It’s Time to Say: Enough of the Abuse!

By Martin Guevara

HAVANA TIMES – I wanted to wait for November 15 to pass, the date on which the dissatisfied Cuban population was summoned to demonstrate for respect for human rights on the island or against their violation, and to petition for the release of the political prisoners, jailed as of the events of July 11^th.

The Diaz-Canel government brags saying that “many inside and outside the country stayed dressed for the party.”

They congratulate themselves for having prevented a peaceful march, first forbidding it and then deploying the repressive forces out onto the streets: uniformed policemen, plainclothes cops, mobs of henchmen and longtime boot-lickers, with sticks and rebar. They pretended to be neighbors who responded spontaneously, to prevent the organizers from leaving their homes, and daring to go out in white clothing.

They celebrate as a triumph of their Revolution, supposedly for the humble, that blacks and mulattoes from the poorest neighborhoods have been repressed in an effective and brutal way after 7/11. Also, joy for having prevented people from exercising their rights with a deployment of frightening forces ready to do anything to earn their pounds of pork mincemeat with 98% of jutia, their refrigerator, or their long-awaited Party card that guarantees priority to buy horse meat croquettes for two pesos.

They celebrate having managed to crush the most elementary human right consisting of expressing disagreement, discontent, ideas, intentions, stating that there are different ways of understanding the construction of the country, including socialism itself.

Things impossible to violate in democratic societies where there are dozens of political parties, radio and TV stations, newspapers, publications, publishers. In those countries that still look the other way when it comes to repression in Cuba.

It is that they continue to respond to that intimate reminiscence kept in the depths, just under the shame, for the abandonment of their own theories, ideas or revolutionary struggles to allocate energy to economic progress, and keep them eternally deposited in a heroic Caribbean island since 1959.

They boast of having stifled the desire for expression, not of harming someone, not of imprisoning as they do, not of beating the different, not even of insulting them, much less of submitting them to their designs for decades under the threat of their lives.

Only to demonstrate, only to demand greater respect for diversity, only to show that there is an energy, a current of thought that does not accompany the decrepitude and decadence that Cuba is experiencing in every sense, already completely detached from the revolutionary utopian dreams of a beginning. Those ideas of emancipation of freedom and progress of its population, of dignity and honor of the Revolution.

Today the revolutionaries, although they prefer not to recognize themselves with that term so affected by the constant betrayals, are the brave ones who work from their independent newspapers without sowing terror, without the slightest violence.

Moreover, receiving violence every day, they are those who create rebellious art, those who participate in the life of their people, not being just another obedient in the sinking of the ship to the shadows of the bottom of history, but trying to contribute to improve their country, the future of their children, their people.

Today the revolutionaries are the ones who come out to paint the air of hope again. A varnish that collects the beauty of the flame tree, the peaceful sea, the mango, the music in the wind and the grace of the hips when walking and once again elevates everything to the category of beauty, desires, joy, a cannon shot of optimism.

But beware, that pacifist goodwill, of love for the land and for its people should not be sullied, humiliated, beaten and mistreated to the extent that one day they become the reason that the French revolutionaries wielded in 1789, “he who sows misery collects anger”, because after that day no one will win, but surely some will have lost much more than others.

Apart from the boasting of effective repressors and the banal excuses that the Government used to prevent and repress the march, I think it is time for the world, both the well-intentioned ones who kept that dry leaf of the carnation of first love in their diary of youth, like those who profit from it, to raise your voice, and slam your fist on the table and say Enough!

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