Let the Cuban people decide their future

Let the Cuban people decide their future
BY ROSA MARÍA PAYÁ 14YMEDIO.COM
04/15/2015 5:22 PM 04/15/2015 5:22 PM

Although the recent Summit of the Americas in Panama served as a forum
where the peoples of the Americas were 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 that tries to ignore the will of the Cuban people and its exiles,
while enthroning the military elite after a masquerade of reforms that
decriminalize certain economic concessions but continue to hijack all
the rights of the citizenry.

After landing in the sister nation of Panama, I re-experienced firsthand
the repression offered by 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.

[Ms. Payá was detained and interrogated at the airport upon her arrival
in Panama, for which the government later apologized. Civil-society
representatives were also the targets of insults and boos at public
forums from Cuban government representatives, and a pro-Castro mob
attacked some anti-government protestors at another venue.]

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 Cuba 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 in Cuba, so in in Panama as well:

The Cuban opposition has been found a priori guilty in the eyes of
authority. The marvelous isthmus thus turned into a suddenly repressive
place. 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 that, 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 Payá said so many times before his extrajudicial
execution in Cuba on July 22, 2012: Dictatorships are not of the left or
the right; they are just dictatorships. Because rights have no political
color, no race, no culture. Because the dignity of the human person is
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.

ROSA MARÍA PAYÁ IS THE DAUGHTER OF THE LATE CUBAN DISSIDENT LEADER
OSWALDO PAYÁ.

Source: Let the Cuban people decide their future | Miami Herald Miami
Herald - http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article18616554.html