Resistance to the regime is here to stay

Posted on Sunday, 09.05.10
Resistance to the regime is here to stay
BY ORLANDO GUTIERREZ-BORONAT
info@directorio.org

So Fidel Castro went back to college. Or, more precisely, to the iconic
front steps of the University of Havana, where the hemisphere's longest
ruling dictator delivered his first public speech after a four-year
hiatus from mass rallies and other public events occasioned by severe
gastrointestinal illness.

The purported objective of the rally was to warn students about the
impending threat of nuclear war in the Middle East. Castro, who began
his political career on the fringes of the student movement at the
University of Havana, where he acquired a reputation as a gun-toting
agitator, chose not to speak about the island's pressing issues: the
abhorrent denial of civil liberties, the collapsing economy and rampant
frustration as the broad reforms some Cubans expected of the younger
Castro, Raúl, refuse to materialize.

Why?

The Friday speech at the front steps of the university took place on the
heels of a daring protest carried out by young pro-democracy activists
at the same location. Once the symbol of resistance against the
dictatorships Cuba suffered during the 20th century, the University of
Havana has been under tight regime control for half a century.

The protesters were expressing their solidarity with other young
human-rights activists arrested in the eastern city of Baracoa who face
stiff repression as they lead meetings of the Cuban Youth Forum, where
Cubans have been openly discussing issues of concern to the island's
population that Fidel Castro chooses to ignore.

So the question remains, Why is the once again olive-clad elder Castro
putting his health and his prestige on the line in order to counter
peaceful and persecuted human-rights activists?

For the same reason that he reappeared in public precisely when
unprecedented talks between Raúl and Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega
resulted in the progressive release and exile of many of the 75
pro-democracy activists imprisoned during the ``Black Spring'' of 2003.
These talks took place after the regime did little to save
hunger-striking prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo, its
violent repression of the Havana street protests of the Ladies in White,
(the wives, mothers and sisters of the imprisoned 75), as well as of
those in Camagüey by waves of youth activists, and dissident Guillermo
Fariñas's prolonged hunger strike. Those events, punctuated by Tamayo's
death, sparked an avalanche of international condemnation that buried
the regime's propaganda efforts aimed at improving its image after 51
years of its iron-fisted rule.

The fact is that his own megalomania and the imperative of regime
survival force Castro to occupy the center stage. The world's attention
is now shifting from the dictatorship to the civic-resistance movement
that increasingly articulates the overwhelming desire for change held by
the vast majority of Cub-ans. Nothing better than Castro's purported
resurrection and talk of nuclear war to try to divert Cubans' and world
public opinion away from Cuba's woes and the actions of the committed
activists who have risen to advocate democratic change.

Resistance in Cuba is real. It is increasingly well-organized, as is
demonstrated by the emergence of the National Civic Resistance Front,
which coordinated demonstrations in different parts of the island to try
to save Zapata's life, as well as the recent one on the University of
Havana steps.

The resistance will not go away, for it is born out of the pursuit of
liberty that has shaped Cuba's national identity for the past two
hundred years. The activists know that through consistent, principled
nonviolent action they have forced a totalitarian regime to engage with
a Catholic Church it once sought to suppress and ignore, so as to avoid
dealing with a resistance that it cannot afford to recognize. When a
one-party tyranny is forced by a grass-roots movement to deal with other
national actors, it has been forced to enter the terrain of
pluralization it so fears to tread.

Eduardo Pérez Flores, one of those arrested at the University of Havana
protest recently wrote in a letter he sent to his mother from his prison
cell: ``Tell the world that in Cuba they are releasing political
prisoners on the one hand and incarcerating more on the other.'' He then
summarizes the ethos of the Cuban resistance: ``I am not afraid of
prison. We will remain firm.''

Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat is a member of the Secretariat of the Assembly
of the Cuban Resistance in Miami.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/05/1808547/resistance-to-the-regime-is-here.html