Serene Among the Vile / Lilianne Ruíz

Serene Among the Vile / Lilianne Ruíz
Lilianne Ruíz, Translator: Unstated

I wanted to say hello to Jose Daniel Ferrer of the Patriotic Union of
Cuba (UNPACU), the next time he was in Havana. On Monday I learned that
police had kidnapped him while he walked down a street of the capital,
and sent him by force to Santiago de Cuba. How frightened they are of
Ferrer, because Ferrer has no fear.

I tried to imagine what it means for a man like him to be walking down a
street in this country and see a patrol car full of uniformed cops, or
agents dressed in plain clothes, who will take you where you don't want
to go because there is a legal trap for Cuban citizens that many have
fallen into, which says that you may not make any kind of resistance to
"authority."

But what does this authority represent? It is not the civil authority
that ensures citizens do not disobey the law to guarantee the peaceful
coexistence of society. It's the brute force that serves to destroy the
freedom of the whole world and guarantee its dominance. Before, of a
single leader; now, from the shadows of that leader.

In Santiago de Cuba Ferrer is responsible for UNPACU, to which Wilman
Villar Mendoza belonged. The Patriotic Union of Cuba stages protests for
Freedom in the streets of eastern Cuba. Not everyone joins in, because
most of the Cuban people expect "the security" — the agents of State
Security — and so they cannot be free. These men who help Ferrer and are
thrown into the abyss of freedom, like knocking on heaven's door, have
for the same reason, being a few, the status of the arsenal of Liberty.

The regime fears them.

It is noteworthy that this country has among its monuments a mass of
ugly cement and iron, known as the Protestodrome (in front of the United
States Interest Section), which has been the scene of many protests,
always guided and organized by the government, so protest does not
figure as a crime in the Penal Code.

People who have suffered imprisonment for having been a part of citizen
protests against the government have been prosecuted for "crimes against
the Security of the State," "enemy propaganda," or things like "public
disorder," "incitement to crime," "insulting national symbols." Or
simply "resisting arrest" and "contempt of authority."

It's one trap after another, the cowards don't even show their faces!
The Revolutionaries, and the nameless Revolution, have always aspired to
pose a "good," and so have deceived many people in Cuba and outside of
Cuba. Or they have found villains like themselves who support them.

To fall, by way of these legal traps, into any of the Revolutionary
prisons — as witnessed by those who have experienced it — is to descend
into underworld conditions, to have guards with no conscience run
roughshod over you, to be persecuted by other inmates whom the agents of
the Ministry of the Interior have convinced, in exchange for some
reward, to harass and attack the political prisoners.

The Government/Cuban Regime must be condemned by every person who loves
the good who still remain in this world. They will not escape from God,
even if they manage to escape human justice. It is a terrible thing to
fall into the hands of the living God.

I don't know if the submission has been only the response of the
instinct of self-preservation against the irrational fear this
dictatorship has imprinted in every conscience. Or if we Cubans are
going through this hell in life because many have found satisfaction in
being dominated. I don't know.

There is always the fear that makes Cubans leave Cuba, at times it is
the desire to earn money and to return to spend it on one's family, but
freedom continues to be postponed.

Ferrer does not do this, we must help him. Because the consequences are
always growing for the actions he undertakes and if this doesn't stop,
where will we be tomorrow if we continue to allow the Cuban apparatus of
repression to act ignoring moral law?

The wider the gap becomes, the abyss, between the defenders of freedom
and the oppressors of freedom, the more sure I am that we must defend
what we are against what we are not. God made us free. I know that we
are not alone.

May 14 2012

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