an improvement in his health but that wasn’t at all what I witnessed…”

Dr. José Luis García Paneque’s semblance was a shock to his mother, father and sister, “…my son resembles a skeleton…he barely has any fat under his skin…he has stick like thighs, his backbone protrudes as he bends over…he is emaciated to the point that his stomach is almost touching his backbone…his skin color is very strange to me…I would describe it as grayish blue…”.

The 42-year old Cuban prisoner of conscience who weighs a little over 100 pounds told his family that he continues bleeding daily through the rectum, a complication related to the malabsorption syndrome he suffers from, an illness that he developed in prison and which does not allow the food he ingests to nourish his body.

Dr. García Paneque also expressed that he is having trouble sleeping at night since the common prisoners he is forced to share a barrack with make loud noises as they play games throughout the night.

Dr. García Paneque was arrested on March 18, 2003, and sentenced to 24 years in jail during the wave of repression that the Cuban government carried out against members of the civil society who were promoting independent ideas on the island.

The wife and four children of this Cuban doctor were forced to seek exile in the United States on March 8, 2007, because of the violent acts of repudiation that were being carried out against their home by mobs instigated by Cuban State Security.

Dr. García Paneque’s family makes an URGENT APPEAL to the international community since they fear for the safety and physical and psychological well-being of this Cuban physician who is unjustly imprisoned in a maximum-security prison for peacefully defending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in his own country.

Information obtained from Mrs. Moralinda Paneque via telephone from Las Tunas, Cuba, by the Coalition of Cuban-American Women / LAIDA CARRO / E-mail: joseito76@aol.com / FAX: 305-740-7323

This renewed rowdy appearance of the Cuban police against those who think differently politically stands in opposition to the new signals being sent by the regime. After General Raul Castro recently allowed the purchase of Computers, Microwave ovens, and cell phones, a concession which is only meaningful to a small number of financially well off Cubans, he has granted a further improvement. Once a week, critical editorials appear in the only daily newspaper “Granma,” edited by and central organ of the Communist party. In these editorials Cubans complain about corruption, the economic model, and low salaries.

“It is self evident that in these restricted critiques- a complete repudiation of Communism is not desired,” stated the ISHR. The editorials serve simply as an outlet for pre-approved critique. No truly uncensored complaints against the system are allowed. Of course this is a good first step in the course towards the freedom to express ideas; the question remains whether these concessions are serving as a skilful maneuver to quiet European observers. Through such accommodations, the Castro brothers could further their success in appeasing the international community and in unfreezing their frozen assets. But while politically different thinkers are imprisoned for a peaceful gathering, no actual improvement can be discussed, says the ISHR.

Cuban Crocodile and Burmese PythonAs a part of its ongoing campaign to promote democracy and human rights around the world, the embassy of the Czech Republic adopted two animals, both reptiles, at the Washington National Zoo, in Washington, DC. The Cuban crocodile, an endagered species, and the Burmese python are indigenous to countries where the Czech Republic is actively involved in improving quality of life and returning full human rights to citizens. By adopting and supporting these animals, the Embassy of the Czech Republic strives to raise awareness of the international effort to return free will and self-governance to the people of Burma and Cuba, and to show solidarity for the stewardship of all their inhabitants.