To promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights
and political and economic freedoms
CFC launches effort to expel Cuba from UNHRC. Cuba not invited to Summit of Americas. The Washington Times warns Biden of Cuba's political blackmail
CFC press conference at the Cuban Studies Institute on April 25, 2022 with Katiuska Mustelier Sosa and John Suarez addressing reporters.
The Center for a Free Cuba held a press conference on April 25, 2022 at the Cuban Studies Institute where Katiuska Mustelier Sosa, sister of political prisoner Enrique Mustelier Sosa, drew attention to the situation of her brother as well as that of other detainees, and the Center's executive director announced an effort to expel the Cuban dictatorship from the UN Human Rights Council. Local 10's Hatzel Vila reported on it.
Enrique Mustelier is sentenced to almost five years in prison.
His sister, Katiuska Mustelier is demanding his release, adding her brother was peacefully protesting in Guantanamo.
Earlier this year, the Cuban government admitted that close to 800 Cubans had been charged and nearly all of those charged would face trials.
Because of this and other human rights violations, the Center for a Free Cuba has started a petition calling for the expulsion of the Cuban government from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
“If they get rid of Cuba and some of these other gross systematic human rights violators, as is required under the existing rules, it would stop being a dysfunctional body,” said John Suarez, Center for Free Cuba Executive Director.
Negative outcomes of trying to normalize the Castro regime are not limited to the UN Human Rights Council, and learning from past mistakes is a positive development.
Reports that the Castro regime, and other dictatorships in Latin America, will be excluded from the Summit of Americas is good news. The Cuban dictatorship was invited to attend in 2015, and turned the gathering into a violent circus. Cuban communists welcomed American corporations to Cuba while visiting violence on Cuban dissidents during civil society events at the Summit. The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung and Nick Miroff reported on what happened and regime priorities during the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama.
As delegations gathered on the eve of the summit, the presence of communist Cuba made for some extraordinary and also ugly scenes.
In one part of town Thursday, at a forum for the chief executives of major U.S. companies including Facebook, Coca-Cola and Boeing, a Cuban trade official invited America’s corporate leaders to visit the island, telling them his country was open for business.
But at a parallel event at a different location, raucous pro-Castro crowds disrupted a gathering of nonprofit and civil society groups, blocking Cuban dissidents from participating and denouncing the event’s organizers for daring to invite them.
The tensions, which had boiled over into a wild melee Wednesday in a city park, were a reminder that Cubans’ deep divisions will persist long after the United States reopens an embassy in Havana.
“We are deeply concerned by reports of attacks targeting civil society representatives in Panama for the Summit of the Americas exercising freedom of speech and harassment of those participating in the Summit of the Americas Civil Society Forum,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, adding that the U.S. “condemns those who use violence against peaceful protesters.”
This set a terrible precedent at the Summit of the Americas in 2015, in the same manner that in 2004 when the Castro regime lost a vote at the UN Human Rights Commission, a Cuban diplomat attacked from behind and physically assaulted a Cuban exile activist in the Palais des Nations, just outside of the Commission chamber. The Washington Times quoted the U.S. Ambassador in Switzerland who witnessed the attack in 2004.
Kevin Moley, the U.S. ambassador in Geneva, said in an interview that he had witnessed the assault and that he intends to press charges.
Mr. Moley said the Cuban diplomat rushed down an escalator to get to Mr. Calzon. “He raised his fist and knocked him to the ground. It was incredible,” said Mr. Moley, a former Marine.
Mr. Moley said he took after the Cuban but that two U.N. security guards reached him first and tackled him. A spokesman at Mr. Calzon’s office in Washington, the Center for a Free Cuba, said one of the United Nations guards pulled out a canister of Mace to fend off any further attack.
Mr. Moley said the Cuban ambassador, Jorge Mora Godoy, arrived on the scene soon after the attack and identified the assailant to the security guards as a member of the Cuban delegation.
The failure to hold dictatorship's like Cuba accountable for these outrages is part of the reason that human rights have been in decline worldwide over the past 16 years, "Democracy is in real danger all over the globe" and the world is facing a time of uncertainty reminiscent of the 1930s during another age when dictatorships were in the ascendancy, and democracies tolerated and appeased actions that were unacceptable.
The Washington Times, in their April 25, 2022 editorial, "Biden should not bow to Cuba’s political blackmail: Negotiating with a dictatorship that generates a migration crisis sends the wrong signal" and provides a prudent course of action that, when applied by other administrations, has prevented migration crises with Havana.
In any potential negotiations with Cuba’s oppressive communist regime, the United States must take charge and only negotiate on its own terms without bowing to the political blackmail of Cuba’s military dictatorship. Sanctions should not be lifted at the expense of repatriating innocent Cubans back to a brutal dictatorship, and the United States should not negotiate anything until Cuba ceases its manipulative migration tactics — and finally frees political prisoners.
The Center made similar recommendations in advance of last week's U.S.-Cuba migration talks.
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