Cuban Catholics Criticize Opposition Letter
HAVANA TIMES, Aug. 24 — The Cuban Espacio Laical magazine, published by the lay Catholic community, rejected a letter sent to Pope Benedict XVI by representatives of the island’s political opposition, which it considered part of an international campaign to torpedo the Catholic Church’s mediation regarding the political prisoners.
According to the text, the letter “responds to the policy of hatred, which distorts the country’s domestic reality by presenting it as a binary scenario of good and bad persons, eclipsing the required nuances needed to describe, with a minimum of seriousness, the complex social and political processes currently taking place in Cuban society.,” reported IPS.
The Cuban Revolution has the right to defend itself by means of the much maligned and abused praxis called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (not so applicable in the case of under-industrialized Cuba, however). However again: it’s pretty clear OTOH that the cuban government indeed over-does the repression of local enemies of socialism — unfortunately giving the imperialists all sorts of ‘openings’ as a result. As well, we should always be suspicious of the motives of the Catholic Church itself — if not its particular sincere representatives here; but in this case it is pretty clear too that these particular people really do sincerely wish to ‘rectify’ an untenable situation. So I applaud them distancing themselves from the rabid anti-/counter-revolutionists. Just stop jailing everyone who disagrees with the Party. If dissidents do commit crimes of sabotage, etc., or clearly conspire to — by all means THEN lock them up.
In any case: it is time for a little freedom in Cuba. That is the ESSENCE of Socialism.