The Five W’s of Cuban Reality

The news about Cuba today was all about the Caribbean leaders at the CARICOM summit calling for the lifting of the Cuban embargo. There were some stories about Cuba’s claim that tourism to the island is booming. Sprinkled in were articles about the screening of the new Che movie in Havana with Benicio del Toro in attendance.
There were, however, other events taking place in Havana on the eve of the day celebrating the international human rights. But Reuters didn’t cover them. AP filed no stories. Will Weisert was otherwise occupied. And not a single one of them cared.
There is the face that Cuba shows visiting dignitaries, mojito-infused tourists, and credulous actors. Then there is visage it shows its hapless citizens. So while the summit members were visiting the tomb of Cuba’s great apostle of freedom, Jose Marti, those following his example were being beaten on the streets of the Vedado district. While Hollywood filmmakers were extolling the virtues of the itinerant Argentinian, real men and women were facing the machinery of repression he helped design.
Belinda Salas Tapanes, President of FLAMUR, the Federation of Rural Women, is a young woman whose organization spearheaded a petition campaign, loosely titled “In the Same Coin,” a campaign which asked simply that the current two tier monetary system be abolished, so that Cubans can use the money they are paid in the stores that actually have merchandise. Although active in dissident affairs, she is not as well known as others, lacking even that minimal protection, and is therefore fair game for intimidation.


So here is the story Anita Snow won’t tell you, as written by one the unwilling participants* herself:
Today, on the afternoon of December 9th of the present year, on K Street, between Linea and 13 in Vedado, opposition members Lázaro Joaquín Alonso, Marlene Bermúdez, Roberto Marrero and I, Belinda Salas Tapanes, were brutally victimized.
A mob made up of eight policemen from two patrol cars, without asking for identification and without intervening conversation, began to beat us violently. Lázaro Joaquín Alonso was beaten so that he bled abundantly about the mouth and head. Alonso Román received powerful blows to his testicles. In actuality, his whereabouts are unknown as he was detained by the police.
Marlenes Bermúdez, along with her husband, Roberto Marrero, was brutally attacked and her blouse was ripped. Immediately they were detained and taken to an unknown location, although the police screamed as they beat them that they would be sent directly to Camaguey, where they reside.
As for me, Belinda Salas, they ripped my blouse, leaving me naked, and the beating left me with a fractured hand, as well. After realizing they had placed me in the police car with those to be taken to the interior, they threw me out of the moving car.
We would like this denunciation-which shows how the regime fears the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-to reach all well-meaning people. We ask for solidarity before such a criminal act and we reiterate that FLAMUR will continue fighting for the rights of the Cuban people.

*Loose translation mine. Original in Spanish available here at Misceláneas de Cuba.
This was but one incident in a wave of repression. So please don’t tell me about the evils of the embargo; don’t pass on fairy tales about tourism; or tout Sodderburgh’s Havana triumph with his paen to a blood-soaked butcher. Write the reality of Cuba. File dispatches about the beatings, the intimidations, the imprisonments, the slow death of the Caribbean gulag. That would be news indeed.