If the efforts expended to devise specious arguments for removing sanctions against the communist dictatorship were redirected to exposing the oppression of the regime, there would be fewer prisoners of conscience in Cuba.
Via the Center for a FREE Cuba:
Update on prisoners of conscience in Cuba
“Never allow the government – or anyone else – to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do or not do.” – Armando Valladares, former Cuban prisoner of conscience and Ambassador to the UNHRC. Spent 22 years in Castro’s prisons.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is one of the founders of Cuba’s San Isidro movement, Luis Manuel helped bring injustices against artists by the Cuban government to the global stage. In 2021, Alcántara was named an “icon” by Time magazine. He was jailed trying to go out to protest on July 11, 2021, and on June 24, 2022, he was sentenced to five years in prison, after a trial behind closed doors. In prison, Luis Manuel’s health is declining and he’s not getting proper medical care, reported Amnesty International.
Luis Manuel in a message sent from prison concludes: “I struggle in this horrible place, which contrasts starkly with my reality in freedom, a reality full of beautiful sunrises, love and friendships. As a result, the good experiences of love have assumed another dimension in my consciousness.”
In 1987, the documentary “Nobody Listened” captured the human rights reality in Cuba with interviews with former political prisoners, archival footage of firing squads and other instances of repression. Former prisoners described show trials, extrajudicial executions, and cruel and unusual punishment that rose to the level of torture. 37 years later, and Cuba’s prisons remain full of political prisoners, The documentary demonstrates that repression in Cuba is not a bug, but a feature of the system.
Thirty five years have passed since the last time the International Committee of the Red Cross was able to visit Cuban prisons. Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the U.S. Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times since 2002.
There are those who for decades have sought to normalize this abnormal and abhorrent state of affairs that have plagued Cuba for 65 years, but what they have done is to spread the contagion to Nicaragua, and Venezuela, inviting more misery to tens of millions more.
The Provincial Court of Artemisa in Cuba rejected an application for parole for the Cuban artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, as revealed on February 7, 2024 by Claudia Genlui, Luis’s girlfriend and an art curator on her social networks.
Amnesty International recognizes Luis Manuel as a prisoner of conscience, and continues to demand his release.
Continue reading HERE.
Yes, but it doesn’t work that way and never has. What matters is the fantasy, not the reality.