Monday, April 13, 2015

Ask the People

Ask the People / Rosa Maria Paya
Posted on April 12, 2015

El Mundo, Rosa Maria Paya Acevedo, 12 April 2015 – Although the current
Summit of the Americas in Panama has been a blackboard where the peoples
of the Americas have been forced – once again – to choke on the
barbarian mouthful of that old subject that is Cuban totalitarianism,
hope is renewed by the attitude of consistency and solidarity assumed by
the diverse civil society of the Americas.

Today in Cuba a self-transition from Power to Power is being cooked up,
which tries to ignore the will of the Cuban people and its exile, while
enthroning the military elite after a masquerade of reforms which
decriminalize certain economic concessions but continue to hijack all
the rights of the citizenry.

Since landing in the sister nation of Panama, I have re-experienced
firsthand repression in the style of the Cuban regime. The sincere
apologies of the Panamanian Foreign Ministry lose force in the face of
all the abuses it allowed to take place against the independent civil
society of Cuba and all of the Americas.

Only Cuban civil society activists and the foreigners who work with us
were threatened and detained in Panama. But there were no consequences
for Cuban State Security agents – such as Alexis Alfonso Frutos Weeden –
who beat their peaceful countrymen openly in the street, simply for
thinking that our beloved Cuban deserves, after more than half a century
without plural elections, an alternative to totalitarianism. Similarly,
these agents boycotted the discussion tables of civil society and beat
accredited foreigners.

As on the Island in Panama as well: the Cuban opposition has been found
a priori guilty in the eyes of authority. The marvelous-real isthmus
thus turned into the magically-repressive. Hence, we civil society
members elevate our demand for democracy in Latin America to the
Organization of American States, in hopes of catching less indolent ears
than those of the OAS's outgoing secretary general.

However, the documents read in the plenary session at the end were
indeed the consensus of the civil society of all of the Americas. The
regime's rudeness did not serve it well, as before the intolerant cry of
"There will be no Forum," the consistent voice of Latin American civil
society was raised, supporting the implementation of "binding mechanisms
for consulting the citizenry, such as plebiscites and referendums."

Civil society forged networks to demand a life in truth. We young Latin
Americans refuse to be subjects of alliances and hegemonies which, with
a rhetoric more or less revolutionary, claim the lives of Venezuelan or
Mexican students, gag the press in Nicaragua or in Ecuador, and condemn
Cubans to a dynastic totalitarianism in perpetuity.

As my father Oswaldo Paya said so many times before his extrajudicial
execution in Cuba on Sunday, 22 July 2012: dictatorships are not of the
left of the right: they are just dictatorships. Because rights have no
political color, no race, no culture. Because the dignity of the human
person in an inalienable gift far beyond the markets and the State.

For this reason we are now working on the citizen initiative Cuba
Decides, which proposes holding a plebiscite, which we presented in the
parallel summits and in the Civil Society Forum in Panama. After decades
of dictatorship, the Cuban government does not represent the people. Nor
do we pretend to speak for all Cubans, but we do want the Cuban people
to have a voice.

The world's democracies have the opportunity today to pay less media
homage to handshakes between the elected president of the White House
and the hereditary general of the Plaza of the Revolution, and to
prioritize the agenda of accompanying Cubans in our liberation, asking
the people in a plebiscite to return to us our sovereignty.

Translated from the original Spanish published in El Mundo.
http://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2015/04/12/55295f9722601d1f0e8b456e.html

Source: Ask the People / Rosa Maria Paya | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/ask-the-people-rosa-maria-paya/

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