Score another kill for the Cuban military dictatorship: last month it eliminated Afro-Cuban dissident Hamell Santiago Mas Hernandez, an inmate of one of its most notoriously brutal prisons.
The remarkable thing was not the death of a critic. That’s routine in a police state that holds all the guns, bayonets, money and food. What’s noteworthy is that the world hardly blinked, which is to say that two years after US president Barack Obama’s detente with Raul Castro, the regime still dispatches adversaries with impunity. It also routinely blocks visitors to the island, even of the leftist stripe (more on this in a moment) to keep the population isolated. “Normalisation” to the contrary, Cuba is the same totalitarian hellhole that it has been for the past 58 years.
The MSU Exponent, February 23, 2017 in Bozeman, Montana
In an urgent letter sent to five congressmen and three senators, which is circulating on Capitol Hill this afternoon, the Center for a Free Cuba charges that “Obama bureaucrats are still running US Cuba policy,” despite President Donald Trump’s commitment on reciprocity as the basis for relations between Washington and Havana.
President Donald Trump said during a press conference Thursday that he shares Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio’s views on Cuba. “We had dinner with Senator Rubio and his wife, who was by the way, lovely, and we had a very good discussion about Cuba because we have very similar views on Cuba,” Trump told journalists. “Cuba has been very good to me, in the Florida elections, you know, the Cuban people, Americans,” he added in reference to the support of Cuban American voters.
Earlier this week it was reported that Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States would receive the Oswaldo Payá human rights award in Cuba. Four hours ago Rosa Maria Payá, daughter of the slain human rights leader Oswaldo Payá tweeted that she was about to enter customs at Havana's airport.
Five days after Fidel Castro’s death, human rights defender Eduardo Cardet was detained and has since been held in provisional detention in Holguín, south-east Cuba. He is a prisoner of conscience who must be released immediately and unconditionally.
The United States will give priority to human rights in its complete review of U.S. - Cuba policy, according to the White House Spokesman, Sean Spicer, as reported by Agencia EFE, Spain's news agency today.
Cuba Archive documented 21 cases of death or disappearance in 2016 attributed to the Cuban political process, however, many more cases were reported for which sufficient information was unavailable and many more cases are expected in prisons but could not be added to the database.
Two prisoners died who were deprived of their freedom for “pre-criminal dangerousness,” an aberration in Cuba’s Penal Code that criminalizes the propensity to commit an offense against the social order, as subjectively determined by state authorities. Both succumbed to reported health ailments without timely or adequate medical care.
Cuban graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado (‘El Sexto’) continues to be detained in a maximum-security prison, a month and a half after his arrest. He is a prisoner of conscience who must be released immediately and unconditionally.
On Thursday, when President Obama ended the “wet foot, dry foot” policy allowing any Cuban who reached U.S. shores to be granted resident status as a refugee, he merely followed his unconditional support of the Raúl Castro regime to its logical end.
The logic is easy to follow: If relations have been normalized between the United States and Cuba, why should those Cubans who arrive here in rafts be treated any differently from other migrants? Why should Cuban doctors working as indentured servants abroad be allowed to claim refugee status when they manage to reach a U.S. Embassy?
