From time to time the Center for a Free Cuba distributes petitions for circulation without being part of that campaign. This is the case here with the No More Internal Blockade campaign. There is an effort to highlight how the Castro regime creates obstacles for Cubans, and at this time it is especially important for the dictatorship to bring to an end these practices.
#NoMoreInternalBlockade
Published March 30 2020 by the Patmos Institute
The Patmos Institute, a Cuban civil society network created to exercise and promote inter-religious dialogue; political influence; monitor and defend religious freedoms; and the general education on the issue of human rights; with a presence on the island, where it was founded Feb. 2 2013, and a presence abroad as a participant in Washington D.C. as an informal member of the meetings and petitions of The International Religious Freedom Roundtable, a group of NGOs that collaborate as a safe space for supporting religious freedom, endorses the petition “End the Internal Blockade in Cuba.”
Taking into special consideration the proliferation of #Covid19, one of the reasons mentioned in the petition, there's an urgent need for an #AmnestyNow for all of the more than 120 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience on the island, and for about 8,400 others convicted under the abuse known as “pre-criminal social dangerousness,” as well as other prisoners who do not represent any danger to Cuban society yet are part of the 90,000 inmates held in Cuban prisons.
And taking into consideration the systematic violation of religious freedoms in Cuba (confirmed in the annual reports of the Patmos Institute as well as the Periodic Universal Examination of Cuba in Geneva in 2018) – violations that facilitate precisely the internal blockade mentioned in the petition as follows:
“Cuba has a permanent systemic crisis reflected in daily shortages of all types. That crisis will grow worse, to unimaginable levels, during and after the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic … We believe that this time of global reflection, of solidarity and of putting into practice the highest values of humanity, might touch the hearts of Raul Castro, Miguel Diaz Canel and all the leaders of the Communist Party to make them lift the internal blockade against the people of Cuba that has taken so many lives and caused so many material calamities for more than 60 years. We also believe that the people themselves should come to understand their situation and demand the respect and freedom we all deserve.
This would facilitate, in large measure, the direct cooperation of the Cuban family that lives abroad with the reconstruction of the nation and the immediate easing of the problems in every Cuban neighborhood. As well as boosting the creative capacity and entrepreneurship of all Cubans who live on the island.
Minimal starting gestures
*Order the end of the “prohibited” and “regulated” categories of people, so that thousands of doctors, sports figures, artists and citizens in general can enter and leave Cuba, in recognition of natural rights that cannot be denied to anyone.
*Lower the prices or suspend the payments for all ETECSA communications for three months.
*Suspend the high custom fees to facilitate a Cuban-to-Cuban humanitarian bridge that would permit the importation of large amounts of food and medicines, as well as farm equipment, production equipment for small businesses, transport and cargo vehicles, seeds, fertilizer, clothes, shoes and food of all types.
An effective and definitive dismantling of the internal blockage
*The release of all political prisoners
*Create conditions for free, pluralistic and competitive elections
*Constitutional guarantees of civil and political rights of all Cubans.
These actions will not only restore the inalienable rights of all the sons of Cuba, but will lead to the immediate disappearance of the U.S. embargo and all the political and commercial restrictions that different countries and groups of countries have imposed on the dictatorship for its constant violations of human rights, making way to a new period of peace, tolerance, progress and freedom.”
The petition may be signed on the following link:
It's time to eliminate the iron-fisted internal blockade that the totalitarian system has imposed on its own people for more than six decades