[The government] uses many methods of repression; they use physical repression as a last resort because their preferred form of repression is psychological. Because they of course want to appear as if they’re not oppressive; so they use what I call “low intensity” suppression. They make your life miserable; they imprison you, they release you, they watch you, they ask for your ID in the street and they pick you up during their patrol, they stop the bus you’re riding and they take you off, they pick you up in a car and drop you (X) number of kilometers away from your town in an deserted area where cars do not pass by.
They did that to Juan Carlos González Leiva, a blind man, who is a human rights activist and is a freelance journalist; they took his cane and left him in a deserted area. [Juan Carlos González Leiva is a Cuban lawyer and freedom advocate.]
So imagine, the poor man had to break a sugar cane and started walking and screaming until he found someone who told him where he was. And that´s the kind of repression that they use. They do not pick you up or beat dissidents in the street. No… If they do…they do it secretly…in some dungeon…because they don’t want the press or anyone to know. But they do beat you up. Yes they do; because there are eyewitness accounts. It is hidden; it is in private so no one can film that they’ve been given a beating, but the [security forces] are trained and evil.
We saw it ourselves in prison, we saw it in the prisons… and those are forms of repression that they use; they target and harass your family, try to hinder you… If your child is studying and wants to go to the university, they prevent them.
They employ various strategies that make life impossible for Cuban people. And then they create… a “conspiracy” and for no special reason, they take you out of your work or remove your son from his good job. It is a stealthy crackdown that is constant…constant…constant on the population; against the people who speak out. And it’s not just dissidents [who should worry about repression] because well, there are people who are not dissidents or they are not associated with any organization and are unafraid to speak out and say things.
And then they [the regime] seek you out sometimes and fabricate a crime. Sometimes they make up charges against people. And since the courts are theirs, the police are theirs, and the judicial system and everything, who says otherwise? They had no reason to condemn us and and yet we were sentenced up to 20-25 years and in some cases almost 30 years [referring to the Group of 75 nonviolent dissidents who were arrested during the Black Spring crackdown].
[There is] much terror; much psychological terror. People have it in them… look, here [in the United States] there are Cubans, who have had no connection with dissidents and have come here for economic reasons or whatever, and you start to talk about these things [opposition activities] and they begin to look side-to-side; they look around because of that fear, of who might be listening. There are people who don´t want to take pictures with me… because if they go on Facebook… imagine… because then they can’t go to Cuba… here in the U.S.!
Here in Miami… you don’t have to go far; because that [fear] is ingrained since childhood; this psychological terror. It is a terror of uncertainty; you don´t know what might happen because it is always present in you, above everything; like the Sword of Damocles, hanging above your head.
The most extreme thing is that a professional, a medical professional doesn’t earn more than $30 a month. They have instituted the duality of the “chavito” [A nickname for the Cuban convertible peso]. But the chavito is worth 25 Cuban pesos. And you have 30 chavitos, and to buy something in the shopping center, it costs you 600 pesos. Imagine that you are a doctor on a bicycle; a surgeon and you have to go operate on a bicycle. And when you earn something, you have to go buy a small can of this or that; measuring the monthly wage for clothes, food, shoes for your child. In the end, who lives like that?
The people there do not live. People complain but they do not wake up. They do not wake up, but there they are, everyone is afraid. It’s a terror of the unknown. It is a fear of what might happen and what might not happen because of the government’s repression.
[The Cuban convertible peso (CUC) is one of Cuba’s two official currencies; the other, which is more widely used by average citizens, is the Cuban peso (CUP). The CUC is pegged to the U.S. dollar and worth 25 times as much as the CUP.]
Arturo Perez de Alejo Rodríguez was born in Manicarauga, Cuba on May 23, 1951. He received a degree in topography and worked in several different fields, including as a subsistence farmer and as a surveyor. As a young man, Arturo believed the 1959 Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power would change Cuba for the better.
Arturo soon became disenchanted with the Castro regime. He was drafted into military service and sent as part of a Cuban force in Angola’s civil war during the 1970s. As a soldier, he witnessed acts of brutality that sharply contrasted with the official version of events.
In 1980, thousands of Cuban citizens stormed the Peruvian Embassy seeking asylum to escape from the Castro regime. Following the incident, the regime announced it would allow people to leave Cuba, but privately, the government encouraged its supporters to harass and brutalize those fleeing the island. The events at the Embassy of Peru led Arturo to break with the government.
In the 1990s, Arturo became more active in the Cuban opposition. In 2001, he founded the Escambray Human Rights Front, which monitored human rights violations in the region. Arturo was arrested in March 2003, as one of 75 nonviolent dissidents during a massive crackdown known as the Black Spring. He was subjected to a summary trial and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his opposition to the Castro regime.
After more than seven years as a prisoner of conscience, Arturo was freed in 2010 when the Catholic Church and the Spanish government negotiated the release of the 75 Black Spring prisoners. He and his family were exiled to Spain where they lived for several years, before resettling in the United States.
Cuba, an island nation of 11.4 million people in the northern Caribbean Sea, is a totalitarian state.
Fidel Castro led the 1959 Cuban Revolution and ruled the country for 49 years before formally relinquishing power to his younger brother Raul in 2008. Raul Castro is the current head of state and First Secretary of the Communist Party, which is recognized by the Cuban Constitution as the only legal political party and “the superior leading force of society and of the state.” Raul Castro has said that he will step down from power at the age of 86 in 2018.
Cuba was a territory of Spain until the Spanish-American War. The United States assumed control of the island until 1902, when the Republic of Cuba became formally independent. A fledgling democracy was established, with the U.S. continuing to play a strong role in Cuban affairs.
In 1952, facing an impending electoral loss, former president Fulgencio Batista staged a successful military coup and overthrew the existing government. While his first term as elected president in the 1940s largely honored progressive politics, universal freedoms, and the Cuban Constitution of 1940, Batista’s return to power in the 1950s was a dictatorship marked by corruption, organized crime and gambling. He held power until 1959 when he was ousted by Fidel Castro’s rebel July 26th Movement.
While promising free elections and democracy, Castro moved quickly to consolidate power. By 1961, Castro had declared Cuba to be a communist nation.
Castro’s communist government nationalized private businesses, lashed out at political opponents, and banned independent civil society. As Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union, Cuban-American relations soured, including a U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to war, after the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, prompting a U.S. naval embargo.
Since the revolution, Cuba has remained a one-party state. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the evaporation of Soviet economic support, Cuba loosened some economic policies, became more open to foreign investment, and legalized use of the U.S. dollar. By the late 1990s, Venezuela had become Cuba’s chief patron, thanks to the close relationship between the Castro brothers and Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez.
The regime continues to exercise authoritarian political control, clamping down on political dissent and mounting defamation campaigns against dissidents, portraying them as malignant U.S. agents. In a massive crackdown in 2003 known as the Black Spring, the government imprisoned 75 of Cuba’s best-known nonviolent dissidents.
The Cuban government does not respect the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association, movement, and religion. The government and the Communist Party control all news media, and the government routinely harasses and detains its critics, particularly those who advocate democracy and respect of human rights. Frequent government actions against dissidents often take the form of attacks by regime-organized mobs. Prison conditions are harsh and often life-threatening, and the courts operate as instruments of the Communist Party rather than conducting fair trials.
Cuba relaxed its travel laws in 2013, allowing some prominent dissidents to leave and return to the country. It continues to experiment with modest economic reforms but remains committed to communist economic orthodoxy.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Cuba was designated as “not free” and is grouped near the bottom of the world’s nations, with severely restricted civil rights and political liberties.
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