It's Cuban Solidarity Day today--a day to show our support for the Cuban people, brave Cuban dissidents, political prisoners and their families. The list of prisoners is long; I'm sure there are many more whose cases are not known or classified as such. In Castro's Cuba there are many "crimes" one can be sent to jail for, from "social pre-delinquency" (propensity to commit a crime, but without having actually committed one; this usually means being unemployed after being fired from one's job by the sole employer in the country, i.e. the State--and frequently used to detain dissidents), "illicit hoarding" (economic crimes such as attempting to survive through one's own initiative by making/selling or reselling anything you can find) to more overtly political ones such as "enemy propaganda" (writing the truth about Cuba and publishing it anywhere), and "desacato" (disrespect) to the Comandante (saying or writing "Abajo Fidel" and the like). In short, actions that would not be crimes here anywhere else.
My heart goes out to every Cuban on the prison-island, but especially to the wives--the Damas de Blanco-- the families and particularly the children of political prisoners. These children are deprived of having their fathers or mothers at home (in some cases both father and mother). Some are too young to understand why their parents are imprisoned. In school, they are told by their teachers that their parent is a criminal, a "counterrevolutionary," they are often abused by their fellow students and picked on by their teachers, given poor marks despite high academic achievement.
For these children, infrequently visiting their fathers in a Cuban jail in all its medieval Dantesque horror must be a demoralizing experience. How could anyone be so cruel as to do this to an innocent child? I pray for these children, and their families, that they all won't have to endure these injustices much longer.
My problem is that I don't believe that all the peaceful pressure of an international community will ever persuade Cuba's rulers to abandon power, any more than North Korea's Kim Il Jung. These unrepentant brutes would cheerfully take as many lives as possible before they would cede an inch, so where does that leave us who desire freedom for these lands? Should we aid & abet armed insurrection inside these countries or wait another half century for the horror-movie regimes to fall of their own internal corruption? Will they really disintegrate like the USSR? Cuba is in the process of illustrating that Fidel's demise will do little to dismantle the apparatus of state repression he instituted a half century ago, about the only thing that works in Cuba these days. May God help me to regain the faith that something can be done.
For these children, infrequently visiting their fathers in a Cuban jail in all its medieval Dantesque horror must be a demoralizing experience. How could anyone be so cruel as to do this to an innocent child? I pray for these children, and their families, that they all won't have to endure these injustices much longer.
My problem is that I don't believe that all the peaceful pressure of an international community will ever persuade Cuba's rulers to abandon power, any more than North Korea's Kim Il Jung. These unrepentant brutes would cheerfully take as many lives as possible before they would cede an inch, so where does that leave us who desire freedom for these lands? Should we aid & abet armed insurrection inside these countries or wait another half century for the horror-movie regimes to fall of their own internal corruption? Will they really disintegrate like the USSR? Cuba is in the process of illustrating that Fidel's demise will do little to dismantle the apparatus of state repression he instituted a half century ago, about the only thing that works in Cuba these days. May God help me to regain the faith that something can be done.
