Tema: Castros’ repression against the dissidents

Protest marchers beaten, detained
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/02/1903584/protest-marchers-beaten-detained.html

Cuban authorities cracked down on a march Sunday to pray at the tomb of a dissident whose death became a rallying cry for human rights activists.


BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Posted on Tuesday, 11.02.10

Cuban security agents beat and detained about 40 dissidents after the mother of the late political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo and her supporters prayed at his tomb, activists reported Monday.

The mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, said she was repeatedly hit on the head, thrown to the ground and gagged with a smelly rag that left her breathless as she shouted anti-government slogans.

Security officers also kicked several handcuffed young men during the incident Sunday, added Marlon Martorell, a dissident who took part in the protest.

Tamayo and most of the 40 others detained were released later Sunday or early Monday but some remained unaccounted for Monday afternoon, including one of Tamayo's sons, Martorell reported.

The detentions appeared to be one of the harshest crackdowns yet on supporters of Tamayo, whose son's death in February after a lengthy hunger strike became a rallying cry for dissidents in Cuba and abroad.

Tamayo and Martorell said about 40 supporters joined the regular Sunday march from her home in the eastern town of Banes to Mass at a local Catholic church and to the cemetery where her son is buried.

The mother said groups of government supporters harassed them on the way from church to the cemetery, and one man ``authorized by the state security'' threw rocks at the marchers, hitting at least three.

Martorell also reported that a ``security agent in civilian clothes'' shouted epithets and threw rocks at the marchers. Some of the marchers threw rocks back, he said by phone from Banes, but kept walking toward the cemetery.

Scores of police and state security officers ringed the cemetery by the time the marchers had finished praying at Zapata's tomb, Tamayo and Martorell said. ``They attacked when I set foot outside the gates to the cemetery,'' Tamayo told the Miami-based Cuban Democratic Directorate. ``They threw me to the ground and dealt blows and kicks to all the brothers.''

Martorell said agents carried out the crackdown ``with a lot of violence, with beatings for all.''

Tamayo, who is Afro-Cuban, said she was forced into a police vehicle and as she shouted ``Down with Fidel!'' one officer shouted at her, ``Shut up, you lousy black.'' She was then gagged with a rag smelling of gasoline that nearly asphyxiated her, the mother added.

Police threw the protesters into two waiting buses, Martorell said, and he later heard Tamayo shouting ``Down with Fidel'' and ``Zapata Lives!'' while they were held in a Banes lockup.

``Once again, there's proof that they are a bunch of murderers,'' Tamayo added. ``Let them kill me, but I will die with honor, dignity and valor.''

The Miami-based group Cuba Independent and Democratic reported Monday that one of its members in Banes, Daniel Mesa, suffered an injury to his hand during the detentions.

The cell phones of Tamayo and those of several other supporters involved in the incident appeared to have been blocked Sunday afternoon and much of Monday.

State Security agents initially blocked Tamayo's marches to the church and cemetery, sometimes with mass detentions like Sunday's. But they had been allowing the protests since mid-August, when Catholic church officials intervened on her behalf.

Church officials told Tamayo last month that she and her immediate family had government permission to leave for the United States, but she replied that she would not leave unless she was allowed to take her son's remains.

While the news media was reporting the latest "reforms" being implemented by Raul Castro, Reina Luisa Tamayo and 40 other dissidents were getting brutally beaten in the town of Banes, Holguin (Oriente) province. They were being stoned and rounded up like cattle.Banes was the birthplace of Fulgencio Batista, located about 20 miles north from the small town of Biran. Fidel Castro birthplace.

Cuban dissidents say cops again beat women
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/15/2360783/cuban-dissidents-say-cops-again.html

For the fourth week, security forces in Santiago halt Ladies in White

By Juan O. Tamayo
Augusts 18, 2911

Cuban dissidents complained that security forces blocked about 20 supporters of the Ladies in White from reaching a church service Sunday in the eastern city of Santiago, including nine women who were beaten and humiliated.

The incidents marked the fourth weekend in a row that authorities have used physical force and even violence to break up the women’s attempt to establish their right to protest in eastern Cuba, just as the Women in White do after Sunday mass in Havana to demand the release of all political prisoners on the island.

“Let’s see who tires first. Those who fight for democracy or those who receive a salary,” José Daniel Ferrer García, a recently freed political prisoner, said by phone from his home in Palmarito del Cauto, about 15 miles from Santiago.

Ferrer said his wife, Belkis Cantillo, was in the group of nine women most seriously pummeled when the truck that was carrying them to mass at the Santiago cathedral was stopped by a large group of police and women prison guards at El Cristo, a traffic checkpoint seven miles from the city.

“I was grabbed by six very large women who threw me off the truck. Two others were waiting for me below. They put me on the patrol car, and inside two male officers started to hit me and pull my hair,” Cantillo told Radio Martí.

When the patrol car carrying Cantillo broke down on the way to Palmarito, she refused to transfer to another car and was again hit by a policeman who also flashed his penis as a way to humiliate the women, Ferrer and Cantillo added.

Police also detained another seven Ladies in White supporters before they could get to the cathedral, including three who tried to sneak out of their homes around 2 a.m. in hopes of evading the security forces, Ferrer reported. One of the women fainted when confronted with a police guard dog.

Only three women managed to attend the 9 a.m. mass, officiated by Santiago Archbishop Dionisio Garcia. They told him that the archbishop had condemned the violence against the women in his homily, Ferrer noted.

The women intercepted at El Cristo were driven back to their hometowns in Palmarito, Palma Soriano, Guantanamo and Holguin, Ferrer told El Nuevo Herald, although some were dropped off at local police stations and only then sent home.

Afterwards, eight government opponents were slightly injured as police and crowds of government supporters harassed three homes of dissidents near Santiago, where the women and others had gathered, to prevent them from staging protests on their streets.

Ten had gathered in a home in the fruit-growing town of El Caney, 41 in Palma Soriano and 18 in Palmarito, Ferrer added.

After several hours, police officials offered to allow the dissidents to leave the homes if they would promise to return to their own homes. The dissidents refused, and the security forces eventually tired and left, Ferrer reported.

Police violence against the dissidents appears to have increased since April, when Cuban ruler Raúl Castro declared at a Communist Party congress that Cubans “will never deny the peoples’ right to defend the revolution.”

The Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) are a group in Cuba of the wives and other relatives of jailed dissidents. They have been protesting the imprisonments of their husbands by going to Mass each Sunday dressed in white and silently walking through the streets. The white color of the dresses is used as a symbol of peace. In 2005 they were awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

These attacks against people participating in peaceful protest keep happening all around Cuba. The all good and well trained progressives never admit the existence of truth when it is not convenient for them.They can’t refute it because they know there is no way they can hide what is happening in Dr. Castro’s island paradise that they support so much.

Ladies in White again attacked in Cuba
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/08/19/2148506/ladies-in-white-again-attacked.html

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
August 19, 2011

MIAMI Cuban government supporters attacked more than 40 members and supporters of Ladies in White in what a spokeswoman called the worst violence against the Havana group since the Catholic Church interceded on their behalf in the spring.

Spokeswoman Berta Soler said the mob punched, slapped and kicked the women, spit on them, pulled their hair and ripped some of their clothes to break up the women's attempt to stage a street protest Thursday.

Several of the 42 women who were attacked reported bruises on their arms and legs but none required medical treatment, Soler and Ladies in White leader Laura Pollan reported Friday by phone from their homes in Havana.

Pollan said the women left her home after their monthly gathering for a "literary tea" for a march to protest violent attacks on the Ladies in White branch in the eastern city of Santiago over the past four weeks.

Forty-seven women had gathered at the house but five did not go out because of age and health issues, she said. Another eight women were detained and taken away by police near her house Thursday morning to keep them from joining the gathering. They were freed later.

Soler said Thursday's attack was the harshest in Havana since March of last year, when the Catholic Church urged the government to halt an increasingly violent string of aggressions against the women during their regular Sunday protests.

"This was a very violent act by the government," she said, adding that the harassments against the Ladies in White, who demand the release of all political prisoners, have been growing more violent since December.

Cuban dissidents are reporting increased government repression across the island this year, amid speculation that the government is applying a tough hand as it tries to enact ambitious and risky reforms to overhaul the island's economy.

"I think the government feels that it is lost and has no options, and is using these terrorist actions against a defenseless population" to keep Cubans in check, Soler said.

Soler said the men in plainclothes who directed Thursday's mob were known to the women as officers of the so-called Confrontation Department, the branch of the Interior Ministry in charge of tracking dissidents and averting their activities.
The Ladies in White, who won the prestigious Sakharov human rights prize in 2005, want to urge Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega to intercede as he did last year, Soler said. But he's out of the country and not expected back until after Aug. 23.

Ortega's intercession meant the Havana women are the only dissidents allowed to stage regular street protests - every Sunday after Mass at the Santa Rita church - by a government that has long claimed "the streets belong to Fidel" Castro.

Government-organized mobs have used violence to keep the women's branch in Santiago, Cuba's second-largest city, from marching after Mass there in what members acknowledge is a campaign to win their own right to take to the streets.

An editorial Friday in the Boston Globe newspaper, meanwhile, noted that Syria is not the only place where "dictatorial rulers have been bloodying their critics" and criticized the attacks by "pro-government goons" against the Ladies in White.

Castro "has nothing to fear from them but their integrity and moral authority. That, however, they have in abundance, while the ruthless regime over which Castro and his brother Fidel have presided for more than half a century has long since lost any claim to the respect or admiration of the free world," it added.

A Cuban website, meanwhile, published a column saying that a machete attack on a dissident in Guantanamo last month was the "spontaneous" work of a government supporter and was not ordered by the government.

Ernesto Carrera Moreno was hospitalized with a cracked skull after he was attacked by a man identified as an official in the municipal directorate of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

The column said Cuban security forces do intervene to protect dissidents "from the people's anger" but added: "Nevertheless, there is a reality: Our people will always respond to any provocation that offends their principles and damages the peace of citizens."

The column was signed by Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy, a Guatemalan living in Havana who has acknowledged working for Cuban intelligence. It was published on the website of the government-run Radio Habana

The regime apologists blame the attacks on the supporters of the Ladies in White, not in the violence of the goons and thugs prompted by Raúl Castro speech at the sixth communist party congress saying that “it is necessary to make clear that we will never deny the peoples’ right to defend the revolution. The defense of the independence, of the conquests of Socialism and of our streets and plazas will still be the first duty of every Cuban patriot." The regime apologists are very predictable, blame the victim not the aggressor. .

Castro vs. the Ladies in White
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576530302503295010.html

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
August 29, 2011
Rocks, iron bars and sticks are no match for the gladiolas and courage of these peaceful Cuban protesters.

Rocks and iron bars were the weapons of choice in a government assault on a handful of unarmed women on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba on the afternoon of Aug. 7. According to a report issued by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the beatings were savage and "caused them injuries, some considerable."

It was not an isolated incident. In the past two months attacks on peaceful women dissidents, organized by the state security apparatus, have escalated. Most notable is the intensity with which the regime is moving to try to crush the core group known as the Ladies in White.

This is not without risk to the regime, should the international community decide to pay attention and apply pressure on the white-elite regime the way it did in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. But the decision to take that risk suggests that the 52-year-old dictatorship in Havana is feeling increasingly insecure. The legendary bearded macho men of the "revolution," informed by the trial of a caged Hosni Mubarak in an Egyptian courtroom, apparently are terrified by the quiet, prayerful, nonviolent courage of little more than 100 women. No totalitarian regime can shrug off the fearless audacity these ladies display, or the signs that their boldness is spreading.

ED-AO145_amcol0_D_20110827133116.jpgThe Castro brothers' goons are learning that they will not be easily intimidated. Take, for example, what happened that same Aug. 7 morning in Santiago: The women, dressed in white and carrying flowers, had gathered after Sunday Mass at the cathedral for a silent procession to protest the regime's incarceration of political prisoners. Castro supporters and state security officials, "armed with sticks and other blunt objects," according to FIDH, assaulted the group both physically and verbally. The ladies were then dragged aboard a bus, taken outside the city and dropped off on the side of a highway.

Some of them regrouped and ventured out again in the afternoon, this time to hold a public vigil for their cause. That's when they were met by another Castro onslaught. On the same day thugs set upon the homes of former political prisoner José Daniel Ferrer and another activist. Six people, including Mr. Ferrer's wife and daughter, were sent to the hospital with contusions and broken bones, according to FIDH.

The Ladies in White first came on the scene in the aftermath of the infamous March 2003 crackdown in which 75 independent journalists and librarians, writers and democracy advocates were rounded up and handed prison sentences of six to 28 years. The wives, mothers and sisters of some of them began a simple act of protest. On Sundays they would gather at the Havana Cathedral for Mass and afterward they would march carrying gladiolas in a silent call for the prisoners' release.

In 2005 the Ladies in White won Europe's prestigious Sakharov prize for their courage. Cellphones that caught the regime's brutality against them on video helped get their story out. By 2010 they had so embarrassed the dictatorship internationally that a deal was struck to deport their imprisoned loved ones along with their family to Spain.

But some prisoners refused the deal and some of the ladies stayed in Cuba. Others joined them, calling themselves "Ladies in Support." The group continued its processions following Sunday Mass in Havana, and women on the eastern end of the island established the same practice in Santiago.

Laura Pollan, whose husband refused to take the offer of exile in Spain and was later released from prison, is a key member of the group. She and her cohorts have vowed to continue their activism as long as even one political prisoner remains jailed. Last week I spoke with her by phone in Havana, and she told me that when the regime agreed to release all of the 75, "it thought that the Ladies in White would disappear. Yet the opposite happened. Sympathizers have been joining up. There are now 82 ladies in Havana and 34 in Santiago de Cuba." She said that the paramilitary mobs have the goal of creating fear in order to keep the group from growing. But the movement is spreading to other parts of the country, places where every Sunday there are now marches.

This explains the terror that has rained down on the group in Santiago and surrounding suburbs on successive Sundays since July and on other members in Havana as recently as Aug. 18.

Last Tuesday, when four women dressed in black took to the steps of the capitol building in Havana chanting "freedom," a Castro bully tried to remove them. Amazingly, the large crowd watching shouted for him to leave them alone. Eventually uniformed agents carried them off. But the incident, caught on video, is evidence of a new chapter in Cuban history, and it is being written by women. How it ends may depend heavily on whether the international community supports them or simply shields its eyes from their torment.

You have to be blind to defend a regime that treat and abuse these peaceful women like criminals. If you still have a mother or grandmother about the same age of “The Ladies in White”, you would probably have to stop the way you think and analyze yourself seriously.

Is it right for these women to receive this kind of beating? These women already suffer enough punishment for having their love ones behind bars for exercising their freedoms.

You have to be blind to defend a regime that treat and abuse these peaceful women like criminals. If you still have a mother or grandmother about the same age of “The Ladies in White”, you would probably have to stop the way you think and analyze yourself seriously.

Is it right for these women to receive this kind of beating? These women already suffer enough punishment for having their love ones behind bars for exercising their freedoms.

Ladies in White again attacked in Cuba
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/08/19/2148506/ladies-in-white-again-attacked.html

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
August 19, 2011

MIAMI Cuban government supporters attacked more than 40 members and supporters of Ladies in White in what a spokeswoman called the worst violence against the Havana group since the Catholic Church interceded on their behalf in the spring.

Spokeswoman Berta Soler said the mob punched, slapped and kicked the women, spit on them, pulled their hair and ripped some of their clothes to break up the women's attempt to stage a street protest Thursday.

Several of the 42 women who were attacked reported bruises on their arms and legs but none required medical treatment, Soler and Ladies in White leader Laura Pollan reported Friday by phone from their homes in Havana.

Pollan said the women left her home after their monthly gathering for a "literary tea" for a march to protest violent attacks on the Ladies in White branch in the eastern city of Santiago over the past four weeks.

Forty-seven women had gathered at the house but five did not go out because of age and health issues, she said. Another eight women were detained and taken away by police near her house Thursday morning to keep them from joining the gathering. They were freed later.

Soler said Thursday's attack was the harshest in Havana since March of last year, when the Catholic Church urged the government to halt an increasingly violent string of aggressions against the women during their regular Sunday protests.

"This was a very violent act by the government," she said, adding that the harassments against the Ladies in White, who demand the release of all political prisoners, have been growing more violent since December.

Cuban dissidents are reporting increased government repression across the island this year, amid speculation that the government is applying a tough hand as it tries to enact ambitious and risky reforms to overhaul the island's economy.

"I think the government feels that it is lost and has no options, and is using these terrorist actions against a defenseless population" to keep Cubans in check, Soler said.

Soler said the men in plainclothes who directed Thursday's mob were known to the women as officers of the so-called Confrontation Department, the branch of the Interior Ministry in charge of tracking dissidents and averting their activities.
The Ladies in White, who won the prestigious Sakharov human rights prize in 2005, want to urge Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega to intercede as he did last year, Soler said. But he's out of the country and not expected back until after Aug. 23.

Ortega's intercession meant the Havana women are the only dissidents allowed to stage regular street protests - every Sunday after Mass at the Santa Rita church - by a government that has long claimed "the streets belong to Fidel" Castro.

Government-organized mobs have used violence to keep the women's branch in Santiago, Cuba's second-largest city, from marching after Mass there in what members acknowledge is a campaign to win their own right to take to the streets.

An editorial Friday in the Boston Globe newspaper, meanwhile, noted that Syria is not the only place where "dictatorial rulers have been bloodying their critics" and criticized the attacks by "pro-government goons" against the Ladies in White.

Castro "has nothing to fear from them but their integrity and moral authority. That, however, they have in abundance, while the ruthless regime over which Castro and his brother Fidel have presided for more than half a century has long since lost any claim to the respect or admiration of the free world," it added.

A Cuban website, meanwhile, published a column saying that a machete attack on a dissident in Guantanamo last month was the "spontaneous" work of a government supporter and was not ordered by the government.

Ernesto Carrera Moreno was hospitalized with a cracked skull after he was attacked by a man identified as an official in the municipal directorate of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

The column said Cuban security forces do intervene to protect dissidents "from the people's anger" but added: "Nevertheless, there is a reality: Our people will always respond to any provocation that offends their principles and damages the peace of citizens."

The column was signed by Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy, a Guatemalan living in Havana who has acknowledged working for Cuban intelligence. It was published on the website of the government-run Radio Habana.

The regime apologists blame the attacks on the supporters of the Ladies in White, not in the violence of the goons and thugs prompted by Raúl Castro speech at the sixth communist party congress saying that “it is necessary to make clear that we will never deny the peoples’ right to defend the revolution. The defense of the independence, of the conquests of Socialism and of our streets and plazas will still be the first duty of every Cuban patriot." The regime apologists are very predictable, blame the victim not the aggressor.

Castro vs. the Ladies in White
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576530302503295010.html

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
August 29, 2011
Rocks, iron bars and sticks are no match for the gladiolas and courage of these peaceful Cuban protesters.

Rocks and iron bars were the weapons of choice in a government assault on a handful of unarmed women on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba on the afternoon of Aug. 7. According to a report issued by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the beatings were savage and "caused them injuries, some considerable."

It was not an isolated incident. In the past two months attacks on peaceful women dissidents, organized by the state security apparatus, have escalated. Most notable is the intensity with which the regime is moving to try to crush the core group known as the Ladies in White.

This is not without risk to the regime, should the international community decide to pay attention and apply pressure on the white-elite regime the way it did in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. But the decision to take that risk suggests that the 52-year-old dictatorship in Havana is feeling increasingly insecure. The legendary bearded macho men of the "revolution," informed by the trial of a caged Hosni Mubarak in an Egyptian courtroom, apparently are terrified by the quiet, prayerful, nonviolent courage of little more than 100 women. No totalitarian regime can shrug off the fearless audacity these ladies display, or the signs that their boldness is spreading.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AO145_amcol0_D_20110827133116.jpg

The Castro brothers' goons are learning that they will not be easily intimidated. Take, for example, what happened that same Aug. 7 morning in Santiago: The women, dressed in white and carrying flowers, had gathered after Sunday Mass at the cathedral for a silent procession to protest the regime's incarceration of political prisoners. Castro supporters and state security officials, "armed with sticks and other blunt objects," according to FIDH, assaulted the group both physically and verbally. The ladies were then dragged aboard a bus, taken outside the city and dropped off on the side of a highway.

Some of them regrouped and ventured out again in the afternoon, this time to hold a public vigil for their cause. That's when they were met by another Castro onslaught. On the same day thugs set upon the homes of former political prisoner José Daniel Ferrer and another activist. Six people, including Mr. Ferrer's wife and daughter, were sent to the hospital with contusions and broken bones, according to FIDH.

The Ladies in White first came on the scene in the aftermath of the infamous March 2003 crackdown in which 75 independent journalists and librarians, writers and democracy advocates were rounded up and handed prison sentences of six to 28 years. The wives, mothers and sisters of some of them began a simple act of protest. On Sundays they would gather at the Havana Cathedral for Mass and afterward they would march carrying gladiolas in a silent call for the prisoners' release.

In 2005 the Ladies in White won Europe's prestigious Sakharov prize for their courage. Cellphones that caught the regime's brutality against them on video helped get their story out. By 2010 they had so embarrassed the dictatorship internationally that a deal was struck to deport their imprisoned loved ones along with their family to Spain.

But some prisoners refused the deal and some of the ladies stayed in Cuba. Others joined them, calling themselves "Ladies in Support." The group continued its processions following Sunday Mass in Havana, and women on the eastern end of the island established the same practice in Santiago.

Laura Pollan, whose husband refused to take the offer of exile in Spain and was later released from prison, is a key member of the group. She and her cohorts have vowed to continue their activism as long as even one political prisoner remains jailed. Last week I spoke with her by phone in Havana, and she told me that when the regime agreed to release all of the 75, "it thought that the Ladies in White would disappear. Yet the opposite happened. Sympathizers have been joining up. There are now 82 ladies in Havana and 34 in Santiago de Cuba." She said that the paramilitary mobs have the goal of creating fear in order to keep the group from growing. But the movement is spreading to other parts of the country, places where every Sunday there are now marches.

This explains the terror that has rained down on the group in Santiago and surrounding suburbs on successive Sundays since July and on other members in Havana as recently as Aug. 18.

Last Tuesday, when four women dressed in black took to the steps of the capitol building in Havana chanting "freedom," a Castro bully tried to remove them. Amazingly, the large crowd watching shouted for him to leave them alone. Eventually uniformed agents carried them off. But the incident, caught on video, is evidence of a new chapter in Cuban history, and it is being written by women. How it ends may depend heavily on whether the international community supports them or simply shields its eyes from their torment.

Many in the mainstream media remain silent on the assault by mobs organized by the state security of the regime against the Ladies in White. These peaceful ladies are asking only that their cause be acknowledged and the repression expose.

The majority of the people depend mostly on the mainstream media for their news, but thanks to ideological blinders of many in the mainstream media remain they know very little about the attacks by the Castros’ goons against the peaceful Cuban dissidents.

You have to be blind to defend a regime that treat and abuse these peaceful women like criminals. If you still have a mother or grandmother about the same age of “The Ladies in White”, you would probably have to stop the way you think and analyze yourself seriously.

Is it right for these women to receive this kind of beating? These women already suffer enough punishment for having their love ones behind bars for exercising their freedoms.

A strike by Pakistani students in Cuba drew a show of force from an anti-riot squad not seen before on the streets of the island.

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com

Posted on Friday, 09.10.10

A Cuban anti-riot squad, previously unseen but surprisingly well-equipped and with fixed bayonets, quelled a Pakistani student protest in Matanzas, a video of the event shows.

Riot police halts student protest in Matanzas, Cuba

This is a forerunner of things to come.On September 08, 2010, a Pakistanis students strike, complaining about the quality of their medical education, was put down by the regime anti-riot squad.

The reasons riot police didn't use force against the students was that the protest wasn’t violent and they were afraid to been recorded and posted in the internet for the whole world to see. If the students have started to throw rocks and bottles, the riot police would have used whatever methods to squelch it. As they said it in the video, “Our hand will not tremble in the face of violence.”

The cell phone video shows Pakistanis medical students besieged by Cuban security dressed in full riot gear and assault rifles with fixed bayonets. Bayonets, other than in drill an ceremonial occasions, are used as a weapon in close combat. To some extent it seems extreme this show of force against unarmed students.