To promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights
and political and economic freedoms
MoMa magazine interviews Cuban protesters of the San Isidro and 27N movements. Reflection on courage in Cuba today with insights by G.K. Chesterton
English writer, philosopher, Catholic lay theologian, and critic G.K. Chesterton in his 1908 book Orthodoxy observed that "courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers." The world has witnessed numerous examples of courage in Cuba with the dissident movement that for over sixty years has resisted the totalitarian impositions of the Castro dictatorship.
The good news is that in December 2020 the world continues to pay attention, and in the magazine of the Museum of Modern Art, based in New York City, there are several interviews with courageous Cubans that are demanding their rights, and claiming that Cubans have a right to their rights. They are echoing themes spoken decades earlier by the Christian Movement that was formed in Havana in 1988, and continues in the struggle despite their founding leader's murder in 2012.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
On December 20, 2020 Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote an important analysis on the "Cuba’s San Isidro Uprising" with the subtitle "There has been organized dissent for decades. This time could be different." In it she described a telephone interview she had with Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, one of the leaders of the San Isidro Movement in Havana, and how he spoke plainly about Fidel Castro. Luis Manuel said, “for me he was a bad person, and what he did is not justified by what he did in things like health care,” the 33-year-old performance artist said. “If you repress someone because they wrote a poem you don’t like or you arrest young people continually, you are not a good person. This repression has destroyed the lives of intellectuals.”Ms. O'Grady pointed out how "lots of Cubans will tell you similar things privately, but few have dared utter them in public, until now."
Reading this reminded me of the plight of Eduardo Cardet Concepción, the Christian Liberation Movement’s national coordinator, and I wrote a letter to the editor highlighting what had happened to him. "A man of impeccable character and widely respected in his community. Dr. Cardet is a physician, a husband and a father of two. Following Castro’s November 25, 2016 death, Dr. Cardet told the Madrid-based esRadio, 'Castro was a very controversial man, very much hated and rejected by our people.'"
This is what happened to this Cuban dissident for speaking honestly. "On November 30, 2016, when Dr. Cardet returned to Cuba, state security beat him in front of his wife and children, and jailed him. Amnesty International recognized him a prisoner of conscience. His predecessor in the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Payá, was killed along with the movement’s youth leader, Harold Cepero Escalante, on July 22, 2012. Sentenced in a 2017 show trial to three years imprisonment, Dr. Cardet was beaten up again and stabbed repeatedly. Because his family campaigned for his release, the dictatorship denied family visits as punishment. Dr. Cardet was paroled on May 4, 2019, after two years, five months and four days in prison, and freed on September 30, 2019."
Eduardo Cardet Concepción
Despite all of this, there are Cubans risking everything for freedom, and dignity. G.K. Chesterton continuing his examination comes close to providing an explanation of what drives courageous individuals. "He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying."
Cuban dissidents continue to risk their lives for the sake of living as full human beings with sovereignty over their persons and a voice in their communities, and for the next generation of Cuban children to have a better future. Observers are bearing witness to this in the courageous examples of Eduardo Cardet Concepción, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and many other Cubans.
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