Castros’ repression against the dissidents

Cita:

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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.

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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.

Cita:

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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.”

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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.

Cita:

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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

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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. .

Cita:

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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.

Archivo adjunto 4140The 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.

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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.

Cita:

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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.

Cita:

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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.

Cita:

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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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaBLj...layer_embedded
Riot police halts student protest in Matanzas, Cuba

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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.

Cita:

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On Cuba’s Capitol Steps
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576532563030650924.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Four women speak the unspeakable.
Opinion
August 27, 2011

The four Cuban women who took to the steps of the capitol in Havana last week chanting "liberty" for 40 minutes weren't exactly rebel forces. But you wouldn't know that by the way the Castro regime reacted. A video of the event shows uniformed state security forcibly dragging the women to waiting patrol cars. They must have represented a threat to the regime because they were interrogated and detained until the following day.

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The video of the incident recorded an unprecedented show of vocal support from the people for the four women staging the protest. Normally passersby don’t get involve since they fear the crackdown of state security agents and government mobs. The Cuban people are showing more sings that they are on the side of the dissidents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ki2yAnSQnQg

The four women are exercising their right to freedom of speech. The tyranny is getting more nervous since the tweets of what is happening in Egypt, Libya and Syria are been send to cell phones in Cuba, and people around the world are watching.

Cita:

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New Videos: Crowds Defend Pro-Democracy Activists
Faces of Repression
http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2011/08/new-videos-crowds-defend-democracy.html
at 1:36 AMSaturday, August 27, 2011

Yesterday, Cuban pro-democracy activists, Ivonne Mallesa Galano and Rosario Morales la Rosa, staged a street-corner protest in Havana.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=fwMzc7tRUME

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The two women protested during two hour against the Castros regime at the Cuatro Caminos Plaza in the center of Havana banging pots and pans, The onlookers, after the women arrest by the police, fallow them to the police station where they demonstrated their support for them shouting libertad (freedom), libertad, libertad. These incidents demonstrate that the Cuban people are losing fear of the Castros tyranny.

During the Pope's visit, a man shouts "Down with Communism" and is beat down by some in the crowd, no doubt Castro's agents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAAWHjzz40E&feature=player_embedded

Cita:

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Dissidents say police used tear gas in a raid, beat women
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/29/v-fullstory/2380921/dissidents-say-police-used-tear.html

For the first time in years, Cuban police used tear gas in a raid over the weekend. Women also accuse police of beating and sexually harassing them over.


By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com
Posted on Monday, 08.29.11

Cuban police used tear gas in a weekend raid against dissidents in eastern Santiago province, where State Security agents also pummeled and made obscene gestures at dissident women, opposition activists reported Monday.
“The riot squad came into th
e house like it was a commando movie, because that’s never been seen in Cuba,” said YulieCQ Valverde, whose husband was one of the 27 dissidents detained during the raid Sunday on their home in the town of Palma Soriano.

It was the first time in recent memory that Cuba was reported to have repressed political dissidents with tear gas and the riot squad, clad in black uniforms and carrying gas masks, shields, helmets, riot batons and tear gas launchers.

But Sunday’s raid was only the latest in a string of reports of unusually strong protests and violent police crackdowns in Cuba, where the communist government has long kept an iron grip on domestic security.

The latest reports came from dissidents and their relatives, and there was no way to independently confirm them. The government has not commented on the weekend incidents, and foreign journalists in Havana reported nothing about them.

Most of the recent incidents took place in Santiago, where members and supporters of the Ladies in White have tried to gather Sundays at the cathedral in the city of Santiago to attend mass and then stage street marches demanding the release of all political prisoners.

The worst incident this weekend came in the town of Palma Soriano, 18 miles to the northwest, where 27 men had gathered Sunday at the home of Marino Antomarchit for a street march protesting the violence against the Ladies in White and other police abuses.

Before the men could hit the street, Valverde said, police sprayed tear gas through the front door and windows and riot squad members in gas masks rushed in, handcuffed the dissidents and took them away in a bus.

“It was like the end of the world,” she said, adding that police also broke up much of her home’s furniture, tore up bedding, seized documents, computers, cameras, cell phones, notebooks and some wallets and ripped up some of the men’s T-shirts, which displayed the word “Change.”

Valverde and José Daniel Ferrer, a dissident who said he watched part of the raid from a distance in order report on the event, told El Nuevo Herald that a fire truck was deployed during the raid, apparently to use its water hoses for crowd control if needed.

Ferrer said he also saw police drag away four or five neighbors who shouted “bullies” and “murderers” at police. Antomarchit’s asthmatic 2 ½ year old daughter, Stefhani, was overcome by the tear gas and evacuated from the house through a window, he added.

The dissidents remained in police detention as of Monday evening, Ferrer said, adding that he had also received reports that one of them, Ruben de Armas Adrouver, was beaten by police and received five stitches on his head.

Ladies in White supporter Caridad Caballero, meanwhile, alleged police pummeled and sexually abused her and Marta Díaz Rondón on Saturday when they tried to travel from their homes in Holguín to Santiago for Sunday mass.

Halfway into the 66-mile trip, police and State Security agents stopped their hired vehicle, dragged them out, shoved them into patrol cars and took them to a police station in nearby Bayamo, she reported.

The police “were shouting at us the whole time, hitting us and making signs and gestures with their fingers that were horrible, grabbing their crotches, something sick, gross,” Caballero told El Nuevo Herald by phone from her home in Holguín.

State Security agents urged the police in Bayamo to strip-search them, but the two women refused to take off their clothes, Caballero added. Police freed them Sunday and drove them back to Holguín.
Ferrer also noted that top State security officers have been contacting him with oddly mixed messages about his fellow Santiago dissidents.

“They told me to go slow, that I am losing some standing with people that support me,” he said, “but that they will jail as many people as needed to keep this from spinning out of their control.” He called the contacts “a trick to halt the protests.”

Also on Sunday, police allegedly beat and detained 13 members and supporters of the Ladies in White who had gathered in a separate Palma Soriano home for an attempt to travel to Santiago for mass at the cathedral.

The women were dragged into a bus that then dropped most of them off at several different locations, said Berta Soler, a spokeswoman for the Ladies in White. She was put on a bus back to her home in Havana, she told El Nuevo Herald before her cell phone went dead. Some remained late Monday in apparent detention.

Dissidents Guillermo Cobas Reyes and Agustin Magdariaga were also detained Sunday in their hometown of El Caney, about four miles from Santiago, according to reports from opposition activists in the province.

Jorge Luis Garcia Perez , a dissident in central Cuba also known as “Antunez,” also reported the weekend detentions of several opposition figures in the eastern province of Camaguey and the westernmost province of Pinar del Rio.

Seven of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, meanwhile, issued a joint statement Monday demanding an end to the violence against the Ladies in White, their supporters and other peaceful dissidents.

“Stop the punches and other abuses!” said the statement by Ferrer, Gisela Delgado Sablón, Guillermo Fariñas, René Gómez Manzano, Iván Hernández Carrillo, Héctor Palacios Ruiz and Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz.

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These protests aren’t something new they already started over a year ago. But their frequency, repression, and people participation have been steadily increasing. The residence where dissident members were seeking refuge was tear gassed in order to get them to come out and beaten by the Rapid Response Brigades. This video is another evidence of the growing and strengthening opposition movement in Cuba: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqheiSRIwyQ&feature=related

Castros’ regime is afraid of the people, and is willing to do anything in its power to control their protests. But every single act of repression against the people brings them closer to its demise. The oppression and repression of the Cuban people for the last 52 years is coming to an end.

Cita:

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New Video: Another Street-Corner Protest
http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/201...r-protest.htmlat 9:05 PMTuesday, August 30, 2011

A family gathers outside their home to chant "Libertad" ("Freedom") and "Justicia" ("Justice"):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AfNnbTN8d9U

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Activists continue street protests against the Castro brothers’ dictatorship. Some members of the community participated with the family in their protest.

Cita:

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Cuba steps up attacks on dissidents, activists say
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/08/31/cuba.dissidents/

By the CNN Wire Staff
September 1, 2011

Havana, Cuba (CNN) -- Cuba has stepped up its harassment of dissidents in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba, with authorities beating, gassing and arresting protesters critical of the Communist government, human rights activists said Wednesday.

During the past five weekends, the government has strongly repressed peaceful protests in several eastern cities, said Elizardo Sanchez, the head of the island's unofficial Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. In at least one case, in the town of Palma Soriano, forces used gas -- either pepper spray or tear gas -- against one family, Sanchez said.
Among those targeted are the Ladies in White, a group of mothers, sisters and friends of jailed dissidents who hold regular marches, said Berta Soler, one of its founding members.
"Starting on July 17, the government has been responsible for criminal, violent acts against women who only want to go to the church for Mass, to pray and ask for freedom for political prisoners," Soler told CNN.

Demonstrations in the neighborhoods of El Cobre and Palmarita Soriano were also squelched violently, he said. In all, at least 65 men and women were arrested by the country's secret police, his commission said.

In one of the most recent incidents, on Sunday morning, a group of female dissidents were beaten and detained as they headed to Mass at the Palma Soriano's cathedral, Sanchez said. In protest of this act, two dissident groups declared they would hold closed-door vigils in certain homes, he said.

On Sunday evening, one of the homes was raided by riot police, Sanchez said. The government forces mistreated the 30 people at the home and destroyed many of the home's furnishings, he said.

The Cuban government has not commented on the allegations. But Soler said she attended Sunday's protest, "and I was beaten just like them." She said she asked Cuba's Roman Catholic cardinal, Jaime Ortega, "to tell the government to stop the violent, repressive actions against the Ladies in White and also human rights activists."

"Once again, we, the Ladies in White, will continue," Soler said. "As long as there are political prisoners, we will keep fighting for them."

The ladies got a recent word of encouragement from popular Cuban singer Pablo Milanes, whose recent performance in Miami was met by protests by some exile groups. In an open letter to Miami radio commentator Edmundo Garcia, published online and excerpted in the Spanish newspaper El Nuevo Herald, Milanes called attacks on the women by pro-government demonstrators "vile" and "cowardly.''

Soler said Milanes should keep up that criticism when he's back home.

"For us, it's very good that Pablo Milanes showed solidarity or at least sensitivity to the pain that the Ladies in White and people in Cuba are suffering," she said. "It's very important that he return to Cuba and maintain it.

---

"Well, well, at last the Castro National Network (CNN) started to report the protests, because until now their Havana Bureau had been silent about the protests by the dissidents. Look that independent news sources on the internet that have been reporting the protests motivated the agency to report it too.

The Castros regime is and always has been a fraud, held together with propaganda that only the uninformed believes. Now it is being exposed for what it has always been and is coming apart at the seams.

Cita:

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Raul Castro is Responsible for This
http://pedazosdelaislaen.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/raul-castro-is-responsible-for-this/

Posted by Pedazos de la Isla on September 2, 2011

Members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba in Palma Soriano captured images of the attacks carried out against them this past Sunday- this time, political police officials fired tear gas on the home of Mario Antomarchi Rivero, where dozens of dissidents were congregated. Also in the house was a 2 year old girl. Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia condemned the acts of brutality as they were occurring last Sunday, but the video has now been published:

The website “Net for Cuba” also published photos of the aftermath of a forceful entry into this same house. Varios dissidents had sent out urgent Twitter messages in which they detailed that anti-riot troops stormed into the town of Palma Soriano with weapons. The soldiers went directly to the house of Antomarchi, as if it was a terrorist they were after. Along with the small child in the house, there was also an elderly woman. Here are the scars left behind by the Castro dictatorship:

It’s no secret that the main culprit of so much violence and intolerance is no one other than the dictator of the country, as former political prisoner Jose Daniel Ferrer makes very clear in his Twitter account:

jdanielferrer jose daniel ferrer:
This humble family suffered an assault by the assault brigades sent by Raul Castro; they shattered everything inside the house.

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The Castros goon are increasing the violence of the attacks, now they are ransacking the homes of the dissidents and destroying everything in their path using black masks to avoid identification.

Cita:

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Street protest in Palma Soriano, Cuba

Here is a video of the courageous opposition members staging a protest in Palma Soriano, Oriente Province, Cuba, September 6, speaking out and fighting back against the regime mobs organized by the Castros regime to intimidate and attack peaceful activists.
People staging the protest started to shout: “Down with the dictatorship, assassins, assassins, assassins. Down with Fidel, down, down, down. Freedom, freedom, freedom. Down with the hunger, down with terrorism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Vx7ytmQwKF4
Abajo la dictadura, asesinos. Abajo Fidel, abajo. Libertad, libertad. Abajo el hambre, abajo el terrorismo.

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This protest was in response to the attack with tear gas and ransack of Mario Antomarchi Rivero humble family home These protests are only the ones caught on video. Many more are not caught on video o reported to the general public. They are never carried on the regime controlled TV.

Seem that the time is ripe for the Cuban people to rise up in justify anger and rage, and march in the streets calling for the demise of the Castro brothers’ regime; to be replace for a form of government more in tune with the people. Let not forget that around 20 percent of the Cuban population has chosen to escape the island of Dr. Castro, rather than yield to his insane experiment.

Cita:

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Dissidents say police used tear gas in a raid, beat women
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/29/v-fullstory/2380921/dissidents-say-police-used-tear.html

For the first time in years, Cuban police used tear gas in a raid over the weekend. Women also accuse police of beating and sexually harassing them over.


By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com
Posted on Monday, 08.29.11

Cuban police used tear gas in a weekend raid against dissidents in eastern Santiago province, where State Security agents also pummeled and made obscene gestures at dissident women, opposition activists reported Monday.

“The riot squad came into the house like it was a commando movie, because that’s never been seen in Cuba,” said YulieCQ Valverde, whose husband was one of the 27 dissidents detained during the raid Sunday on their home in the town of Palma Soriano.

It was the first time in recent memory that Cuba was reported to have repressed political dissidents with tear gas and the riot squad, clad in black uniforms and carrying gas masks, shields, helmets, riot batons and tear gas launchers.

But Sunday’s raid was only the latest in a string of reports of unusually strong protests and violent police crackdowns in Cuba, where the communist government has long kept an iron grip on domestic security.

The latest reports came from dissidents and their relatives, and there was no way to independently confirm them. The government has not commented on the weekend incidents, and foreign journalists in Havana reported nothing about them.

Most of the recent incidents took place in Santiago, where members and supporters of the Ladies in White have tried to gather Sundays at the cathedral in the city of Santiago to attend mass and then stage street marches demanding the release of all political prisoners.

The worst incident this weekend came in the town of Palma Soriano, 18 miles to the northwest, where 27 men had gathered Sunday at the home of Marino Antomarchit for a street march protesting the violence against the Ladies in White and other police abuses.

Before the men could hit the street, Valverde said, police sprayed tear gas through the front door and windows and riot squad members in gas masks rushed in, handcuffed the dissidents and took them away in a bus.

“It was like the end of the world,” she said, adding that police also broke up much of her home’s furniture, tore up bedding, seized documents, computers, cameras, cell phones, notebooks and some wallets and ripped up some of the men’s T-shirts, which displayed the word “Change.”

Valverde and José Daniel Ferrer, a dissident who said he watched part of the raid from a distance in order report on the event, told El Nuevo Herald that a fire truck was deployed during the raid, apparently to use its water hoses for crowd control if needed.

Ferrer said he also saw police drag away four or five neighbors who shouted “bullies” and “murderers” at police. Antomarchit’s asthmatic 2 ½ year old daughter, Stefhani, was overcome by the tear gas and evacuated from the house through a window, he added.

The dissidents remained in police detention as of Monday evening, Ferrer said, adding that he had also received reports that one of them, Ruben de Armas Adrouver, was beaten by police and received five stitches on his head.

Ladies in White supporter Caridad Caballero, meanwhile, alleged police pummeled and sexually abused her and Marta Díaz Rondón on Saturday when they tried to travel from their homes in Holguín to Santiago for Sunday mass.

Halfway into the 66-mile trip, police and State Security agents stopped their hired vehicle, dragged them out, shoved them into patrol cars and took them to a police station in nearby Bayamo, she reported.

The police “were shouting at us the whole time, hitting us and making signs and gestures with their fingers that were horrible, grabbing their crotches, something sick, gross,” Caballero told El Nuevo Herald by phone from her home in Holguín.

State Security agents urged the police in Bayamo to strip-search them, but the two women refused to take off their clothes, Caballero added. Police freed them Sunday and drove them back to Holguín.
Ferrer also noted that top State security officers have been contacting him with oddly mixed messages about his fellow Santiago dissidents.

“They told me to go slow, that I am losing some standing with people that support me,” he said, “but that they will jail as many people as needed to keep this from spinning out of their control.” He called the contacts “a trick to halt the protests.”

Also on Sunday, police allegedly beat and detained 13 members and supporters of the Ladies in White who had gathered in a separate Palma Soriano home for an attempt to travel to Santiago for mass at the cathedral.

The women were dragged into a bus that then dropped most of them off at several different locations, said Berta Soler, a spokeswoman for the Ladies in White. She was put on a bus back to her home in Havana, she told El Nuevo Herald before her cell phone went dead. Some remained late Monday in apparent detention.

Dissidents Guillermo Cobas Reyes and Agustin Magdariaga were also detained Sunday in their hometown of El Caney, about four miles from Santiago, according to reports from opposition activists in the province.

Jorge Luis Garcia Perez , a dissident in central Cuba also known as “Antunez,” also reported the weekend detentions of several opposition figures in the eastern province of Camaguey and the westernmost province of Pinar del Rio.

Seven of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, meanwhile, issued a joint statement Monday demanding an end to the violence against the Ladies in White, their supporters and other peaceful dissidents.
“Stop the punches and other abuses!” said the statement by Ferrer, Gisela Delgado Sablón, Guillermo Fariñas, René Gómez Manzano, Iván Hernández Carrillo, Héctor Palacios Ruiz and Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz.

---

These protests aren’t something new they already started over a year ago. But their frequency, repression, and people participation have been steadily increasing.

The true change will come the day when a free democratic society will arrived in Cuba. A society where its citizens have a representative government, made up of multiple parties and are ruled by a constitution that stipulate the inalienable rights of all Cubans. It will come when every Cuban will be able to live free and seek their dreams with dignity and respect, and feel accomplished in their lives. Only then there will be a true change in Cuba.

Cita:

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Castro sics dogs on flower-carrying women
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=342273


By Nat Hentoff
Posted: September 06, 2011

Among the bravest and most persistent protesters against dictatorial regimes have been, for years, the Ladies in White of Cuba. With Fidel presumably sidelined, his brother Raul carries on the brutish family tradition of crushing dissent, as seen in his attacks against this non-violent group.

Ladies in White members are comprised of relatives of caged political prisoners, as well as unyielding Cuban human-rights activists. For an ongoing account of what they have to endure while much of the world – including America – now largely ignores the victims of this ruthless "Revolution," read the account below:

On Aug. 7, 20 Ladies in White bearing flowers (never weapons) began their march on the streets of the city of Santiago de Cuba after leaving its cathedral.

Government-organized mobs battered the women and pushed them into buses headed for an unknown destination. More of these hoodlums, also assembled by the Ministry of the Interior, also beat up Ladies in White that day in the city of Palmarito del Cauto. ("Activists With Fractures Are Hospitalized After Brutal Attack," Aug. 7, netforcuba.org).

For their "disloyalty" to the Castro regime, six Ladies in White and other human-rights dissidents were hospitalized. And dig this if you have been led to believe that Cuba's rulers have been "humanized" in recent years:

"By orders of the political police, doctors refused to provide these wounded activists with a medical certificate, which they need in order to accuse Cuban authorities of the violence perpetrated against them." (Raul seems to be becoming more meticulous in denying charges of cruelty.)
Trapped in Castro's gulag and lived to tell about it – check out Armando Valladares' story of 20 years under dictator's thumb: "Against All Hope"

One of the few U.S. newspapers still covering the Stalinist beat in Cuba is the Miami Herald ("Cuban dissidents say cops again beat women," miamiherald.com, Aug. 16). These violently enforced gag rules "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."

And this is how utterly insistent on squashing dissent the Castro administration remains after all these bloody decades, as reported by the Miami Herald:

"Police also detained another seven Ladies in White supporters before they could get to the cathedral (in Santiago), including three who tried to sneak out of their homes around 2 a.m. in hopes of evading the security forces," said Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, a recently freed political prisoner. "One of the women fainted when confronted with a police guard dog."

Is Raul Castro, shown enlisting combative dogs, becoming insecure?

Another rare U.S. news source staying on the Castro brothers' revolutionary crusade against free speech is the Wall Street Journal ("On Cuba's Capital Steps," Aug. 27). The week before, there were four Cubans "who took to the steps of the Capitol in Havana ... chanting 'liberty' for 40 minutes" – until dragged into patrol cars by uniformed Castro state security thugs.

One of them, Sara Marta Fonseca – a member of Cuba's Rosa Parks Feminist Movement for Civil Rights – in a telephone interview with Diario de Cuba, a Spain-based online newspaper, said she was pleased with the results of her arrest "because she heard the crowd crying 'abuser, leave them alone, they are peaceful and they are telling the truth.'"

Fonseca explained: "I am very happy because in spite of being beaten and dragged, we could see that the people were ready to join us."
However, she does admit: "Realistically, we do not have the strength and the power to defeat the dictatorship. The strength and the power are to be found in the unity of the people. In this we put all our faith, in that this people will cross the barrier of fear and join the opposition to reclaim freedom."

These Cuban forces of freedom, however, will continue to get no support from, gosh, the American Library Association (ALA), despite its mantra "The Freedom to Read." The ALA resolutely will not condemn the Castros' attacks on Cuban independent librarians.

Because I've long reported on this shame of the ALA, the world's largest organization of librarians – by contrast with library associations in other countries rebuking Cuba – I've been scorned by Eliades Costa, the director of the Cuban National Library, where biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. are banned.

Said Costa: "What does Mr. Hentoff know of the real Cuba?"

My public answer (The Friends of Cuban Libraries, "Defenders of Intellectual Freedom," Aug. 28, 2011): "I know that if I were a Cuban, I'd be in prison."

I also damn well know that I'm right about the ALA's silence on Castro courts ordering the burning of books seized from arrested Cuban independent librarians – and that these raids continue. From Friends of Cuban Libraries late-breaking news section, on April 9: "Jose Ramon Rivera, the director of an independent library in Pinar del Rio Province, complains that a State Security major named Rafael and two police agents entered his house at #655 Garmendia St. and, without showing a warrant, took away four boxes of books."

Now hear this: On April 30, in New York, ALA activist Rhonda Neugebauer, when asked why in 20 years of visits to Cuba she hasn't been able to find any censorship of books, said: "The question does not deserve an answer."

Fortunately, Americans still find public libraries essential. Next time you're in one, ask the librarian to insist that the American Library Association help Cubans gain their right of freedom to read by speaking the truth about the Castros!

And why has so much of our online, print and electronic media let the ALA get away with this naked hypocrisy? I can only imagine that the smiling Castro brothers approve of the august ALA's silence.

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Good article by Nat Hentoff about the “Ladies in White”, their struggle and the brutality against them by the goons of the Castroit tyrannical regime.

He writes too about the American Library Association (ALA) lack of support for the Cuban independent librarians, and their silence about the burning of books by the Castroit tyrannical military regime. It is Fahrenheit 451 all over again.

Cita:

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Arrests during religious procession in Cuba
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14855656

9 September 2011Last updated at 07:48 ET
Cuban police in Havana have arrested at least six people who shouted slogans calling for the release of political prisoners.

The detentions took place during the first religious procession of Cuba's patron saint allowed in the island since the 1959 revolution.

Liliet Heredero reports.

To see the video press the bbc link above.

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This religious procession of Cuba's patron saint is the first allowed in the island since 1959 when the Castro brothers took control of the government. First CNN started to provide coverage of the attacks against the dissidents by the regime State Security agents, and now the BBC is doing it too. It is encouraging to see the international media starting to publicize the tyranny's violence against the people.

Cita:

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At Least 55 More Political Arrests Today
http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2011/09/at-least-55-more-political-arrests.html

At least 22 Ladies in White were arrested today as they tried to attend Mass in celebration of the feast day of Our Lady of Charoty.

Amongst those arrested were Laura Pollán, Belkis Cantillo, Aimeé Garcés, Tania Montoya y Mildred Noemi Sánchez.

They were dragged into a bus, beaten and driven away.

Moreover, 16 dissidents were arrested in the town of Guantanamo, six in Palma Soriano and one in Guantanamo, as they set to embark on a nationwide East-to-West protest march.

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La Virgin de la Caridad (The Virgin of Charity), Cuba’s patron saint celebration took place September 8^th. The Castros dictatorship arrested more than fifty peaceful opposition members during the ceremonies, one of the most important religious events in Cuba. It is evident that the Castros’ regime continued to place restrictions on freedom of religion.

Cita:

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Cuban police reportedly detain dissidents http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/16/2409196/cuban-police-reportedly-detain.html

By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Cuban dissidents say police detained more than 20 people Thursday as they tried to take part in a novel protest – a proposed march from one end of the island to the other.

Among those reported detained were Angel Moya, freed this year after eight years in prison, and Guillermo Fariñas, awarded the prestigious Sakharov human rights prize last year.

Five dissident women were detained with Fariñas and Moya in the central city of Santa Clara, according to the dissidents, and two men were grabbed in Mella, in eastern Santiago province.

Berta Soler, Moya’s wife and a spokeswoman for the Ladies in White, said there was no news from those arrested as of Thursday evening. Such detentions usually last only a few hours or days, just long enough for the police to make sure they disrupt any planned protests.

The detentions came as the dissidents mobilized for their latest anti-government tactic — a march from east to west that would recreate a famous offensive by Cubans fighting for independence from Spain in the 1800s.

Police have blocked every attempt, however, keeping some dissidents under house arrest and detaining others before they reached the march’s starting points — then dropping them off in isolated spots or driving them home.

The Havana-based Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation reported that it had received word of more than 20 detentions on Thursday in the Santa Clara region alone.

“All the detentions were arbitrary, with the goal of preventing a group of peaceful [government] opponents from gathering,” wrote commission president Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz.

He added that his panel has received reports of more than 200 such detentions so far this month — very likely one of the highest totals since Raúl Castro took the reigns of power from his ailing brother Fidel in 2006.

José Daniel Ferrer García, a former political prisoner in the eastern town of Palmarito del Cauto, noted that Thursday’s detentions were connected to the proposed “National March for Freedom, Boitel and Zapata Live!”

The march was to have started Sept. 8 in easternmost Guantanamo and picked up supporters as it moved west toward Havana, he added.
But the plans changed after police from the very first day detained several dozen dissidents in towns like Guantánamo, Palma Soriano, Holguín, Bayamo and Las Tunas.

Now dissidents in each town and city are expected to try to stage their own marches, whenever they can and for as long as they can before police break them up, Ferrer told El Nuevo Herald.

The marches are to demand the government obey international agreements on human rights, halt the repression against peaceful dissidents, free all political prisoners and cancel all laws that limit dissent.

Ferrer also reported that Cuban prosecutors appear to be preparing to bring to trial four dissidents arrested Sept. 8 after they shouted anti-government slogans in the city of Santiago.

Ferrer and Moya were among the 52 political prisoners freed over the past year as part of a Raúl Castro promise to release the last of the 75 dissidents still jailed since a massive crackdown in 2003.

They were among the 12 who chose to stay in Cuba, while the rest went directly from prison to airplanes that flew them to exile in Spain in what critics branded as virtual deportations.

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Close to seventy human rights activists have been subjected to physical attacks, harassment, arrests and detentions while exercising their legitimate right to hold peaceful demonstrations calling for the release of political prisoners in Cuba. These attacks form part of a vast crackdown orchestrated by the Castros tyrannical regime forces under the command of the Ministry of the Interior.

Cita:

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Cuban police reportedly detain dissidents
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/16/2409196/cuban-police-reportedly-detain.html

By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Cuban dissidents say police detained more than 20 people Thursday as they tried to take part in a novel protest – a proposed march from one end of the island to the other.

Among those reported detained were Angel Moya, freed this year after eight years in prison, and Guillermo Fariñas, awarded the prestigious Sakharov human rights prize last year.

Five dissident women were detained with Fariñas and Moya in the central city of Santa Clara, according to the dissidents, and two men were grabbed in Mella, in eastern Santiago province.

Berta Soler, Moya’s wife and a spokeswoman for the Ladies in White, said there was no news from those arrested as of Thursday evening. Such detentions usually last only a few hours or days, just long enough for the police to make sure they disrupt any planned protests.

The detentions came as the dissidents mobilized for their latest anti-government tactic — a march from east to west that would recreate a famous offensive by Cubans fighting for independence from Spain in the 1800s.

Police have blocked every attempt, however, keeping some dissidents under house arrest and detaining others before they reached the march’s starting points — then dropping them off in isolated spots or driving them home.

The Havana-based Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation reported that it had received word of more than 20 detentions on Thursday in the Santa Clara region alone.

“All the detentions were arbitrary, with the goal of preventing a group of peaceful [government] opponents from gathering,” wrote commission president Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz.

He added that his panel has received reports of more than 200 such detentions so far this month — very likely one of the highest totals since Raúl Castro took the reigns of power from his ailing brother Fidel in 2006.

José Daniel Ferrer García, a former political prisoner in the eastern town of Palmarito del Cauto, noted that Thursday’s detentions were connected to the proposed “National March for Freedom, Boitel and Zapata Live!”

The march was to have started Sept. 8 in easternmost Guantanamo and picked up supporters as it moved west toward Havana, he added.
But the plans changed after police from the very first day detained several dozen dissidents in towns like Guantánamo, Palma Soriano, Holguín, Bayamo and Las Tunas.

Now dissidents in each town and city are expected to try to stage their own marches, whenever they can and for as long as they can before police break them up, Ferrer told El Nuevo Herald.

The marches are to demand the government obey international agreements on human rights, halt the repression against peaceful dissidents, free all political prisoners and cancel all laws that limit dissent.

Ferrer also reported that Cuban prosecutors appear to be preparing to bring to trial four dissidents arrested Sept. 8 after they shouted anti-government slogans in the city of Santiago.

Ferrer and Moya were among the 52 political prisoners freed over the past year as part of a Raúl Castro promise to release the last of the 75 dissidents still jailed since a massive crackdown in 2003.

They were among the 12 who chose to stay in Cuba, while the rest went directly from prison to airplanes that flew them to exile in Spain in what critics branded as virtual deportations.

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Close to seventy human rights activists have been subjected to physical attacks, harassment, arrests and detentions while exercising their legitimate right to hold peaceful demonstrations calling for the release of political prisoners in Cuba. These attacks form part of a vast crackdown orchestrated by the Castros tyrannical regime forces under the command of the Ministry of the Interior.

Cita:

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Pro-regime mob targets rights activists in Cuba
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iw0AFpP-TyyGfapWH69WqTqYlWUA?docId=CNG.055333c57e91be37a5aab83ae4ca97b6.31
(AFP) HAVANA — Some 300 activists backing Cuba's Communist government shouted down 35 relatives of political prisoners, some of whom were roughed up, an AFP journalist witnessed.

The pro-government crowd of university students and members of the Union of Communist Youth, massed to demonstrate outside the Havana home of Laura Pollan.

She is leader of the Ladies in White group, an award-winning group of political prisoners' kin that won the European Parliament's Sakharov prize back in 2005.

The Ladies in White, who organized a prayer meeting, were subjected to more than three hours of shouting and insults, including "Cuba, yes, Yankees, no," and "You witches won't pass by here."

When the women tried to leave the home, they were unable to open the door and Pollan and some other women were struck as they tried to exit.

An Interior Ministry bus then showed up to clear the area.

"These are the same people as ever," Pollan told reporters. "They are not the 'enraged Cuban people' (as the government calls the pro-regime activists) -- they are not spontaneous, they are brought here," she stressed.

Cuban dissidents say the Americas' only Communist regime has stepped up repressive activities in recent weeks. An estimated 50 political prisoners remain behind bars in this Caribbean country of 11 million.

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The AFP journalist reported that “An Interior Ministry bus then showed up to clear the area” What is this telling us? After the harassment of more than three hours, preventing the Ladies in White to go to church, the bus show up and took the mob of the Union of Communist Youth away. The regime brought them to do its dirty work, an after several hours came back to carry them away.

This CNN video show the mob attack against the Ladies in White.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LJCRNO33Qoc

This other video from the Spanish TV show the violent attack by the regime mobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KiQSfB0x0c4


These photo form EFE shows the physical violence against the Ladies in White when they were trying to live the house.
Archivo adjunto 4619

Archivo adjunto 4620

Cita:

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Cuba's Repression Escalates
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204138204576601123009028568.html

The loosening of travel restrictions by the U.S. is read as weakness in Havana.

BY MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
October 3, 2011

What happened was very predictable. The “loosened travel restrictions” and increased “remittances [from] Cuban-Americans” that Mr. Richardson cited as signs of Mr. Obama’s willingness to deal are read as weakness by the bullying regime. It has something, i.e., somebody, the U.S. wants back very badly, and the administration acts as if it is powerless. Why should Castro deal?
Mr. Richardson did even less for Cuba’s dissidents. One Richardson pearl of wisdom, shared on CNN, was that Cuba’s “human-rights situation has improved.” In fact, human rights in Cuba are rapidly deteriorating. To claim otherwise is to abandon the island’s brave democrats when they most need international solidarity. Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson returned home from an attempted hostage-rescue mission to Cuba last month empty-handed and “still scratching [his] head” as to why the Castro regime double-crossed him. What is truly baffling is why Mr. Richardson expected anything different from a dictatorship operating in extreme-repression mode.
In a Sept. 14 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Mr. Richardson said he had been invited to the island to discuss the release of U.S. Agency for International Development contractor Alan Gross. Mr. Gross was arrested in December 2009 and is serving a 15-year sentence.
Mr. Richardson admitted that he got stiffed by Cuba’s “foreign ministry, which a lot of the people there I know and have been friends” with. What he could not grasp is why those “friends”—a strange designation for individuals who might one day be hauled before an international human-rights tribunal—don’t appreciate the Obama administration’s outreach. Yes, they are “hardliners,” he admitted, but they ought to understand that the White House has been bending over backward to get along.
Actually they do understand, and that’s why they treated him so badly.
Mr. Richardson told Mr. Blitzer that he was “flabbergasted” when, after a “delightful” three-hour lunch discussing how U.S.-Cuba relations might be improved—including, he told me by phone Friday, the possibility of removing the country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism after the release of Mr. Gross—the foreign minister “slammed me three ways: one, no seeing Alan Gross; no getting him out; and no seeing Raul Castro.” Ask Sonia Garro, pictured in the nearby photo. For years Ms. Garro has denounced the regime’s discrimination against Afro-Cubans. Despite her own poverty, in 2007 she created a recreation center in her home for poor, unsupervised children, according to a report by an independent Cuban journalist. One of her goals: to get young girls out of prostitution. Ms. Garro is also a member of Ladies in Support, a group that pledges solidarity to the Ladies in White, which was founded by the wives, sisters and mothers of political prisoners in 2003 to work for their liberation.
In October 2010, Ms. Garro was detained by state security and held for seven hours. She emerged from the ordeal with a broken nose. Another woman taken into custody with Ms. Garro had her arm broken.
The nongovernmental organization Capitol Hill Cubans has reported that in the first 12 days of September, authorities detained 168 peaceful activists. These “express detentions” are designed to break up dissident gatherings, which risk spreading nonconformist behavior. Locking up offenders for long periods would be preferable, but the regime wants people like Mr. Richardson to go around saying that human rights have improved. The regime is also making greater use of civilian-clothed “rapid response” brigades that are trained, armed and organized to beat up democracy advocates.
Mr. Richardson told me he considers Cuba’s record improved because 52 political prisoners were sent to Spain in 2010. Yet exiling promising opposition leadership hardly qualifies as a humanitarian gesture. Nor are gruesome Cuban prisons anything to ignore.
Last month in a speech in New York, one former prisoner, Fidel Suárez Cruz, described his seven years and seven months of solitary confinement, including two years and eight months in a cell with no windows, ventilation or artificial light. One favorite pastime of his torturers: Four military men would pick him up and then drop him on the floor. His testimony, posted on Capitol Hill Cubans website, is required viewing for anyone who doubts the evil nature of this regime.
Nevertheless, Cuba’s dissidents remain relentless, and there are signs that the regime is giving up on the express-detention strategy. Fearless democracy advocate Sara Marta Fonseca and her husband Julio León Pérez have been in jail since Sept. 24. Ms. Fonseca’s son has seen her and says she is black and blue all over and has an injury to her spinal column. Word is the regime is preparing to charge the couple; 11 other dissidents are awaiting trial. Meanwhile, Yris Pérez Aguilera, the wife of the prominent dissident Jorge Luis García Pérez “Antúnez,” and two peers were detained on Sept. 26. Their whereabouts are unknown.
Any hope of protecting these patriots lies in international condemnation. Mr. Richardson could help by returning to CNN to correct the record.

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Ms O'Grady reporting is a kind that you don’t find out in most of the Main Stream Media. She keeps us informed on the activities conducted by the Castro brothers tyrannical regime. The MSM will attack in the U.S. those who roughly interrogates enemy terrorists, but ignore the brutal torture and detention of innocent political dissidents in Cuba.

The Cuban people had to suffer repression, torture, and tyranny for the last 54 years. The people in the U.S., especially blackand Hispanic, should realized that the nature of a government with unchecked powers is extremely dangerous. This type of regime claim to be the champions of the "people" but their real agenda is power and control. Once in power they won't give up control peacefully.

JFK policy to isolate Cuba, and maintained by the successive administrations, has been correct course of action. This type of policy, as it applies to dictatorial regimes, goes back to FDR in 1937 when he declared that dictatorships such as Nazi Germany need to be 'quarantined' as one would isolate the diseased from the healthy. To restore a US relationship with Cuba without a change in the brutal nature of the regime would simply serve to legitimize and economically prop up the Castros’ tyranny. It shouldn't be forgotten that when the Soviet Union existed and patronized the Castros politically and economically, the Castros used their strength, not for the good of Cuba or their people, but to export Communist Revolution to Latin America and Africa.

Basically the US Democrats politicians are the ones who have wanted to coddle the Castros and their repressive regime, going so far as expressing admiration for those bastards. Could be that their motivations were influenced by the wide availability of prostitutes during their visits.

Who can ever forget the face of Elian as he was brutally grabbed by Reno's DOJ officers, to be returned to the Cuban prison, clearly contrary to the wishes of his mother who died giving him a chance for freedom. Without a significant quid pro quo, restoring a US relationship with the Castros' tyranny should be out of the question.

Seem to me that double standards thrive among the majority of those who live in democratic countries and propound keeping Cuba under the Castros grip.

Those living in democratic countries fight tooth and nail for their freedom of expression, like the right to publish newspapers and own radio and television stations, freedom to found political parties, freedom to organize and participate in political rallies, and freedom to stage all sorts of protests. Most, if not all, strongly oppose discrimination by reason of political ideas. It is astonishing that these individuals couldn’t care less if Cubans are deprived of the civil rights they so passionately want for themselves.

Cita:

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New media bring the world closer to Cuba
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/04/2439025_p3/new-media-bring-the-world-closer.html

By MIMI WHITEFIELD
mwhitefield@MiamiHerald.com

When two women at Havana’s Cuatro Caminos market began beating on pots and pans with spoons one day in August, their protest call for freedom echoed around the world. At least 16 video entries, many of them the same or similar footage, were posted on YouTube and reposted on websites from Miami to Madrid. They showed the women calling out for freedom before police arrived to take them away. As a crowd followed, a rhythmic chant of “ Libertad, Libertad, Libertad’’ began. Cuban dissidents have long demanded respect for human rights and for just as long, pro-government demonstrators have clashed with them. But what has changed in Cuba — and changed drastically — is that new media are bringing these events to the world almost as quickly as they unfold. A protest by a group of women on the steps of the Capitolio building in Havana was likewise prime material for videographers, bloggers and Twitter aficionados. Members of the crowd can be seen holding up cellphones to capture the event. During a meeting of dissidents in Palma Soriano — a small town northeast of Santiago that was a hotbed of protests this past summer — dissident José Daniel Ferrer, watching from a distance, posted tweets as security agents surrounded the home and broke up the meeting with tear gas. “It’s undeniable that the new media is playing a role in the narrative of what is coming out of Cuba,” said Ted Henken, a Baruch College professor who has studied Cuban bloggers. “There is this network where people have learned to share their view of reality” through texting, sending videos, and blogging. New media are capturing not only the protests of human rights activists such as the Ladies in White, who are calling for the release of political prisoners, but also the angry voices and aggression of pro-government mobs who try to break up their marches. But for those who hope that the cascade of emails and texts that led to mass mobilizations during the Arab Spring might be repeated in Cuba, the island’s antiquated telecom system is a stumbling block. With only about 16 percent of Cubans with Internet access, it is the rest of the world rather than those inside Cuba who are more likely to see the videos and Internet updates. “The Cuban Internet is like their old cars — Cuba is stuck at Web 1.0,” said Larry Press, a professor of information systems at California State University Dominguez Hills. The Cuban Internet is slow, clunky and expensive, and the government can block websites it deems unfriendly. But Press said Cubans manage to connect in various ways: at embassies, Internet cafés, through friends at universities, hotels and other workplaces or by paying someone who does have Internet access to send emails for them. An undersea fiber optic cable connecting Cuba and Venezuela that should make Cuba’s Internet connections much quicker and more efficient has been completed for months but service still hasn’t begun. While the cable eventually may provide a very fast international link, “the domestic infrastructure also has to keep up,’’ Press said. “Otherwise, it will be a strong link in a weak chain.’’ Still, dissidents and bloggers have expanded their repertoire and often exchange information on how to thwart government blocks on blogs and other websites. Independent blogger Yoani Sánchez, who has established an international reputation writing about the activities of dissidents and her own thoughts on Cuban life, seems adept at getting around censors. The government is no longer blocking her blog and she has said sending SMS — text message — tweets from her mobile phone has become an important alternative when Internet access is lacking. Sánchez has nearly 165,000 Twitter followers and usually sends out several tweets daily. “Yoani Sánchez is better known outside Cuba than inside Cuba,” said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Center for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “She’s more famous outside than inside.’’ But Henken said sometimes there is an echo effect: A post may go international and then bounce back to Cuba through cascading emails or telephone calls from family abroad and then spread in Cuba through word of mouth. Cellphone use has grown rapidly in Cuba, increasing from 621,000 registered phones in 2009 to 1 million last year, according to Cuban government statistics. But per capita subscriber rates are low, according to Press, exceeding those of only eight other nations — Somalia and North Korea among them — that report to the International Telecommunication Union. “For the most part, it’s like the cellphones we used 10 years ago,” said Press. Most Cubans use their mobile phones for texting and talking and don’t have phones with Internet access. Ninoska Pérez, a Miami radio host and director of the Cuban Liberty Council, which condemns Cuba’s human rights record, said the cellphone has made a difference in getting news from Cuban dissidents. In one case, Pérez said, she was interviewing a dissident on Radio Mambí when a pro-government mob began to surround the home. She could hear the sounds of the crowd through the phone. Cubans, she said, sometimes send pictures to the station by cellphone or flash drives via friends or relatives. Right now, said Gomez, the cellphone might be one of the more effective methods to encourage change in Cuba: “Travel to Cuba. Ttake a cellphone and leave it behind. Improve the social network. That is itself a major accomplishment.” Havana has claimed that the United States is waging a “cyberwar” against Cuba with its recent attempts to distribute satellite Internet equipment. The U.S. says its effort is designed to encourage civil society. But it isn’t always successful. U.S. contractor Alan Gross, who tried to deliver communications equipment to the Jewish community in Havana, is now serving a 15-year sentence in Cuba. Ironically, the dissidents may have become better known in Cuba because state-run media have aired or printed various reports in recent weeks to discredit them as paid mercenaries of the United States and to accuse the U.S. of mounting an international media campaign that presents a distorted image of repression and violence in Cuba. A recent article on pro-government website CubaDebate that was picked up by various state-run media outlets said it’s not accidental that the United States has picked this moment, when the Arab world is in tumult, to mount a media campaign. The videos and blog posts coming out of Cuba do give the impression that Cuban dissidents have become emboldened, and human rights monitors say short-term detentions of dissidents have increased this year. Still, analysts say it’s hard to know if this is a high point in protest activity or whether it seems that way because of the ability to get the message out in a more dramatic fashion. Current protests don’t seem to have reached the level of those in other times of economic crisis. During the summer of 1993, for example, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc sparked widespread food shortages and frequent power blackouts in Cuba, there were almost daily reports of spontaneous street demonstrations against the government, spraying of anti-government graffiti on walls, looting of shops or even the stoning of homes of government officials and state vehicles. Still, Wilfredo Beyra said he believes dissident activity in his hometown of Palma Soriano is increasing. Beyra lost his job as a doctor and was threatened with 20 years in jail after he and others formed the Pro Human-Rights Movement, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in the late 1990s. He sought political asylum in the United States and has been here for the past 11 years. But he recently returned to Palma Soriano for a visit. “The dissident groups are growing, probably 500 percent between when I lived there and now,’’ said Beyra, who now lives with his family in Arizona. “There are a lot of people involved — the majority of them are very poor people,’’ he said. “In places like Palma Soriano, they are just tired of the way things are.’’ Beyra said he’s glad to see there’s at least a small window that allows dissidents to get their texts and videos out. But he said that window needs to open more — not just for the outside world to learn more about what is happening in Cuba but for Cubans themselves. “They don’t have enough information. Most don’t have the Internet; they don’t have Facebook,’’ Beyra said. “Really, no solutions are possible unless people get more information — and learn what they can do with their freedom.’’

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The regime tactic is to regard those who speaks out against the system as being a "traitor to the revolution" and mercenaries funded by foreign governments. The real fact is that certain Cubans are forming grass roots organizations of people who openly oppose the regime and aren’t funded by any outside source. Many others support those dissident groups but don’t do it openly because of the regime brutal crackdown on protesters in the form of beating by mobs, arrest and jail sentences.

The general discontent and exasperation with the regime has not yet reached its peak as in the Arab world, but have no doubt that the day of reckoning is coming. The reason that any reference to what is occurring in the Middle East can’t be find in the regime control media is because it worries of the impact of such events in the people. Nevertheless the information is seeping through the cracks and given people ideas of what and how con be done

Seem to me that double standards thrive among the majority of those who live in democratic countries and propound keeping Cuba under the Castros grip.
.
Those living in democratic countries fight tooth and nail for their freedom of expression, like the right to publish newspapers and own radio and television stations, freedom to found political parties, freedom to organize and participate in political rallies, and freedom to stage all sorts of protests. Most, if not all, strongly oppose discrimination by reason of political ideas. It is astonishing that these individuals couldn’t care less if Cubans are deprived of the civil rights they so passionately want for themselves.

Due to the new technologies is easy to record and transmit the Castroit regime goons violence against dissidents, including women and young people, with total disregard for their basic human rights. The military regimen lies and abuses are been video and witnesses accounts recorder, exposing them in a manner and to a level that was impossible before the advent of these new technology.

Cita:

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Cuba’s repression takes on more racial tint under Raul Castro
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/15/v-fullstory/2454488/cubas-repression-takes-on-more.html

BY JON B. PERDUE
Twitter@jonperdue

Unlike the pervasive myth of universal literacy and quality healthcare that has gone unchecked and unchallenged for decades, Cuba’s fabled championing of the Afro-Cuban community is one Cuban myth that has been shattered since Fidel Castro handed power to his younger brother Raúl.

Unlike Fidel, Raúl Castro has shown a tin ear about the politics of image making, sending violent mobs to attack peaceful female marchers in an age where every cell phone can be a live broadcasting tool to the rest of the world. Lately, these citizen-held cameras have been broadcasting disturbing scenes of screeching mobs of Castro supporters waiting outside a church for the peace marchers of the “Ladies in White” to exit, where they proceeded to beat, pelt with stones and even smash the ladies against the church walls to prevent their march, leaving several severely injured.

What is most remarkable is that these are not mayimbes, or light-skinned Communist Party elites of Cuban society, but many of these marchers are poor and black. Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, who runs the Rosa Parks Women’s Movement for Civil Rights, is a good example.

Perez Aguilera was leaving her home on Sept. 26 to go to a peaceful march for the freedom of another female prisoner, Sarah Marta Fonseca Quevedo, when she was beaten and forcibly taken away by Castro’s security apparatus. She was kept incommunicado from her husband and children for six days before being released — beaten and bloodied.

Sonia Garro recently became one of many peaceful Afro-Cuban community organizers that have gotten the business end of the Castro regime’s “outreach” efforts to Cuba’s black community.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Garro had protested the Castro regime’s discrimination against the Afro-Cuban community, and had paid dearly. In October of 2010, Garro was taken by Castro security for seven hours, after which she was released — with her nose broken. One of her fellow female marchers, also taken by Castro enforcers, was sent home with a broken arm.

Garro, a woman with little means to support her own family, had committed the offense of building a recreation center in her home for other poor children in the community who have nothing to do but roam the neighborhood unsupervised. One of her goals had been to try to free young girls from having to resort to prostitution, an all-too-common survival occupation in a country that boasts that its governing model provides for all.

Since taking over in 2008, Raúl Castro has continued Fidel’s policy of using female agents to handle the takedown and capture of the female marchers, so as to avoid photos of thuggish male enforcers attacking helpless females who do nothing other than carry flowers and march silently. But that has not lessened the brutality the women receive once they are behind the walls of Castro’s jails.

Aside from many of the Ladies in White and their supporters, two of the most recognizable Afro-Cuban dissidents have been Orlando Zapata and Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who were arrested together in 2002 during a peaceful protest. Biscet, a medical doctor and disciple of the nonviolence preached by Dr. Martin Luther King, was finally let out of prison in March of 2011 so the regime could let some steam out of the international pressure that was building against it. Zapata was not as fortunate.

Zapata died a martyr on Feb. 10, 2010, 83 days after beginning a hunger strike after he had asked in vain to serve his sentence under the same prison conditions that Fidel Castro had enjoyed when he was imprisoned by the Batista government. When Zapata died, Cuba’s state-controlled newspapers called him a “common criminal falsely elevated to martyr status.”

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson recently traveled to Havana under the auspices of trying to bring home American prisoner Alan Gross, who was imprisoned for handing out computers to the island’s small Jewish community. When Richardson arrived, he was not allowed to meet with Gross, nor with Raúl Castro.

His biggest failure was not asking to meet with any of Cuba’s political prisoners. Richardson compounded that mistake upon his return by telling CNN that the “human-rights situation has improved” under Raúl — a qualitatively and quantitatively false assertion that will now be regurgitated ad nauseam by the regime in order to dismiss international criticism.

But Richardson’s futile and counterproductive diplomatic freelancing is not the worst of the foolhardy foreign policy actions toward Cuba in recent years.

History may view the repeated junkets taken by members of the Congressional Black Caucus as the most shameful. They treat the Castro brothers as teenage girls would treat the Jonas Brothers, and come back singing the praises of how the “revolution” has been great for Afro-Cubans, without ever asking to check the dissidents’ living conditions in the island’s gulags.

They will, however, shout from the mountaintop about the supposed atrocities taking place on the opposite end of the island at Guantánamo Bay.

Racial solidarity, it seems, stops at the water’s edge.

Jon Perdue is director for Latin America programs at The Fund for American Studies.

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The new technology is a great threat to Castros’ tyrannical regime. They need isolation to prevent the outsiders seeing the drastic measures they used to remain in power, and at the same time to prevent those in the island from receiving news and support from the outside world, like news and video's of revolts against other tyrannical regimes, which would encourage them to take a stand and fight for their freedom.

Cita:

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Grief and shame
http://www.penultimosdias.com/2011/10/17/grief-and-shame/

By Ernesto Hernandez Busto

The Cuban situation is increasingly veering away from politics. The prevailing sentiment among people who closely follow the news from the island tends to be shame: decent Cubans, in Cuba and in exile, are ashamed of the direction the country has taken, the cynicism of repression, the complete lack of moral perspective that remains following the political failure of the Castro regime. The discussion is no longer political, it is moral.

Laura Pollán’s death in Havana’s Calixto Garcia Hospital, after a week in intensive care, raises serious questions not only about the virtues of the Cuban health care system, but also about the capacity to translate this moral indignation into visible politics.

Of course, there are always suspicions that the death of an indisputable leader of the peaceful opposition could have been caused, or accelerated, by methods that only the nightmares of totalitarian systems can conceive of. We have already seen worse; the Cuban chronicle of horror could easily admit another stain. But even if we have no proof of medical negligence, or worse, even if we cannot directly blame the forces of repression or expound on the details of her death, we have abundant proof of what the Cuban government did, in life, to Laura Pollán Toledo and to the courageous Ladies in White. Abundant proof of how they wanted to debilitate this woman, over and over; of how they tried to break her by every means possible.

I wonder, and I believe I am not the only one, what they are thinking now, all those people who behaved like rabid dogs at each of the many repudiation rallies that Laura suffered; what will she do now, for example, the woman whose insolence stands out even among the mob incited by State Security. Or another one, who personally took charge of mistreating Laura last month. Their faces are unforgettable, but they also trigger our embarrassment, a shame provoked by seeing such lamentable events, such despicable actors. Isaac Bachevis Singer’s story, The Destruction of Kreshev, offers a good summary of the morality of the pogram and its consequences; there, he says it all.

Laura Pollán was, without a doubt, a moral example—as recorded today in a good editorial. Her dignity and her Catholic faith favored a comportment that lifted her far above her detractors. She knew how to win a cause, the release of the 75, but she paid the highest price for embodying the choice of peaceful struggle and nonviolence. Her example moved even the most iconic figures of the official culture, like Pablo Milanés, whose shame in the face of the programmed bullying of defenseless women burst forth in some controversial declarations that honor the man, and that remind us, by contrast, of the shameless cowardice of those who today remain silent or continue to defame her.

Now, Laura Pollán is no longer among the living, and the Cuban opposition is in mourning. With regards to the wake, the testimonies I have received agree that State Security imposed its rhythm from beginning to end; her family and other opponents offered not the least resistance to their directions. Drowning in grief, they were paralyzed by an event that transcended them, perhaps unable to grasp the tremendous significance of her death. Grief mixed with shame, and this mixture resulted in inaction, the temptation to avert one’s face and to become defenseless against the onslaught.

I read that there will be masses in Miami, in Santiago de Chile, and in Madrid. But the mass and homage that this woman deserves remains pending; it will be remembered the day her people wake up and decide to follow her example: a humble teacher who defied a government and so managed to prove its true nature.

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Laura Pollan is not the first and unfortunately will not be the last either.
http://cubaarchive.org/home/images/stories/truth%20and%20memory/female_victims.pdf


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Cita:

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The legacy of Laura Pollan, Cuba’s Lady in White
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-legacy-of-laura-pollan-cubas-lady-in-white/2011/10/16/gIQAUizlpL_story.html

By Yoani Sanchez,

Eight years ago, Laura Pollan was a schoolteacher living with her husband, Hector Maseda, the leader of the outlawed Cuban Liberal Party. Despite the vicissitudes of living in a country where association is penalized, the family tried to live a normal life in their small house on Neptune Street in Havana.

But early one morning, a pounding on the door irrevocably changed their lives. After an exhaustive search and a summary trial, Maseda was imprisoned and sentenced to 20 years in jail, accused of acting against national security. His crime: imagining a different Cuba, politically opposing the authorities and putting those opinions in writing.

Seventy-five opposition figures were arrested and condemned during that sad March of 2003, a time that will remain forever known in Cuba’s history as the Black Spring. The Cuban government expected this blow to the opposition to persuade other restless citizens to abandon the ranks of the protesters. Officials also believed that the wives, mothers and daughters of the political prisoners would remain silent, so as not to cause more problems for their loved ones. They never anticipated that these women would band together to publicly denounce the arrests and imprisonments. But every political calculation made from the arrogance of power turned out badly.

Thus was born the Ladies in White, a group of women who, through peaceful struggle, demanded and achieved the release of all the prisoners of conscience. At first it seemed a tiny, disjointed movement, given the long miles separating one woman from another. But the ladies’ indignation functioned as a unifying element, and their marches through the streets of Havana, each woman dressed in white and carrying a gladiolus, followed Sunday after Sunday for more than seven years. One voice stood out among them, that of a diminutive blue-eyed woman who taught Spanish and literature to teenagers.

Laura Pollan was emerging as the spokeswoman and leader of the Ladies in White, which focused on human rights and the release of their relatives. In a country that has always been moved by the polarization of its ideological discourse, the Ladies in White were different from their inception. Instead of party platforms, the women displayed only the desire to embrace their loved ones. They did not choose to organize themselves around a doctrine but rather around the unassailable position of family affection. Thus they won a great deal of sympathy among the population of the island, and so, of course, provoked the authorities into a campaign of defamation and insults against them.

If one group has been denigrated to a fault in the Cuban media, it is the Ladies in White. The regime has launched a kind of media war against the women, backed by experiments in intimidation. “Repudiation rallies” — busloads of “spontaneous” protesters called in to scream insults at and even beat their targets — made Pollan’s front door their highest altar. Official journalists called them “The Ladies in Green,” an allusion to the economic support they received from Cubans in exile in order to take food to their imprisoned husbands. Meanwhile, the Cuban government didn’t hesitate to dip into its national coffers for every kind of political attack; part of this money — which could have gone to feed Cubans — was spent ferreting out every cent that reached the hands of these women in need.

The national press continued to denigrate Pollan even on Oct. 7, when she was admitted into the intensive care unit of a Havana hospital with aching bones, shortness of breath and extreme weakness.

Given the seriousness of her condition, government officials asked her family if the patient could be transferred to a luxury clinic designed for the military. But Pollan herself said, before losing consciousness in an induced coma, “I want to stay in the hospital of the people.” And there she died on Oct. 14, after a five-day delay in diagnosing dengue fever, in a country that has been experiencing an intense outbreak of the disease for months now.

While newspapers around the world reported on the death of Laura Pollan, Granma, the official paper of the Communist Party, and all the papers of Cuba’s provinces remained silent. This reaction is a given, considering the pettiness of a government that cannot feel sympathy at the death of an opponent. The Castro regime has never been able to pause in its belligerence, never been able to offer condolences.

But this silence also stems from its fear of this little teacher of Spanish, the fear that sticks, even now, in officials’ throats. The leader of the Ladies in White is dead, and no one in Cuba will ever carry a gladiolus in his or her hands without thinking of Laura Pollan.

Yoani Sanchez is a writer in Cuba. Her awards include the 2010 World Press Freedom Hero award. She blogs at www.desdecuba.com/ generationy and is the author of “Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today.” This column was translated from Spanish by M.J. Porter.

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We cannot forget the thousands of Cubans executed without due process, imprisoned, perishing trying to escape in make shift rafts, forced into exile, since the reign of terror of the Castro brothers tyrannical monarchy started 53 years ago.

Why so many Cubans left the island and live all over the world? Some of the reasons are: because they cannot live in a country where an employee in a tourist hotel earns more than a doctor, where the currency in which they are pay is worthless, where they cannot say that Castro is an inept without being through into prison, you cannot travel freely, a place where in order to have a phone install you must be a supporter of the regime, where to get a job in which you can earn some hard currency need to be recommended by an apparatchik. Want a few more? How about a country where you can not kill your own cow, because if you do, you will go to jail and get as many years as somebody that kill a person, where you cannot own more than one house, and the regime can take it away from you at any time. Put yourself in their shoes, and think what would you do.

Castros’ regime evil characteristics have long been well-known and documented in many cases of political repression. But for the main stream media and so call progressives “supporters of human rights”, they are oblivious to these human tragedies events and consider them non-events. Yet they still apologize for the regressive Soviet Union Stalinist regime. The bravery of the “Ladies in White” shall be recognize as a triumph of the human spirit, supported and celebrate outside of Cuba. Not to do so, will encourages the regime to keep attacking them with impunity. They need your support.

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Cuban independent journalist who wrote about the possible intravenous bacterial infection of Laura Pollan arrested
http://babalublog.com/2011/10/cuban-independent-journalist-who-wrote-about-the-possible-intravenous-bacterial-infection-of-laura-pollan-arrested/#comments

Hablemos Press journalist who wrote about the possible intravenous bacterial infection of Laura Pollan arrested

Havana, October 17, 2011- Six agents from Cuban State Security arrested independent journalist Carlos Rios Otero at his home at 5:30 pm on Friday the 14th.

Rios Otero, who is a member of Independent Press Agency Hablemos Press, had published an article the day before detailing the critical condition of Lady in White Laura Pollan and other cases of Ladies in White who became ill after being injected during acts of repression.

According to the journalist, the agents took him to the Aguilera police station in Lawton, Havana, where he was constantly threatened until after midnight.

His arrest took place two hours before the announcement of Laura Pollan's death, at the same time when it became evident that many of the cell phones of peaceful opposition members had been cut off.

At the home of the journalist at Correa #163, Santos Suarez, a patrol car appeared with two uniformed police officers and two plainclothes agents of State Security. Another two agents in civilian clothes arrived on motorcycles. One said to Rios: "Carlos, we need to talk."

In his articles for Hablemos Press, one on September 12th "IPK Denounces Medical Power," and on October 28th, "Lethal Vaccinations against the Cuban Dissidence," Rios explored the possible relationship between the grave illness of Laura Pollan and the puncture inflicted on her at the last attack she suffered.

He cited previous instances, such as the other Ladies in White who had been injected and then suffered dizzy spells, blurry vision, fever, loss of equilibrium, diarrhea, nausea, cramps, irregular menstrual cycles with heavy bleeding, and other symptoms attributable to bacterial infection or reactions to toxic substances.

Rios said: "They placed me in the back seat between two plainclothes agents and with the two motorcycles leading a caravan that appeared to me as if I were the president of the republic. In the Aguilera station at a section they call "The Pit," they interrogated me and the four agents threatened me regarding signs that had appeared in the streets with the word "NO." I belong to the "NO" campaign. They threatened me with prison for the signs, calling it a "crime of propaganda for the enemy," but I refused to sign an "admission." They interrogated me about my friends and about a repair done on my house - remember that Dr. Darsi Ferrer was imprisoned on the pretext of the materials used in the repair of his house. They avoided talking about my articles dealing with the health of Laura Pollan and the puncture she suffered on her forearm during the last act of repression carried out by them and their paramilitary "Rapid Response Brigades." After releasing me around midnight, one said, 'Laura has died.'"

Carlos Rios believes that the sudden interest in him has nothing to do with the signs on the streets, but with the death of Laura Pollan while he writes of how the government's "battle of ideas" includes suspicious injections.

According to family members, Lady in White and photo journalist for Hablemos Press, Sandra Guerra, was "sequestered by State Security agents on Saturday morning when she was traveling to Havana to attend the funeral for Pollan."

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On October 17 Roberto Rodriguez Tejera in his radio program interviewe­d the Cuban independen­t journalist of Hablemos Press­ Rios Otero, and several Ladies in White. They denounce three other cases of toxic injections applied on Ladies in White by the regime mobs on their Sunday walk to mass. One of them is Ana Betancourt, a healthy 40 years old woman, hospitalize with high blood pressure and fever, general inflammation and uncontroll­ed menstruati­on. The other two are Montes de Oca and Sara Marta Fonseca, who after being injected during their Sunday walk, had similar symptoms to that of Laura Pollan and Betancourt. Rios Otero denounced that he was detained and interrogat­ed during several hours in the Villa Marista, headquarter of the Political Police. They told him that he will be prosecuted on a number of charges if he does not leave aside his investigat­ion about the toxic injections­. They are afraid he will find the smoking gun if he continues with his investigations.

Cita:

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Lech Walesa on the death of Laura Pollan
http://joanantoniguerrero.blogspot.com/2011/10/lech-walesa-elogia-la-lucha-de-laura.html

October 20, 2011

Letter send by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wakllesa to the husband of Laura Pollán, Héctor Maseda, with the condolences for the recent death of The Ladies in White leader.
Archivo adjunto 6006

Dear Sir:

It was with great sadness that I received the news regarding the death of your wife Laura Pollan. Those of us who admire the values professed by Ms. Laura Pollan share in the enormous tragedy that is being experienced in these days.

She was able to mobilize not only her compatriots, but also the international community in the defense of those struggling for democracy who were unjustly sentenced and imprisoned for their beliefs. The cause for democracy and liberty in Cuba has become our dream and our common objective.

The Ladies in White, a movement established by Ms. Laura Pollan, is proof that peaceful struggle and the results of its practice are always victorious. Please, accept my sincerest condolences and you can count on my constant support for the mission launched by your wife.

Sincerely,

Lech Walesa

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. "The US does not lead morally or politically anymore. The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. That was the hope, that whenever something was going wrong, one could count on the United States. Today we lost that hope." - Lech Walesa

We are in need of a few more Walesas on these trial times. It is deplorable how quickly people forget.

Cita:

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A Dissidents Mysterious Death in Havana
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576645362368682524.html

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
OCTOBER 24, 2011

Days after a beating by a mob, Laura Pollán fell ill and soon died. She was cremated two hours later.
For more than eight years, the Castro regime tried its level best to silence Ladies in White leader Laura Pollán. Ten days ago Pollán did fall silent. She passed away, after a brief illness, in a Havana hospital.

Hospital officials initially said that she died of cardiac and respiratory arrest. But according to Berta Soler, the spokesperson for the Ladies in White in Havana, the death certificate says that Pollán succumbed to diabetes mellitus type II, bronchial pneumonia and a syncytial virus.

Since there was no independent medical care available to her and there was no autopsy, we are unlikely ever to find out what killed Pollán. We do know that although she was a diabetic with high blood pressure, both were under control and she did not need regular insulin shots. Indeed, she had been healthy only weeks before her death, according to friends and family. We also know that the longer she remained under state care, the sicker she got.

Not surprisingly, the Cuban opposition is suspicious about her demise, and their concerns deserve an airing if only because of the nature of the totalitarian regime. It learned its trade from communist Eastern Europe, where the practice of eliminating enemies while in state custody was refined.

Over the life of the Cuban dictatorship, suspicious deaths (most commonly heart attacks) of otherwise healthy individuals who were considered disloyal to the Castros are not unheard of. The most famous was José Abrantes, a former interior minister and confidant of Fidel, who had a falling out with his boss, was imprisoned, and though known for being fit died of a heart attack in his cell in 1991. More than one defector from inside the regime has claimed that Abrantes was murdered.

Pollán took up her cause when her husband, Hector Maseda, was arrested, along with 74 others, in an island-wide crackdown on dissent in March 2003. Seeking a way to resist the injustice, she joined other women whose loved ones were handed down long sentences in Cuba's Black Spring. Together they organized a simple, peaceful act of disobedience: After attending Mass at St. Rita's church in Havana, they marched in the street, dressed in white and carrying gladiolas. The group was peaceful and nonpolitical. But to the regime it was dangerous. Mobs were unleashed against it.

Beatings, detentions, intimidation and harassment of the group were fruitless. The Ladies repeatedly returned to their "counterrevolutionary" practices: Sunday Mass, silent processions, Wednesday women's "literary teas" held in Ms. Pollán's home, prayer vigils for the persecuted.
The movement took on enormous visual power, and when images of the ladies being attacked in the streets went viral, the dictatorship was humiliated. The Castros were forced to offer the Black Spring prisoners "liberation" through exile with their spouses.

Pollán and her husband refused. Instead she expanded the movement across the country and promised to convert it to a human rights organization open to all women. Speaking from the Guanajay prison as her condition was deteriorating, jailed former Cuban counterintelligence officer Ernesto Borges Pérez told the Hablemos Press that making public those objectives likely sealed her fate.

On Sept. 24, Pollán was attacked by a mob as she tried to leave her house to attend Mass. Her right arm was reportedly twisted, scratched and bitten. This is notable because for more than a year, the Ladies had alleged that when Castro's enforcement squads came after them, the regime's goons pricked their skin with needles. Those same women claimed that they subsequently felt dizzy, nauseous and feverish. Independent journalist Carlos Ríos Otero reported this for Hablemos Press before Pollán was hospitalized.

According to interviews with Pollán's daughter and husband and with Ms. Soler, conducted by the Miami-based nongovernmental organization Directorio, eight days after the Sept. 24 assault Pollán came down with chills and began vomiting. Wracked with pain in her joints the next day, she was taken to the Calixto García hospital. After a battery of tests she was told everything was normal and released. On Oct. 4, she had a fever and shortness of breath. A prescribed antibiotic did not help. On Oct. 7 she was admitted to the hospital, later transferred to intensive care and the next day put on a respirator.

Her family was denied visitation rights until Oct. 10, when only her daughter was allowed to see her. State security agents surrounded her bed and monitored the doctors. On Oct. 12 doctors reported that she had a syncytial respiratory virus, which is otherwise known as a cold. She was obviously much sicker.

On Oct. 14 she died. When the family was allowed to see the body, state security agents were again on hand, as they were at the one-hour wake permitted at midnight. In record time—only two hours later—Pollán was returned to ashes. Who could blame the resistance for its suspicions?

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The tragic death of a true leader. The Castros are old men near the end of the rope, but it would be much sweeter to see them deposed and repudiated before they go. They deserve a Gaddafi and Ceausescu type of end.

Former political prisoner José Ángel Luque Álvarez, on October 20^th was arrested in Havana and beaten for wearing a T-shirt with the word “change.” When he was released two days later, the State Security officer Fernando Tamayo Gómez told him: “We killed Laura; we can do the same with you and nothing happens.”

Cita:

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Anti- governmentprotest at Havana’s Fraternity Park
http://babalublog.com/2011/12/human-rights-activists-in-cuba-violently-arrested-and-bystanders-pepper-sprayed-after-courageous-public-protest/

ByAlbertode la Cruz (translation), on December 1, 2011,

Activistsdisplayed a sheet with the words "Stop the lies and deception of the Cubanpeople" and "End the hunger, the misery, and the poverty inCuba"

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Archivo adjunto 63934Vq5IKT15oU/Ttbck7eSg2I/AAAAAAAADE8/m3GeP8aNyFg/s1600/Agentes+esposan+a+Ivonne+al+derribarla+al+suelo.JPG/
ActivistsIvonne Malleza and Blanca Hernández Moya led a protest this Wednesday againstthe island's government at the Fraternity Park in Havana, say sources from thedissidence.

MallezaGalano, who is 33, and Hernandez Moya, 77, displayed a sheet with the phrases"Stop the lies and deception of the Cuban people" and "End thehunger, the misery, and the poverty in Cuba," said Mayra Morejon toCUBAENCUENTRO, who was also present at the protest.

Morejonexplained that for almost 20 minutes, the activists demanded from thegovernment "food for the children, liberty for the Cuban people, and araise in pensions" for the elderly, among other demands.

Theactivists said that while the women were protesting, "two police officerscame running" and attempted to "take away Ivonne's sheet." Butthe crowd gathered around her came out in her defense and demanded that thepolice let her go, and then the police officers "backed away fromher."

Accordingto Morejon, more police and patrol cars arrived and began "pepper sprayingthe people." They arrested Malleza Galano, her husband, Ignacio MartinezMoreno, who was beaten, and Hernandez Moya. All of them are currently at theZanja y Dragones police station in central Havana, said the activist.

Morejonalso stated that Yordani Biset was also arrested, " a young man who was onhis cell phone, but who had nothing to do with the protest. This young man hasnothing to do with us, he is not a member of the opposition. He was just aspectator in the crowd, and they aggressively threw him into a police car. Hehas nothing to do with this," Morejon said.

Oppositionleader Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, who leads the Cuban Network of CommunityCommunicators, also reported on the protest at Háblalo Sin Miedo (Speak itwithout Fear).

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cwaLXPjdLco/TtbclDk5JHI/AAAAAAAADFE/T-JjcjB0uN0/s320/Blanca+e+Ivonne+con+el+lienzo.jpgArchivo adjunto 6392

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The public protest initiated by Cuban human rights activists at the Fraternity Park in Havana was quickly quashed by Castro State Security with several activists and bystanders being violently arrested. The protest was led by two women of Cuba's peaceful opposition movement, Ivonne Malleza and Blanca Hernández Moya. Their act of protest against the repressive Castro dictatorship was highlighted by the support they received from the large crowd of bystanders when the Cuban State Security agents attempted to arrest them. The crowd surrounded the women in an attemptto protect them from the agents, forcing the security officials to pepper spray the people in order to reach the two women.

Video of the protest on November 30 at Havana’s Fraternity Park
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hbBJJm3-uAw

This is one of the most recent examples of the great achievements of the Revolution, the physical abuse of women demonstrating peacefully. Clearly it can be seeing and hear a lot of public support, something that is occurring with more frequency. The Cuban people are fed up with the Castroit regime disaster and it is only a matter of time that this type of protests will evolve into the Caribbean spring.

Cita:

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Cuba stops dissident Rights Day protest, 200 held
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE7B90HI20111210

ByJack Kimball and Nelson Acosta

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban dissidents said on Saturday thatabout 200 people were temporarily detained by the Communist-run island'ssecurity services in the days leading up to an international human rightscelebration.

Government supporters danced salsa and chanted political slogansin a Havana square to mark the 63rd anniversary of the adoption of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.

Opposition members who had planned to celebrate Human RightsDay in the same place, and protest against abuses in Cuba, were blocked fromgoing to the square, dissidents said.

"Some 200 detentions for political motives have takenplan in the last nine days in the lead up to the international Human RightsDay," said Elizardo Sanchez of the independent Cuban Commission of HumanRights said.

"Authorities use a tactic of short-duration arrests,who are released a few hours or days later, to impede protests."

International rights groups say Cuban laws virtually preventall forms of protest and dissent while the government says the free educationand health services it provides show its respect for human rights.

On Friday, government backers blocked the dissident groupLadies in White from marching in the street.

The women were heckled again on Saturday by a crowd ofgovernment supporters and prevented from leaving a house were they had gatheredin central Havana.

"Here come the people to fight for what is ours. Thesestreets are ours and that's why we defend them," shouted governmentsympathizer Mirta Sosa outside the house.

"The government has prevented us from exercising theright of free movement in the streets. Here in Cuba, human rights are violateddaily," said Ladies in White leader Berta Soler.

The Ladies in White group was formed by the wives andmothers of 75 dissidents jailed in a 2003 crackdown on Castro's opponents. Theyhave since been released by President Raul Castro's government.

Havana's "Black Spring of 2003" caused a majorfallout between Cuba and the international community, and while some Europeannations have begun a rapprochement since the prisoner release, relations withlong-time ideological foe the United States remain in a deep freeze.

Opposition protests in Cuba are exceedingly rare. Cuba'sgovernment, which came to power in a 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro,accuses dissidents of being on the payroll of the Washington, which has imposeda trade embargo on the island since Castro embraced Soviet communism in theearly 1960s.

On Saturday, state media was filled with stories andcommentaries for the anniversary of the adoption of the U.N. UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights in 1948.

"The fulfillment of international commitments ... hasbeen implicit in the work of the Cuban Revolution despite the economic war ...and also the systematic plots to destroy it," Jose Luis Mendez Mendez, ananalyst at the research arm of the Interior Ministry, wrote in an opinion pieceon cubadebate.cu.

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Castros’ tyranny, which is a member of United NationsHuman Rights, celebrated Human Rights Daywith a crackdown on around 200 Cuban human rights activists. The oppressionin the island is vast and wide. Long Live Human Rights!

Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez y Sanchez, Cuban Lawyer, Jurist, Politician, Diplomat and Economist, wrote a book entitled "La Carta Magna de la Comunidad de las Naciones (The Magna Carta of the Community of Nations)" in 1945. At the San Francisco Conference the Republic of Cuba submitted two proposals for consideration, a "Draft Declaration of the International Rights and Duties of the Individual" and a “Draft Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Nations.” These two drafts were written and presented by Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez in his book.

John P. Humphrey prepared the first draft for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947. In the Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4, “Memoirs of John P. Humphrey, the First Director of the United Nations Division of Human Rights”, he stated: “I was no Thomas Jefferson and, although a lawyer, I had had practically no experience drafting documents. But since the Secretariat had collected a score of drafts, I had some models on which to work. One of them had been prepared by Gustavo Gutierrez (Sanchez) and had probably inspired the draft Declaration of the International Duties and Rights of the Individual which Cuba had sponsored at the San Francisco Conference.” He was right, those were the documents written in Gutierrez book. Gutierrez draft for the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was chosen as one of the drafts presented by the Secretariat.

Dr. Gutierrez draft exercised a great influence in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Below you will find a preamble of three proposed drafts. The draft by Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez is the one in the middle.

Archivo adjunto 6630

Cita:

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Jailed Cuban dissident dies at 31
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/1...t-dies-at.html
147A
BY Juan Carlos Chavez
jcchavez@elNuevoHerald.com
Posted on Thursday, 01.19.12

The young Cuban dissenter Wilman Villar, who 50 days ago began a hunger strike in his jail cell in response to his imprisonment, died Thursday night in the Juan Bruno Zayas de Santiago hospital in Cuba.

Villar, who was 31, became a martyr of the opposition movement in defense of individual liberties and human rights in Cuba. Villar was being kept alive by a respirator for several days before his condition deteriorated. He developed a sepsis infection that spread through his bloodstream in his final hours. Doctors alerted his family, stating that "only a miracle" could save his life.

The complication mortally wounded his liver and intestines, according to doctors. On Thursday, his wife, Maritza Pelegrino, said state agents will not allow her to see her husband's body. Villar was serving a four-year jail sentence at the time of his death.

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Another prisoner of conscience died in a hunger strike under the Castros regime. The Dissident’s death highlights the repressive tactics of the regime. It uses capricious arrests, fake trials, harsh imprisonment, and harassment of dissidents’ families, in order to silence its critics.

Wilman death after 50 days of a hunger strike is a demonstration that there are Cuban dissidents capable of fighting the regime all the way to the limit. The Castros regime doesn’t make any concession that could be interpreted as weakness, since it doesn’t has any future whatsoever. The one that had a future was Wilman, 31 years old and with a wife and two girls, but the regime elected to let him die.

It is really quite amazing how CBS News has completely given up on even trying to give the appearance their reports on Cuba are objective. This news report goes way beyond irresponsible and lazy journalism and can be honestly classified as pure propaganda.

One of the few non violent ways to be heard in the Castro brothers 54 years paradise is going in ahunger strike as an act of political protest. It is very sad that these hunger strikes have to be used to bring worldopinion to bear against the oppression and denial of freedom by the two tyrantsand force change.

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What Wilman Villar's tragic death tells usabout today's Cuba

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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/01/24/what-wilman-villars-tragic-death-tells-us-about-todays-cuba/

By Mike Gonzalez

The tragic death of Cubandissident Wilman Villar after a 50-day hunger strike should make clear that theCuban people seek freedom and are increasingly willing to defy a repressiveregime to get it.

They deserve outsidemoral support, which is best expressed by a repudiation of the regime thatbrutalizes them, not by establishing relations that would only legitimize thedictatorship of the Castro brothers.

The Obama administrationhas already begun to take steps in the direction of progressively establishinglinks with Cuba.

It has relaxed travelrestrictions and remittances to Cuba, therefore replenishing the generals’hard-currency coffers and helping to validate their unelected, illegal andrepressive regime.

Mr. Villar’s death,however, makes a sad mockery of many of the arguments used by those who wantU.S. ties with the island’s communist leaders.

Among these arguments:that 80-year-old RaulCastro, Fidel’s little brother and successor, isliberalizing his island fiefdom.

We also hear that thedocile Cubans don’t care that they lack political freedom anyway and thatAmerican companies should go into Cuba headfirst and transact with thetormentors of 11 million Cubans.

The more than 4,000political detentions and arrest in Cuba in 2011, and Mr. Villar’s death, arepowerful reminders that none of these premises are true.

Outside theadministration, no man has taken up the cudgel of the defense of normalizationmore than one senior official who, ironically, served in the Bushadministration -- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, formerchief of staff to Secretary of State ColinPowell.

As it happens, I debatedCol. Wilkerson last Wednesday, precisely 24 hours prior to Mr. Villar’s murder,in front of a very friendly crowd (very friendly to him) at the World AffairsCouncil. His comment at one point that “the Cubans couldn’t give a rat’s assabout who governs them,” pretty much describes the patronizing mindset.
Well, tell that to Mr.Villar, or his widow, or the dissidents the Cuban authorities are roughing uptoday to prevent them from gathering to denounce Mr. Villar’s death.

In fact, Col. Wilkerson’scomments were fairly typical of the pro-normalization crowd and are worthdelving into. For example, he expressed the opinion that it was okay to forgejoint ventures with the military. Yes, the same military that suppresses therights of Cubans and controls 80 percent of the Cuban economy.

That these generalspocket over 90 percent of the compensation foreign corporations pay Cubanworkers also didn’t seem to dissuade him. This is “what happens all over theworld,” he snorted.

More troubling was theobvious contempt Col. Wilkerson expressed for the democratic institutions of acountry he once served, such as the FBI and our judicial system.

Even more disturbing werehis references to a fellow American languishing in a Cuban prison, Alan Gross,for the “crime” of distributing computers to fellow Jews in Cuba. Mr. Gross,Col. Wilkerson said at one point, could very well be a U.S. spy.
What’s most amazing aboutthis is that not even Cuba’s communists say this. They have put Mr. Gross inprison precisely for distributing computers in Cuba.

Cuba has one third theInternet penetration of Haiti, perhaps the world’s poorest country, because the Castroswant it that way.

Col. Wilkerson knew thatthere were two representatives of the Cuban government in the audience -- twogoons who work that Interest Section here -- and that justifying theimprisonment of a fellow American in front of them is injurious to the effortto free him.

Col. Wilkerson, againstall evidence, spoke as though he thought that people who want world-widecondemnation of Cuba’s regime didn’t have principle on their side, but wereonly afraid of losing the Cuban-American vote.

My ears perked up when hesaid that KarlRove had prevented Sec. Powell from rapprochementwith Cuba (did Sec. Powell really want that?). He said, “Karl Rove told us thatwe needed to win Florida’s 27 electoral votes.”

I served in the Bushadministration and that didn’t sound right to me, so I e-mailed Karl Rove. Hisreply was swift:

“Totalfabrication. A lie. Never had any such meeting or conversation.
In myexperience, Col. Wilkerson found questions of principle hard to grapple with ifthe opinion of Secretary Powell differed from the convictions of PresidentBush.

PresidentBush had deep and well-informed opinions about Cuba and a clear-eyedunderstanding of how best to hasten the day of freedom for the Cuban people.”

That day will indeed behastened if we all keep this mindset, and we will have fewer sacrifices likeMr. Villar’s. May he rest in peace.

MikeGonzalez is Vice President forCommunications at TheHeritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @gundisalvus

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The International Community shall be urged to condemnthe Castros tyrannical regime for the death of Cuban dissident Wilman VillarMendoza. As Martin Luther King said “We shall overcome.”