A False Duality
There is a false duality in the argument about bringing change to Cuba: either you prefer a violent bloody war that precipitates swift political change or you favor a slow and incremental transition launched by the dictatorship. It is a false dichotomy because, since 1976, Cubans on the island have opted for a third option: nonviolent resistance from the bottom up through civil disobedience movements using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a shared reference point.
The decision to embrace the UDHR is not a haphazard decision but one rooted deep in Cuba’s democratic history. It was Cuban diplomats in the 1940s who led the successful effort to draft and ratify this document at the United Nations.
This is a long and painful struggle, and that should not be overlooked, nor should the fact that these courageous individuals refuse to be passive in the face of injustice, but instead actively confront it.
Prisoner of conscience
Juan Enrique Pérez Sánchez, father of four and former phone technician, was arrested and badly beaten on July 12, 2021 after participating in the 11J protests in Nueva Paz, Mayabeque. He carried a poster that read “Down with the dictatorship” on one side, and “The hunger was so much that we ate the fear.” Juan Enrique was sentenced to eight years in prison on December 15, 2021. He suffers from asthma and a herniated disc. Reports emerged over social media that he sowed his mouth shut with a wire, in protest of his unjust imprisonment.
The decision to nonviolently resist these evils was not an easy or quick one for Cubans.
Cuba’s democratic opposition learned through much suffering that violence, even when successful in defeating the immediate adversary, did not automatically translate to democratic change. The 1953 Moncada Barracks Assault, and the promises of the Castros did not result in a democratic renaissance, but a more terrible, violent, and totalitarian dictatorship that ended a corrupt authoritarian dictatorship in power for less than seven years, replacing it with one that for nine times longer, and counting, continues to repress and murder Cubans after 64 years.
For decades, grassroots groups in Cuba have struggled for liberty, organizing Cubans to defend their human rights and freedoms. The nationwide protests on July 11th across Cuba were historic, but they did not arise out of nowhere.
Ricardo Bofill led the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, the first dissident movement to fight the dictatorship nonviolently, which began in 1976.This movement resulted in the formation of numerous Cuban dissident groups in the 1980s, one of which is still active today: the Christian Liberation Movement, created in 1988. The Ladies in White emerged following a significant nationwide crackdown on the dissident movement in the Spring of 2003. Twenty one years later, Ladies in White leader Berta Soler was arbitrarily detained for 72 hours for walking out in a public space and calling for the freedom of all political prisoners. Four Ladies in White are currently serving long and unjust prison sentences for defending human rights. They are Tania Echevarría, Saylí Navarro, Sissi Abascal, and Aymara Nieto.
Imprisoned Ladies in White from Left to Right: Tania Echevarría, Saylí Navarro, Sissi Abascal, and Aymara Nieto.
The decision to adopt this strategy is not unique to Cuba, but rather part of a global trend of rising nonviolent resistance to injustice. Nor are the efforts of tyrants to lure their enemies to embrace violence unique to the Castro regime.
What are the odds?
University academics and nonviolent theoreticians Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their 2008 study “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.
The two authors found that major nonviolent campaigns achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with just under half that at 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns.
Even the 26% figure needs to be looked at within the Cuban context. The above-cited Stephan, Chenoweth study also suggests “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression.”
The events surrounding the Cuban opposition initiative, the Varela Project, as depicted in the National Democratic Institute 2002 documentary “Dissident: Oswaldo Payá and the Varela Project,” which is available to watch below, demonstrate the power of nonviolence to challenge even the most entrenched dictatorship.
Oswaldo Payá spoke truth to power on July 20, 2012, referencing Martin Luther King Jr. denouncing the fraudulent change of the dictatorship and offering a vision of real change in Cuba.
“The Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) and the opposition do not kill, sabotage or exclude, everyone knows that. Our motto is Liberty 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 the power of the people, popular sovereignty, as Martin Luther King did, remember? Power to the people!… We denounce institutionalized corruption. Those who have power declare us enemies and do not compete with the opposition but rather sentence it, stigmatize it and annihilate it.” … “The peaceful, logical and fair solution that can lead to change and genuine dialogue is to recognize these rights. Enough of reactionary justifications that say that the people are not ready, that they do not want change. Do you think that fifty-four years without freedom and without rights are not enough? Others say that the people do not want rights, what an insult! Others may say that many Cubans want this government. I do not believe it, but in any case no Cuban can decide what they want in this environment. With these laws and with this system, Cubans cannot choose who they want to govern them, what system to have. We demand rights for all, without hatred or offense, with justice. Everyone knows that not even the National People’s Assembly can decide freely, it also receives orders. This will change only when they are elected by the people, only then will they obey the people. That is our demand. We continue to call on all Cubans, no matter how they think or where they come from, to be part of the solution and the changes. Only the people can do that. Why say no to our rights? Why elitism? Philosophies and theologies? What oppresses us is fear, intolerance and the determination of a group to maintain absolute power. Let us abandon pretense! Let us take the path of the people, which is the path of democracy.”
Two days later, on July 22, 2012, agents of the Cuban dictatorship assassinated Oswaldo Payá and the Christian Liberation Movement’s youth leader, Harold Cepero. On May 19, 2022, CubaDecide released an 11 minute 27 second video on the facts about the murder of the two nonviolent human rights defenders.
BabaluBlog, September 26, 2024
Cuban dictatorship frees Ladies in White leader Berta Soler after jailing her for 72 hours
From our Bureau of Socialist Tolerance, Compassion and Social Justice with some assistance from our Bureau of Black Lives That Don’t Matter to Black Lives Matter
She was violently arrested for daring to step out of her house last Sunday and then she disappeared for three days. No one knew if she was dead or alive. Yesterday she was freed. Other Ladies in White were also arrested throughout the island. Black lives matter, yes, but not to leftists in the free world and especially NOT to the Marxist organization in the U.S. that calls itself Black Lives Matter or to the Black Congressional Caucus.
Loosely translated from ADN Cuba
The leader of the Ladies in White, Berta Soler, was released on Wednesday morning after being missing for almost three days, her husband, activist Ángel Moya, reported.
According to Moya, she was initially taken to the Aguilera police station and later transferred to the Cotorro station.
On Tuesday night, State Security agents moved her back to the Aguilera station, where she was released on Wednesday.
During her detention, Soler was held in dimly lit cells, denied access to water, and deprived of her Bible.
Soler was arrested on Sunday by State Security agents as she was leaving the organization’s headquarters in Lawton, Havana.
The previous week, while being held at the Cotorro police station, a State Security officer known as “Felo” had threatened to imprison her if she went out the following Sunday.
She was detained for almost 72 hours without her whereabouts being known.
Other Ladies in White also faced repression this Sunday.
In the city of Santa Clara, Ladies in White members Yaima Pérez and Marbelis González were arrested and held in a police patrol vehicle from 7 a.m. until 1 p.m.
In Colón, Matanzas, Mayra García and Yudaxis Pérez were detained to prevent them from attending the local church.
The opposition movement celebrated its 21st anniversary on March 30. Since its founding in 2003, it has brought together the wives and other relatives of Cuban political prisoners. In 2005, the group was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.
Miami Herald, August 1, 2024
Reflections on nonviolent resistance in Venezuela | Opinion
By Regis Iglesias Ramírez And John Suárez
The Venezuelan people and democratic leaders now have a duty to defend popular sovereignty as demonstrated civically through their vote for freedom, and they appear to be doing so.
Some may argue that they should not have gone to the elections with a National Electoral Council that is an extension of the chavista regime, among other adversities and evidence that fraud, as in previous occasions, would be the regime’s way of maintaining power, delaying the inevitable day of freedom.
The process should have been contested when chavismo violated the Barbados accords and María Corina Machado was barred from participating as a candidate.
It should have been flagged the moment international observers were denied entry after it was decided they’d participate in the elections, and the irregularities that occurred during the day, which exemplified the gangster-like chavista regime’s intentions, should have been more forcefully denounced.
Despite the regime’s perverted and criminal nature, which is true of communist governments, the Venezuelans chose to accept the challenge. They opted to vote for Edmundo González , and the vast majority supported change.
This happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Chile, and South Africa. People under repressive regimes, as Venezuelans are now doing, follow agreements between the parties to promote and ensure the legitimacy of those processes. They overcame tyranny by their ballots because their leaders were steadfast, and the international community was supportive.
Those who ignore this and try to diminish the civic struggle that people have chosen to achieve their freedom or who undervalue nonviolence as a path to free and prosperous societies have every right to believe otherwise. Still, violence is not a guarantee of success.
In their 2008 study “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” university academics Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth compared the outcomes of 323 violent and nonviolent resistance actions from 1900 to 2006. They found that major nonviolent initiatives were successful 53% of the time, compared to 26% of violent resistance actions.
The investigation additionally demonstrates “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent campaigns in the face of brutal repression.”
Those who believe in and offer extreme remedies, which are not radical because radical means getting to the root of the problem, and the central issue in totalitarian systems is a lack of popular sovereignty, should amass troops and war resources to achieve their objective. However, this would be a mistake because violence rarely results in freedom or healthy nations.
In 1981, Narcotics Anonymous published “the basic text,” which stated that “insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” The same is true for both addicts and people who resort to violence.
What will happen in Venezuela now is up to democratic leaders and their voters. Let us hope Venezuelans do not grow weary but continue in their civic demand through their mobilization for the nation’s freedom.
What will the international community do? The Biden administration said Thursday it is getting ready to officially recognize González as the country’s president-elect.
This is also a subject free nations must address. The supportive position is to refuse to recognize the dictator and establish an independent commission to review all voting records and thus declare the civic opposition’s victory, as all evidence indicates is the will of the Venezuelan people.
If those who have taken over Venezuela over the past 25 years do not accept it, then impose an international boycott, as was done in Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. We have requested the same sanctions for Communist Cuba, as well as for Maduro’s dictatorship.
Venezuelans are ultimately the protagonists. They will determine whether they will overcome tyranny this time or whether they will have to wait over 65 years to obtain their freedom, as we Cubans still do.
Regis Iglesias Ramírez is the spokesperson for the Christian Liberation Movement. John J. Suárez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/article290673149.html
Miami Herald, July 27, 2023
In the 1950s, Cubans soon learned the Moncada attack was nothing to celebrate | Opinion
By John Suarez
On July 26, at 5:00 a.m., Raúl Castro, age 92, Ramiro Valdés, 91, and Guillermo García Frías, 95, presided over the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was a violent act that led to the formation of the July 26th Movement and helped establish a dictatorship with Fidel Castro as its leader.
By contrast, 75 years ago, a delegation representing the Cuban Republic helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations. That republic provided an eight-hour work day; the right to strike; and university autonomy. The island enjoyed a large number of newspapers and radio stations with diverse political and ideological viewpoints. This year, Cuba is observing the Declaration’s 75th anniversary with a new draconian penal code and more beatings and arrests of dissidents.
After Fulgencio Batista’s coup ended Cuban democracy on March 10, 1952, Cubans fell for Fidel Castro, a charismatic young lawyer who promised to return constitutional order. Following the July 26 Moncada attack in 1953, the July 26th Movement’s urban terrorism killed Cubans throughout the rest of the decade. Raúl Castro plotted numerous aircraft hijackings. On Nov. 1, 1958, one such skyjacking killed 17 civilians when the plane crashed.
The United States slapped an arms embargo on the Batista dictatorship in March 1958, thanks to Castro’s July 26th Movement’s lobbying, and in December 1958, the U.S. ambassador in Havana pressed Batista to leave.
On Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro rose to power and was quickly recognized by the United States. Raúl Castro remains there today.
What happened to the Cubans who, in good faith, used violence to effect democratic change?
Mario Chanes de Armas, for example, who survived the Moncada attack, served prison time with Fidel and, like Castro, received amnesty, went to Mexico to train and returned to Cuba on the Granma yacht to unseat Batista. Chanes could have taken any position in the new regime, but he chose to return to his brewery work. After watching Castro betray their movement, Chanes spoke out against communist influence. In 1961, Chanes was prosecuted as a counterrevolutionary and imprisoned for 30 years. He died of Alzheimer’s in 2007 in Miami, after being released in 1991 and going into exile in 1993.
He was not the only one to follow this trajectory; others took up arms again.
The men and women who battled Batista’s dictatorship, many of them in Castro’s July 26th Movement, hoped for the restoration of Cuba’s 1940 Constitution and its republic. This is what Fidel promised in his “History will Absolve Me” speech at his trial for the Moncada assault. They got a totalitarian dictatorship, instead. They then fought Castro for six years in a civil war with substantially higher casualties on both sides than during the struggle against Batista. About 400 Soviet advisers assisted Castro in crushing the resistance. The opposition ended up in exile, imprisoned or executed.
It was within the prison cells that Cuba’s human-rights movement was forged.
This movement understood the potential of nonviolent resistance, demonstrated by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The resistance practiced it in Castro’s prisons and saw it as a means of mobilizing Cubans. It became a national civic movement to challenge Castro’s monopoly, educate citizens, rebuild democratic culture, reclaim human rights, refuse to accept injustice and oppose repression. Members reveal the dictatorship’s own contradictions by insisting that it adhere to the democratic provisions in its own constitution.
The communist dictatorship refused to follow Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, believing that glasnost and perestroika would bring an end to its rule. They understood that nonviolent leaders would provide an alternative to their regime and had them murdered.
One high-profile case was the July 22, 2012 assassination of pro-democracy leaders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero. Payá and his Christian Liberation Movement amassed over 30,000 signatures for the Varela Project petition calling for human rights reforms, organizing tens of thousands of Cubans and attracting international attention. Payá was a Sakharov Laureate, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Fidel Castro became sick in 2006 and handed down power to his younger brother. The elder Castro died on Nov. 25, 2016. Raúl Castro and his son Alejandro continue to rule Cuba today through their hand-picked president Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Cuba’s prisons remain full of political prisoners — and the freedom struggle continues.
John Suarez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article277714198.html
Miami Herald, November 30, 2021
Nonviolent resistance has a history of success in combating repression in Cuba | Opinion
By Regis Iglesias Ramírez and John Suarez
Grassroots movements in Cuba have fought for liberty for decades, mobilizing Cubans to defend human rights and freedom. The July 11 nationwide protests marked a historic moment, but they did not arise from nowhere.
In November 2020, hundreds of artists mobilized outside of the Ministry of Culture in a 15-day effort to free political prisoner Denis Solís González. They demanded both his release and greater artistic freedoms.
The San Isidro Movement (MSI), an artists collective formed in 2018 to nonviolently defend artistic freedom, challenged regime officials to free their unjustly jailed compatriot. Solís González was charged with contempt for protesting an illegal search of his home by a policeman, whom he had called a coward.
Rather than accede to MSI’s demands, officials repeatedly and violently escalated repression over 15 days, but they were met with nonviolent responses that inspired hundreds of artists and intellectuals to gather outside the Ministry of Culture, bringing officials to the negotiating table for dialogue.
The San Isidro Movement’s exercise in nonviolent power led to the formation of a new movement, 27N, and increased civic resistance. The pattern continued through 2021, reaching millions of Cubans across the island with the movement’s art and music — in particular the song, “Patria y Vida.” The rapper Maykel Castillo Perez (Osorbo), co-author of the song and also a member of MSI, is currently in prison and severely ill.
This is not the first time nonviolent tactics have been carried out successfully in Cuba. The Cuban Committee for Human Rights, founded in 1976, systematically documented human-rights violations, information smuggled out of Cuba to international human rights organizations, which led to the installation of a special rapporteur focused on Cuba’s human-rights situation and the Castro regime’s condemnation over a 15-year period beginning in 1991. Havana’s record was carefully scrutinized, and it was held accountable annually until 2006.
The Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), founded in 1988 to work for Cuba’s democratization, is best known for the Varela Project, a petition signed by 11,020 Cubans in May 2002 calling on the regime to guarantee international human-rights norms in law. Fidel Castro changed his constitution to prevent it from being amended that same year.
The regime responded with violence, not so much because of the number of signatures presented to the National Assembly, but because more than 120 Citizens’ Committees had been created throughout the country in the process and imprisoned most of their leaders. Despite this repression, MCL turned in an additional 14,384 signatures in October 2003.
Castro expected the March 2003 crackdown, dubbed the “Black Cuban Spring,” to be the end of the opposition. Instead, it sparked the emergence of a new movement, the Ladies in White, led by the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the men jailed. For eight years, these women lobbied, protested and marched for their loved ones’ freedom. They were successful, and the last of the men were released from prison in 2011, a nonviolent victory over the dictatorship. The Ladies in White continue to the present day, demanding human rights be respected in Cuba.
The price of nonviolent defiance has been high: long prison terms, exile, deportations and extrajudicial killings. Tempted by the understanding that Cubans are exerting power through nonviolent action, some voices have emerged advocating a turn to violence in the belief that it would expedite a democratic transition.
Strategic studies have demonstrated that the more brutal the regime, the less effective and successful violent movements are. Counterintuitively, nonviolent movements have been more successful in overthrowing brutal dictators and transitioning to lasting democracies.
The Castro dictatorship, with decades of experience in terrorism, torture and genocide around the world, is an expert in war, as demonstrated in the 1960s when it efficiently and ruthlessly crushed a violent opposition in Cuba with the aid of Soviet advisors to consolidate power.
Nonviolent resistance is better able to mobilize citizens to demand change and obtain global solidarity and sanctions, creating the political, diplomatic and economic isolation of the regime and punishing the individuals and entities that violate Cubans’ rights.
Regis Iglesias Ramírez is spokesperson for the Movimiento Cristiano Liberación.
John Suarez is executive director of Centro por una Cuba Libre.
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article256225232.html