The Indomitable Opposition

The Indomitable Opposition / Angel Santiesteban
Posted on June 22, 2015

I am startled at the idea that the Cuban spies captured in the United
States were at one time kept isolated, and that odes are written about
this, as if it were an unheard of injustice.

I don't want to make comparisons, but the five spies were sentenced with
proof for crimes of espionage, while Cubans opposing the totalitarian
regime are innocent, because exercising the right to a political
opinion, a meeting, free association and demonstrating are rights
recognized under the Magna Carta of the UN as being fundamental.

Cuban opposition prisoners are incarcerated in dark and dirty dungeons,
witnesses to their suffering. They are exposed to constant torture, in
some cases while sick – with tuberculosis or dengue fever – from the
humidity, the lack of hygiene and the precarious nourishment.

I even remember the five spies complaining because they were served
chicken more than once a week in the U.S. prison, while in a Cuban
prison that repetition would be a motive for a party. Here in the
prisons of the dictatorship, some Fridays, like a holiday, they deliver
a quarter of a quarter of a chicken, if you can call it that.

All you had to do was look at the photos of the five spies when they
returned to Cuba to understand how they had been treated compared to the
penal population on the Island.

In my case, and if I mention it it's only with the goal of denouncing
the dictatorship, they have confined me for nine months in a few square
meters, after one and a half years of violating my right — according to
the penalty that they unjustly imposed on me — to the same regulation
pass they award to assassins, rapists, international drug traffickers
and pederasts, among other dangerous criminals. As the opposition
independent journalist, Lilianne Ruiz, told me recently, my captors
couldn't tolerate the fact that I had resisted without bowing down to them.

I don't believe that the nations making up the UN today refuse to
support a referendum demanding that Cuba "respect the freedom of the
opposition." Presented like that, very few presidents of the leftist
Latin American mafia and others in the rest of the world who second
their dictatorships would dare to deny us that right

I repeat — history will show I am right — that President Obama is
committing a grave error in strengthening the totalitarian regime, and
this will be a stain on his record in the matter of international
politics that he will carry with him.

But we are victims of the powers that be, and there is nothing we can do
but continue to hope for that democracy, which we will never renounce.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

May 3, 2015

Source: The Indomitable Opposition / Angel Santiesteban | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-indomitable-opposition-angel-santiesteban/