The Sounds of Liberty in Cuba, the failure of the EU Ambassador to Cuba, and the desperate call for help for Cuban's political prisoners
James Freeman in his February 26, 2021 column in The Wall Street Journal, "The Sound of Liberty in Cuba: A new challenge to the Marxist regime" sounds an optimistic note with the song Patria y Vida and the wider phenomenon of the San Isidro and 27N Movements protesting censorship in Cuba and activists successfully (although temporarily) renaming the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana to the Plaza de la Libertad.
However, this week marked the 25th Anniversary of the Brothers to the Rescue Massacre, an act of state terrorism carried out by the Castro regime on February 24, 1996 instantly killing Armando Alejandre Jr.,45 years old, Carlos Alberto Costa, age 29, Mario Manuel de la Peña, age 24, and Pablo Morales, age 29. On February 24, 2021 the Washington DC market woke up to advertisements on Politico and Apple News linking to a letter sent certified mail to President Biden on February 2, 2021 by the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (ARC), a coalition of pro-democracy groups inside and outside Cuba . The Center for a Free Cuba is a member, and signatory to the letter. The letter seeks to hold President Biden to one of his campaign promises, that of listening to Cuban Americans to whom he referred to as the “Ambassadors of Freedom for Cuba”.
Engagement with dictatorships for the sake of engagement without democratic and human rights principles can degenerate into complicity with the dictatorship. This is the apparent situation with the EU Ambassador in Cuba Alberto Navarro. Politico's Hans von der Burchard in his February 25, 2021 article "MEPs urge EU to fire ambassador to Cuba" has the disturbing sub-headline: "Diplomat accused of siding with ‘regime that neither respects nor defends human rights.’"
This failure led to a "cross-party group of 16 MEPs, including senior lawmakers" to urge "EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell to sack the bloc’s ambassador to Cuba for allegedly siding with the country’s Communist leadership." The trouble is that Mr. Borrell is guilty of the same behavior when in Moscow in a joint meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded to the Russians whataboutism on Cuba by echoing the Russian position against the United States embargo that drew criticism from his partners in Europe.
Meanwhile in Cuba's prisons, that have not had a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross in decades, prisoners of conscience continue to languish in cruel and inhuman conditions, and some of them are dying, and others have already died. The Center for a Free Cuba is calling attention to four critical cases.
Orlando Zapata Tamayo died eleven years ago on February 23, 2010 after years of physical and psychological torture that drove this Amnesty International prisoner of conscience to die on hunger strike. That prison officials periodically denied him water, during his water only hunger strike, adds to the outrage surrounding his death.
Other Cuban dissidents have died while in the custody of Cuban prison officials. Recently the Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) denounced the death of Yósvany Aróstegui Armenteros on August 7, 2020 following a long hunger strike protesting his unjust imprisonment.
“The Center is extremely concerned for the safety of Yandier García Labrada, Keilylli de la Mora Valle, Josiel Guía Piloto, and Virgilio Mantilla Arango. CFC also recognizes there are many more who are unjustly jailed. We fear for the lives of these political prisoners, and that tragically another prisoner of conscience perish due to the unduly cruel and harsh prison conditions. The International Committee of the Red Cross has not been able to visit Cuba’s prisons in decades, despite repeated requests,” said John Suarez, executive director of CFC. Today, the Center shared these cases with international human rights organizations in an urgent appeal for these lives at risk.
The Wall Street Journal, February. 26, 2021
The Sound of Liberty in Cuba
A new challenge to the Marxist regime.
By James Freeman
Yotuel Romero, among the creators of the song ''Patria y Vida,” describes the Cuban regime’s abuse of human rights on Thursday in Madrid, Spain.
Photo: Eduardo Parra/Zuma Press
Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet military empire, one of the world’s remaining communist dictatorships is facing a fresh challenge to its authority. And it couldn’t sound any sweeter.
Agence France-Presse reports:
In Cuba, where music and revolution are intertwined, a song by rappers boldly denouncing the communist government has found viral appeal online -- but angered a regime that keeps close tabs on culture.
The song is called, “Patria y Vida,” or “Homeland and Life,” and has logged more than two million views on Alphabet, Inc.’s YouTube. Sarah Marsh and Rodrigo Gutierrez of Reuters have more on the popular new anticommunist anthem and the Miami-based musicians who helped make it happen:
Gente de Zona, Yotuel of hip-hop band Orishas fame and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno collaborated on the song with two rappers in Cuba, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky, who are part of a dissident artists’ collective that sparked an unusual protest against repression outside the culture ministry last November.
“Homeland and Life” repurposes the old slogan “Patria o Muerte” (“Homeland or Death”) emblazoned on walls across the Caribbean country ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 leftist revolution and expresses frustration with being required to make sacrifices in the name of ideology for 62 years.
“It’s over,” says the song’s chorus. What’s most striking is the song’s direct demand for freedom and blunt challenge to the dictatorship and its lies. “Advertising a paradise,” sing the performers, “while mothers cry for their departed children.”
Nora Gámez Torres notes in the Miami Herald:
Yotuel Romero, a singer with the band Orishas and the brain behind the project, told the Miami Herald that the song is part of an “awakening of Cuban youth.”
“It was important to tell the world that Cubans today, we want life, that the doctrine that came out in ‘59 belongs to that moment,” Romero said...
This time, the song appears to have made Cuban authorities so nervous that state media have launched a campaign to combat its message and discredit its authors.
Naturally, the Cuban dictatorship is also able to distribute its Marxist propaganda via Twitter and the other U.S. social-media platforms that habitually censor Americans. But until Silicon Valley starts cracking down on Cuban dissidents, the Havana regime may not be strong enough to suppress the sound of liberty. Ms. Torres reports:
The uber popularity of those who perform in “Patria y Vida” — Grammy award winners with a global audience and, at the same time, hip-hop and reggaeton stars in Cuba — as well as the delicate political and economic moment the country is going through, help explain both the instant success the song has become and the government’s angry reaction.
Those praying for the end of the communist regime have been disappointed for decades. But in December the Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady noted the new phenomenon of artists and musicians increasingly refusing to remain silent:
In a telephone interview last week I asked Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, one of the leaders of the dissident San Isidro Movement in Havana, what he thinks of Fidel Castro.
His answer stunned me not because I disagreed but because challenging the godlike myth of the comandante, alive or dead, has always been taboo.
“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.”
Lots of Cubans will tell you similar things privately, but few have dared utter them in public. Until now.
Mr. Otero Alcántara appears in the video for the new song. Ms. O’Grady noted in December that in her conversation with the artist, she “couldn’t shake the feeling of something new unfolding.”
That feeling now has a sound.
***
Also in the Miami Herald, Syra Ortiz-Blanes reports that this week Cuban dissidents were briefly able to use Google to undermine the communist dictatorship before the Alphabet subsidiary restored the regime’s preferences:
For a few hours, Cuba’s storied Revolutionary Square, where Fidel Castro once gave hours-long speeches to the masses, had a different name on Google Maps this week: Freedom Plaza.
A group of Cubans on the island and in the diaspora launched a campaign to change the name of the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana to the Plaza de la Libertad — and succeeded, though only temporarily.
User requests for the switch made it through Google’s system, the company confirmed, but were eventually flagged and the name reverted back to its revolutionary idiom.
Osmani Pardo, a Cuba-based activist, said the loose-knit network, whose exact size is unknown, aims to empower the Cuban people to assign new words and language to government-run institutions.
Now this is the kind of renaming project all Americans should support. Certainly few historical figures are more deserving of cancellation than the murderous Castro.
Imagine if social media networks could somehow be used to undermine tyrants and open closed societies. But how?
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