Taguayabon - Village Pastor Abducted

Taguayabon: Village Pastor Abducted / Yoaxis Marcheco Suárez
Posted on February 12, 2014

Taguayabon, Cuba – I could have written a simple informative note about
one of the many arrests carried out by Cuban State Security agencies
during the days leading up to the CELAC Summit in Havana. But in this
case I was both eyewitness and victim, and had to deal with the fact
that my daughters saw it all.

On Saturday January 25, my husband, the Baptist pastor Mario Felix
Lleonart, and I, together with our daughters, Rocío, 13, and Rachel, 5,
left our home in Taguayabón, intending to travel to the neighboring city
of Remedios to spend a relaxing family afternoon. We were stopped by two
State Security agents, dressed in civilian clothes, riding a small
Suzuki motorcycle, who approached my husband and told him he was under
arrest.

The situation became very tense a few minutes later when a National
Revolutionary Police patrol car appeared, with a uniformed police
officer and another civilian agent who joined the first two and pounced
on Mario Félix as if he were a common criminal, handcuffing him and
speeding him off toward Remedios, without telling me where they were going.

Our daughters were in shock and both began to cry. The younger one kept
saying: "Save my daddy! Those bad men have taken him away!" It was a
tremendous struggle for me to calm them and try to help them understand
what was happening. The girls love their father dearly, and know that he
is an honest and good-hearted man; his abduction was something they
could not fathom, especially because they knew he had set the afternoon
aside for them.

Swallowing this bitter pill, especially my indignation–because I don't
hide that in the face of all this arbitrariness and despotism I am
deeply outraged–I took the little ones to Remedios, walking with them
and highlighting the figure of their father. Somehow my little Rachel
latched onto my words and then kept saying: "If those cops come here
looking for my dad's house, I'll tell them to leave him alone because my
father is a free man." I do not know if my daughters have understood
fully that message, but freedom is ours and we belong to it, and so I
hope they both grow up knowing that no human system, nor repressive
body, nor dictatorship, nor dictator, nor tyrant can prevent us from
being free.

We returned home to await Mario's fate. We did not know for sure where
they had taken him. Caibarién and Remedios are in the same direction and
we only knew that the patrol car had headed to one of those two places.
A legally authorized kidnapping, obvious state terrorism–citizens are
taken away someplace, the family not even knowing where.

Arrests can occur anytime, anywhere, to anyone, without explanation,
using brute force as well. They repress, they persecute, not the
increasing numbers of common criminals, but political and ideological
opponents.

At six that evening my husband showed up. My daughters ran to him and
kissed him, relief evident on their faces. Since then, a police
operation has encircled our home and our church, and the ban was
extended to me. We could only go and pick up the girls at their
respective schools, and always guarded by the political police. The
Suzuki is parked on the corner near the schools, visible to our
daughters; it was a reminder to the girls that they were still there,
and a way of keeping them upset.

As before, our phones were blocked by Cubacel, the state-run monopoly
that controls the lines. Perhaps divine providence intervened at some
point, allowing the messages to leave my phone, like bottles thrown into
the sea of liberty, carried along on the blessed twitter. So foreign
friends had news of our fate. I could also call activists who found
themselves in the same situation as we did, though not always with much
luck because some of their phones were also disrupted. Every night we
pray for those who have had worse fortune, because they have ended up in
the cold cells.

The CELAC summit concluded and did not bring anything new to the Cuban
context. No one defined it any better than my daughters: "CELAC is bad
because it's responsible for our dad being taken prisoner." The CELAC
meeting in Havana has has left a shameful stain on the Latin American
political landscape; its complicit stance toward an anti-democratic
regime is now marked forever and ever, amen.

Source: Taguayabon: Village Pastor Abducted / Yoaxis Marcheco Suárez |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/taguayabon-village-pastor-abducted-yoaxis-marcheco-suarez/