MIAMI, United States. – Cuban professor and journalist José Raúl Gallegó denounced this Saturday the inclusion of Colonel Abel Enrique González Santamaría, a high command of the Island’s Ministry of the Interior, in one of the panels organized by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA, for its acronym in English).
This is the panel “Background of the protests of July 11 in Cuba”, scheduled for next May 7.
“It turns out that for this edition, a colonel from the Cuban Ministry of the Interior will participate as a speaker in one of the panels on 3/11, and not just any colonel,” Gallego Ramos said in a Facebook post.
“Forget the presence at the table of a character like Carlos Alzugaray, a former opinion broker who has justified every violation of law committed by the Cuban State and that some still want to play the game of ‘teacher’ or ‘academician’. That’s dirt in the shoe compared to this one. We are talking about the speaker at LASA being someone who belongs to the body in charge of repressing, imprisoning, injuring and killing (remember Diubis Laurentius) to protesters of 11J”, he considered.
Later, the Cuban journalist residing in Mexico specified that “Colonel Abel Enrique González Santamaría is not only a high command of the MININT, but he was one of those closest to Alejandro Castro Espín, son of the dictator Raúl Castro, in the powerful and already disintegrated Commission of Defense and National Security”.
Likewise, he pointed out that the soldier was “directly linked to the organs of State Security, the Cuban political police” although they wanted to “pass him off as an academic.”
“González Santamaría is also the compiler of the book entitled Views in context. Approaches from the university to the current Cubaa pamphlet put together in a few days with texts published on social networks by opinion agents, cybercriminals and mediocre professors who dedicated themselves to criminalizing and delegitimizing the 11J protests and, in turn, justifying the serious violations of rights committed on those dates by the State Cuban”.
The Cuban journalist considered that “if this invitation is upheld, LASA is being, once again, a direct accomplice in the repression of the Cuban people.”
He also said that he felt increasingly “prouder” of having left that institution and of not lending his name or his work to “legitimize figureheads who should not be on academic panels, but rather before the courts, answering for their responsibility in supporting of a criminal and human rights violating regime.”
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