Antunez, Translator: Unstated
In January, the first month of 2012, the Cuban internal resistance was
the scene of two major events which, for their impact and significance,
are milestones and mark the Cuban nation. On January 19, 2012 the death
of political prisoner Wilman Villar Mendoza was announced, a young
Christian Baptist who had spent more than fifty days dying on hunger
strike, in which he demanded fair and transparent criminal proceedings,
with promise of an adequate his defense.
Villar Mendoza had been arrested, along with other members of the
Patriotic Union of Cuba, when they carried out a resounding and peaceful
protest in Santiago municipality of Boatswain. The political police,
true to their cruel and false nature, planned a future attempt to
prosecute him for alleged crimes of which he had already been legally
exonerated, and Wilman Villar met his cruel death after a painful agony
where the silence, indifference, complicity and torture put paid to his
young, dignified existence.
But days later his brothers in the internal resistance from one end of
the country to the other, united in an unprecedented move. In hundreds
and hundreds of Cuban homes, thousands and thousands of compatriots
joined in a national cacerolazo — a pounding on pots and pans — to
condemn the crime and the crude smear campaign launched by a cowardly
government's press releases against the memory of this young man who had
much more courage than his executioners, to meet the challenges from a
position of strength, against those who led him to prison unjustly.
The regime and its enforcers of its flamboyant military deployment,
arrests, and persecutions could do nothing to avoid the pot-banging,
women, adolescents and almost children, men and women and all the people
of the village who do not belong to the opposition as such, joined the
cacerolazo. The cacerolazo this Jan. 24, Day of Resistance, its
connotation and national and international impact tells us how much
progress has been made by Cuba's opposition, far-reaching in will and
consensus, as is embodied in the spirit of unity in action and we
announced that this could represent the year that has just begun in the
fight for the freedom of the motherland. These are the facts, the rest
is up to us.
January 26 2012
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