In the face of the massive protests of July 11 and 12, 2021, the Cuban State has responded “with disproportionate and methodical political and legal violence, which far exceeds the specific and spontaneous episodes of violence committed during the outbreak by some citizens,” denounces a group of Cuban artists and intellectuals in a letter published this monday.
The document, under the title Manifesto against silence, for justicehas been signed so far by more than 40 personalities, including the filmmakers Fernando Pérez and Juan Pin, the writer and translator Alex Fleites, the historians Alexander Hall and Leonardo Fernández Otaño, and the journalist Jorge Fernández Era.
The letter constitutes an allegation of the right to demonstrate on the Island. In this regard, it states that “the responsibilities of a protester who damages an object or another’s property are not comparable with those of someone who attacks —being a law enforcement officer or a civilian— another citizen.
After the protests, the regime unleashed “the excessive use of violence that brought as an immediate consequence the death of the citizen Diubis Laurentiusraids on dwellings, beatings of demonstrators and the arrest of more than a thousand citizens”. These acts of repression, they continue, “have been followed by judicial proceedings against more than five hundred citizens, where exemplary sentences have been handed down that, in several cases, exceed twenty years in prison.
“There is a disproportion of the sentences, violations of the current procedural standards” as well as “an exemplary exhibition of the processes by the national state press”
The protesters “have only exercised their right to have rights” as in other parts of the world, they declare in the first of five points addressed to the Cuban artistic and intellectual community. “And in any republic, when excesses are committed in demonstrations, those involved – be they citizens or state agents – must be prosecuted proportionally and according to law, never punitively.”
As for the trials that have taken place, in a second point they denounce that “there is a disproportion of the sentences, violations of the current procedural standards” as well as “an exemplary display of the processes by the national state press.” The objective of this action by the regime, they insist, is “to prevent any attempt of active protagonism of people in the destinies of their country” and that is why these “public ridicules” occur against “the entire Cuban society, beyond ideological sympathies or political militancy.
They also advocate the duty of academics and artists to “condemn violence and arbitrariness without double standards”, “without ideological dispensations or subterfuges of realpolitik“, above all because “the victims of this violence” are almost always those people who “are the object of our investigations and works”.
The signatories, among whom are also the artists Tania Bruguera, Camila Rodríguez and Sandra Ceballos, the poet Amaury Pacheco and the writer Rafael Rojas, defend that “the social explosion” through the “civil disobedience” registered in the last year, is the result of “government mismanagement of the economy and authoritarian ways of managing the socio-political conflict and participation in Cuba.”
“In this era of digital connectivity, we all know what is happening. No one is currently unaware of the events, the testimonies and the outcomes”
Finally, they call on other intellectuals and artists to join this denunciation, insisting that the prisoners can be “our relatives, neighbors, friends. We ourselves.”
“In this era of digital connectivity, we all know what is happening. No one is currently oblivious to the events, testimonies and outcomes,” says the letter also made up of economists Omar Everleny and Pedro Monreal and lawyer Eloy Viera. .
“The positions of dissimulation, silence or complacency in the face of the punitive prosecution of the protesters of the social outbreak, instead of defending vulnerable citizens and making the authorities rectify, will only perpetuate and amplify the abuses and conflicts”, they affirm and conclude the manifesto demanding the release of the prisoners: “The specific way to initiate such a proceeding —by an Amnesty or similar formula— can be the subject of debate; its substance cannot. Law cannot subordinate Justice.”
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