Cuba’s Foreign Minister of Blindness
HAVANA TIMES – The “tantrums” of Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez are routine whenever the US government does something that displeases him.
For instance, this week he lodged a formal protest over the presence of the US Southern Command in a naval deployment in the Caribbean, allegedly to curb regional drug cartels, what he called “shows of imperialist force”, while claiming that Cuba is a model in the fight against drugs and needs no help whatsoever.
At almost the same time, however, he asserted on social media that the Cuban Revolution ended disappearances and torture nearly 70 years ago when it came to power.
While the first claim is certainly uncommon (in every sense of the word) and the second is hard to prove—since no one can enter a Cuban prison to document what happens behind bars—it is a true display of blindness to pretend that human rights are not constantly violated in this country.
Opposition activists are routinely arrested, in violation of Cuba’s own criminal procedure laws, and kept in unknown locations for hours or even days, hidden from their families and friends.
The Foreign Minister posted on his social media account that Cuba remains committed to opposing enforced disappearances and considers them a serious violation of human rights.
Yet he stays silent about another practice: arresting dissidents without mercy whenever they try to attend a meeting with colleagues—like what happened on August 26 in Havana to activist Yamilka Laffita, known on social media as Lara Crofs.
She was intercepted by National Revolutionary Police (PNR) agents while riding in a vehicle after leaving the home of writer and humorist Jorge Fernandez Era, in Havana’s Antonio Guiteras neighborhood.
Hours later, Laffita confirmed on her Facebook page that she had been released but reported that the arrest was violent and left her with an injury to her right foot.
For his part, Fernandez described as “fascists” the State Security officers who assaulted him on July 18 at the Zanja police station in Central Havana, where he was taken shortly after leaving his house to carry out his usual peaceful protest in Central Park.
With photos documenting the beating, the intellectual tried to file a complaint against his aggressors at the police station in Havana’s Diez de Octubre district, even providing the name of the direct attacker (Lieutenant Colonel Yoan). But the complaint went nowhere because, he was told, the injuries were “minor.”
Likewise, in mid-August the enforced disappearance of Cuban political prisoner Mario Alberto Hernandez Leyva, a member of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic, was reported after more than 48 hours with no information about his whereabouts.
These are only the recent well-known cases, but others cast serious doubt on the words of the “Foreign Minister of Blindness,” because even a temporary enforced disappearance is a crime.
On another front, repression against artists imprisoned for political reasons in Cuba has also been denounced.
The Cultural Rights Observatory (ODC) cited, among others, independent reporter Luis Angel Cuza Alfonso, arrested on July 29, just two months after serving a previous sentence—this time for carrying a bullet that, according to his family, he had kept as a religious object for more than 17 years.
The ODC also denounced the critical condition of Duannis Leon Taboada, who ended a 12-day hunger strike in July, and musician-poet Juan Enrique Perez, hospitalized with tuberculosis after suffering high fevers in prison for over a month.