One of the highlights of my blogging about Cuba, was my September 2006 e-mail interview with Cuban dissident leader Dr. Darsi Ferrer. When I asked him how receptive Cubans have been to his calls for change on the island, he wrote:
The immense majority of Cubans long for a change, including many of those that are currently in different levels within the power structure. We’ve had more than four decades of resistance to change, and the Cuban government has demonstrated its filthiness and failure in political, economic, and social arenas with the destruction of everything. If it still currently maintains our nation in submission, it is due to the mechanisms of terror that it has implemented. But, in the conscience of Cubans, it is now time to put an end to all the suffering; that’s what the change urges. Cubans desire to live in freedom with democracy and to have the opportunity to move ahead.
Ferrer is one of the more prolific writers in the Cuban dissidence movement. Or at least one whose work is the most familiar to the outside world, thanks to his apparently regular access to e-mail, courtesy of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Every week or so, I and others receive messages from Darsi, and Web sites like Misceláneas de Cuba publish his work.
Ferrer has taken his work to a new forum: His own blog, BASTA DE APARTHEID EN CUBA MARCHA 10 DICIEMBRE, dedicated to rallying Cubans to participate in a peaceful march Dec. 10 — International Human Rights Day — to protest the apartheid policies of the Castro dictatorship:
We call upon all Cubans to commemorate International Human Rights Day on December 10th, by exercising our right to demonstrate in a PEACEFUL SILENT MARCH as a protest of the immoral and illegal APARTHEID policy imposed by the Cuban government.It is the duty all people to assume individual responsibility and confront the tragedy facing the nation, to urge political, economic and social changes that benefit EVERYONE, and to facilitate an end to this humiliating situation in which a powerful few violate sovereignty and enjoy privileges all while discriminating against the majority simply because they are citizens.
Governments, institutions, organizations and human beings in general have an obligation to promote respect for fundamental rights and freedoms, as well as ensure their recognition and universal and effective application.
Our appeal, by our participation on that day, will be for the recognition, in every corner of the earth, of the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.
Never in the history of the nation has there existed such an ANTI-CUBAN government. The current constitution recognizes rights and freedoms for Cubans (Article 42 and 43), the penal code condemns as a felony any application of apartheid (Article 120-1 and 295-1); in practice the two laws are systematically violated by the established official public policy.
Despite the fact that the Cuban government is a member of the newly created United Nations Council for Human Rights, it violates its pledge to be a signatory of the international convention on repression and punishment for the crime of apartheid.
Ferrer is one of the giants of Cuban dissidence, a status that presumably has brought him some protection from the dictatorship. But he is well familiar with its evil ways.
Still, he persists in the cause of freedom, and for that, he is a hero.
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