Are You One of Those Human Rights People?

Are You One of Those Human Rights People? / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar
Posted on December 15, 2014

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 9 December 2014 — Victims of
political illiteracy — as so aptly described by Dagoberto Valdés — many
people do not know the difference between being a member of an
opposition party, a civil society activist, an independent journalist or
a protester in their own right. All are usually accommodated under a
single definition: "Those human rights people."

I'm not going to give a history here — which needs to be written – of
the Cuban movement in defense of human rights. In the last thirty years,
several have specialized in researching, noting and reporting on
violations committed in the country of those rights enshrined in the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued on 10
December 1948.

Such has been the hostility of the Cuban authorities to these claims,
that in more than one act of repudiation voices have been heard to
vociferously scream the infamous slogan, "Down with Human Rights!" This
demonization has reached such an extreme that for many years the mere
allusion that you have a right to something has been seen as suspicious.

Who are those who dare to approach, to jump the barriers of fear?
Strangers who knock on the door, telephone calls from prison, old
friends who reappear. Anyone who has seen their rights violated and has
dared to go through their own Via Cruces of legal appeals, including the
useless visit to the Council of State's Office of Attention to the
Population, or the call to the prosecutor's new phone numbers when there
is no other recourse, then he or she seeks out one of those "human
rights people."

The moral force of this dreaded spectrum, typecast as mercenaries in the
pay of the empire, has been growing. I know of cases that are invoked as
a threat, "If you don't resolve this problem I'm going to go to those
human rights people, and see what you are going to do about it!" says
the lady who built an bedroom extension on her house that they now want
to make her demolish; or the worker in the process of retiring who
claims a few years of service are missing from his file; or those
convicted without proof, fined for no reason, the self-employed worker
whose license they are going to revoke, someone who suffers a
confiscation, a search; in short, all those being run over.

It is not enough to explain that others dedicate themselves to this
issue, including journalists, independent librarians, or the creators of
a political platform. In the end they don't understand and they say to
you, "I know you are one of those human rights people," and there is no
way to convince them that they should approach another specialist on
this issue. We end up hearing the case and helping the injured.

How would you react? Would you, perhaps, tell me that you aren't one of
those human rights people either?

Source: Are You One of Those Human Rights People? / 14ymedio, Reinaldo
Escobar | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/are-you-one-of-those-human-rights-people-14ymedio-reinaldo-escobar/