I’m writing these phrases in exile. I left Cuba nearly precisely a yr in the past, after months of being threatened by state safety to cease my work defending human rights inside Cuba.
My story is the story of dozens of activists, journalists, political dissidents and non-conformist artists who in the previous couple of years have been compelled to board a aircraft. And in lots of circumstances, to additionally observe the migrant routes that cross half of the American continent to achieve a secure place to begin over.
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Camila Rodriguez: ’I left Cuba nearly precisely a yr in the past, after months of being threatened by state safety to cease my work defending human rights inside Cuba’ (Picture: Jose Rovira/IFF Panamá)
On Wednesday (22 November), Eamon Gilmore, the EU particular consultant for human rights, will arrive in a rustic in turmoil, as folks flee authorities repression. He’ll arrive within the midst of an intensified authorities siege. A willingness to talk with him might result in, on the very least, hours of interrogation or enforced disappearance for individuals who want to share in first particular person how the Havana regime has oppressed them.
Gilmore’s go to dangers legitimising the Cuban regime if he doesn’t take a agency public stance on the human rights scenario and voice his solidarity with human rights defenders. A regime that has systematically destroyed the chance for impartial civil society to behave, has fragmented a era of honourable folks, has shattered the peace of lots of of houses, and has worn down, if it was even potential to take action additional, the hope for democracy and justice in Cuba.
If my brothers and sisters on this combat who’re at the moment in Cuba can’t communicate with Gilmore, if those that attend a gathering in a frigid room surveilled by a photograph of a ravishing Cuban seashore share a doctored model of our actuality, I wish to use this area to share 5 truths that the particular consultant ought to know. A actuality that he ought to concentrate on earlier than arriving in Cuba and posing with the dictator in a picture of smiles and complicity.
Firstly, this go to will happen within the context of a rising systemic disaster. Though the federal government doesn’t publish up to date information on poverty in Cuba, specialists have warned of the rising precarity of life for many residents.
It has prioritised the development of resorts for overseas tourism, which is not assembly projected revenue ranges, whereas public well being, schooling and power administration all lack infrastructure. On the identical time, ranges of violence, femicides and anti-government public protests are on the rise.
Secondly, for the reason that July 2021 protests, practically 1,000 folks have been detained on the island for political causes. Most of them from waves of public protests demanding respectable residing circumstances and political freedoms. The present variety of political prisoners in Cuba is a number of occasions increased than the entire quantity in the remainder of the area, even accounting for Nicaragua and Venezuela, which have been singled out for not respecting the precise to free expression and affiliation.
Thirdly, detained people dwell in dire circumstances, in state custody, not solely uncovered to sicknesses corresponding to tuberculosis, but in addition to torture and inhumane and degrading therapy. The fixed human rights violations contained in the nation’s prisons happen with out neutral worldwide actors such because the EU holding in loco visits as a part of oversight mechanisms, since Cuban laws neglects or forbids them.
Fourthly, repression has intensified following the entry into power of the brand new penal code. Since final December, no less than 25 Cuban dissidents have been detained, both on conviction or beneath investigation, for allegedly committing political crimes. The brand new code, which expands the demise penalty to round 20 crimes, most of them political in nature, penalises the receipt of funds to help civil society with as much as 10 years of imprisonment. In the meantime, no provisions legalising the rights to peaceable meeting and affiliation have been introduced.
And at last, the present political emergency in Cuba can be evident from the latest surge in folks leaving the nation, with numbers now totalling over 300,000 Cubans.
Those that have left the nation embody hundreds who participated in civic actions and are fleeing the nation beneath risk from state safety. The compelled expatriations of Cubans have due to this fact shaken a substantial portion of the Cuban inhabitants; they don’t seem to be merely a repressive apply used solely towards activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and different key actors in society.
At a time when the EU is reviewing its overseas coverage agendas and priorities for Latin America, these of us who make up impartial Cuban civil society, wherever we could at the moment discover ourselves, hope that the EU, within the agenda and targets of the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Settlement with Cuba, will implement concrete actions in help of individuals in Cuba and help for the victims of repression and their households.
If the Cuban state doesn’t present ensures of respect for human rights and the existence of an impartial civil society, and analysis mechanisms, we ask that the EU droop the inter-governmental settlement. The human rights scenario has worsened within the years since its creation, we will not consider within the effectiveness of this settlement as an instrument in favour of human rights.
We are going to maintain preventing, swimming towards the tide maybe, even when elevated state repression forces us to take action exterior of our nationwide borders.