Restore Sovereignty to the People If You Want To Avoid another Revolution

Restore Sovereignty to the People If You Want To Avoid another
Revolution / 14ymedio, Pedro Campos
Posted on July 27, 2015

A pandemic of freedom floods our senses.
Juan Carlos Cremata

14ymedio, Pedro Campos and other authors, Havana, 25 July 2015 – It will
soon be 62 years since a group of young men headed by Fidel Castro
attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, an event that
catapulted that figure to the foreground of national politics and
definitively buried the possibility of a peaceful and political outcome
to the situation created by Fulgencio Batista's coup a year before.

The armed struggle prevailed and managed to oust the tyrant from power.
But the violent way in which it was achieved marked until today the
political fate of Cuba. The Encampment triumphed again over the Republic.

That same character who organized and led that assault and who then
headed a rebel military movement capitalized on the popular triumph of
the 1959 Revolution, made and supported by the great majority of the
Cuban people in order to restore the democratic system.

The small group close to Fidel and Raul Castro leads, now for more than
half a century, an authoritarian Government that never re-established
democratic institutions, structured on the basis of the "dictatorship of
the proletariat," according to the principles of Stalinism, which has
nothing to do with Marx or with the founders of socialism.

All very well done to keep the little group in power. All very badly
done according to the interests of the people and workers.

Injustice today still openly and violently represses different thought,
prevents a few women [the Ladies in White] from marching with flowers on
an avenue seeking liberty for political prisoners, imposes on the nation
its own Communist Party and political economy that they decide and
negotiate with the US Government, behind the backs of the Cuban people,
an effort to save their monopolistic State capitalism with an alliance
with the foreign capital that could lead to the virtual economic and
geo-political annexation by the neighbor to the north.

The failure of monopolistic State capitalism imposed on Cuba in the name
of socialism, the Revolution and the working class is more than evident
in many of its main results:

1-Destroying the country's economy. 2- Impoverishing workers and Cubans
in general. 3- Covering the word socialism in mud. 4-Dividing and
scattering the Cuban family. 5-Discouraging the Cuban people from
working. 6-Distorting national history and de-nationalizing the Cuban
nationality. 7-Retarding for almost half a century revolutionary
progress in Latin America with its encouragement of violence.

Another recognized achievement is international solidarity, which has
been the work of the Cuban people, but some part would have to be
celebrated, another part discussed and much re-evaluated as
counterproductive and even reprehensible. Education and health in reach
of all, with all its deficiencies and limitations, are the little
improvement that it has achieved, but both were conceived for the
skilled and continuous exploitation of salaried statism.

That is the concrete thing we have today. What happened before 1959 is
ancient history for new generations, who are brought up in absolutism
around the power established and recognized in an obsolete Constitution,
copied from the former USSR, a constitution that the Government itself
violates every day.

The constant violation of the civil and political rights of the Cuban
people is found today in the most recent absurd attacks by the
bureaucratic system against artists of great national and international
prestige such as Tania Bruguera and Juan Carlos Cremata, attacks which
constitute offenses against the whole national culture and prove that the

Encampment does not back down in its outrage against the Republic.

If different expressions of art and national culture cannot be freely
demonstrated, if they cannot creatively represent our contemporary
national reality, then the old slogan "Within the Revolution everything,
outside the Revolution nothing" has been turned into: The 'Revolution'
is no longer 'everything,' rather it is 'nothing.'

A nation is its culture and if it is not respected, it is nothing more
than a group of empty symbols.

The most sacred thing that a human being has, what permits him to live,
to be fulfilled and to build a family, is his work, his creative
capacity, his physical and intellectual aptitudes, which are materially
translated into remuneration for his efforts and results.

The right to payment for work is perhaps the most important right, which
permits in turn the realization of other rights.

And the supposedly socialist State is violating that right since it
appropriated and nationalized all the factories, lands, big, medium and
small businesses, theaters, cinemas, parks, beaches, cultural and social
centers, dance halls, etc., and converted everyone, even artists, into
salaried employees of the State. Today they receive miserable salaries
and pensions, the same as 50 years ago but devalued 50 times.

That desecration of the value of work, the main basis for any economy,
has destroyed the productive forces of the nation, especially the most
important, the human workforce, which has been demoralized and corrupted
by the high level of exploitation to which it is subjected with
extremely low wages. How can they ask people to be productive, to take
care of the means of production and to feel master of them?

If they do not respect the workforce, art or the citizens' civil or
political rights, what mess are we facing?

We already told the General [Raul Castro] that it was time to close the
Encampment and to open the Republic. But like all our messages to power,
this one did not reach receptive ears either. It was ignored.

Do the current rulers really believe they can ignore with impunity the
demands of other revolutionaries and citizens with different thinking?
Do they believe that I gained this by shooting and by shooting they will
have to take it from me? Why were those shots fired? To gain access to
power eternally and return to the people trampled dignity and
sovereignty? To keep themselves in power by means of violence? Do some
still believe that it is preferable to sink the Island in the sea than
to lose their power and privilege?

They go so slowly that they are becoming paralyzed. Everything has its
limits. Patience, too.

Today repressive actions against the peaceful opposition do not stop not
even with the approach of the pope's visit. If anything, they increase
in number and intensity in an effort to stop the inevitable progress of
the democratization demanded by almost all of Cuban society, parts of
which are equally inside and outside of Cuba, the worker, the fledgling
entrepreneur, the student and the soldier, the communist, the
indifferent and the dissident. We are all parts.

I recently demanded an end to the spiral of violence, which is the fault
of the repressor State. The opposition no longer places bombs or makes
attacks. It assumed the path of peaceful confrontation. The world today
is different than that of the Cold War. Not realizing these changes and
continuing with violence is good for no one.

As some opponents demand: Judge for yourself the repression's direct actors.

From the democratic left it has been warned many times: if they
continue forgetting the original contents that gave life to this proc
overflow.

If they do not want people protesting in the streets or wherever or
however they can, they must do things right: stop the repression, free
the political prisoners, permit freedom of expression, association,
election and economic activities. Start a dialogue with everyone. Move
towards a new democratic Constitution, a State of law and a new
electoral law.

Set reasonable internet prices. Eliminate obstacles to self-employment,
cooperativism and state trading monopolies. Deliver state enterprises to
the collective management of the workers. And free yourselves from so
much blame.

Without peace, democracy and freedom, there will be no development or
any socialism.

This is, once more, a plea from the political forces that emerged from
the revolutionary process itself. From people who devoted the best years
of their lives to fighting for the socialism in which they believed and
who today see their poor families torn apart and their children and
grandchildren risking their lives at sea or in the jungles searching for
well being. Bringing people to desperation is the worst politics.
Prevent violence from growing and spreading.

We do not demand that you surrender or submit, but that you permit the
democratization of Cuban society or let others do what you espoused and
were incapable of doing: achieving the complete happiness of all the
Cuban people.

Do that last service for the Revolution that you began and that long ago
you should have put into the hand of the sovereign people, and then no
one will bother you. In any case, you would pass into history as those
who righted the stray path.

Let the people decide, restore to them their sovereignty. Because of
that and for that they supported the Revolution that you lead 62 years
ago. Don't provoke another one.

Translated by MLK

Source: Restore Sovereignty to the People If You Want To Avoid another
Revolution / 14ymedio, Pedro Campos | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/restore-sovereignty-to-the-people-if-you-want-to-avoid-another-revolution-14ymedio-pedro-campos/