Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
In Cuba, the new Criminal Code includes the possibility of the death penalty for crimes such as “disseminating false news”. Human rights organizations and defenders worldwide have denounced this new criminal instrument in Cuba as a reflection of the authorities’ fear of the growing discontent of the population with the repressive situation prevailing in that country.
Approved by the plenary of the Cuban People’s Power (the Cuban Parliament) on Sunday, May 15, the new Criminal Code “protects the socialist political and state system from the set of actions and activities committed against the constitutional order and with the purpose of creating a climate of social instability and a state of ungovernability”, according to Remigio Ferro, the president of the People’s Supreme Court (equivalent to the president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, in Mexico, or Chief Justice in the United States).
What are these conditions of “social instability and a state of ungovernability” to which Remigio Ferro refers?
According to reports from independent Cuban and international human rights organizations, the balance of the protests of July 11, 2021, is many political prisoners arrested because thousands of Cubans took to the streets in hundreds of towns in peaceful demonstrations to complain to their government about the shortages, the lack of opportunities, the mismanagement of the Covid pandemic and the lack of freedom of expression and political freedoms on the island.
What is normal in any reasonably democratic country in Cuba is considered by the State as subversion with an attempt to overthrow the government and the socialist State. These protests motivated the recent modifications to the Cuban Criminal Code.
The Cuban State and government were so frightened by the protests that President Diaz Canel’s first reaction was to summon all members of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) and, especially, the Armed Forces to take to the streets and repress the alleged coup attempt with “revolutionary” violence. It was a call for civil war in Cuba.
Was it a coup plot, or was it simply a hungry nation demanding changes in economic policy and freedom of expression from the government?
At the time of President Lopez Obrador’s visit to the island, there were more than a thousand political prisoners for the 11-8 protests, some of them underage, many of them tortured by elements of the State. Some have been sentenced to varying from 3 to 30 years, depending on the “seriousness” of the crime. That simple fact would have been enough to declare Cuba a dictatorship.
The new Cuban Criminal Code comprises 28 articles defining the penalties applicable to, for example, “crimes against the security of the State, terrorism, international drug trafficking, and murder”. The death penalty may be applied for any of these crimes. For the Cuban government, practically any protest action, even of conscience, can be considered an attack on the “security of the State” or, if you will, as crimes of “terrorism”.
From a general point of view, these crimes inevitably include all the conduct of every human being because precisely what defines us is our discordant and questioning nature. That is what distinguishes humans from other species: our willingness to question and doubt. The damned doubt! In Cuba, doubt can lead you to the firing squad.
Protesting in the streets in Cuba is punishable, as is publishing false information, even with capital punishment. False information, according to whom? For the State, any information that has not been approved and published by its own media is false or biased.
Cuba is a society that lives in fear. The State, the government, and the Armed Forces live in fear because they feel that the day when they will be held accountable for their repressive behavior is coming, sooner rather than later. And society lives in fear, for the here and now, for fear of not being able to eat or attend to a health need, but afraid to protest against the tightness and misery in which they live.
In Cuba, everyone is afraid. The government fears society, and society fears the government. Mistrust is what prevails as the predominant social mood on the island.
In this context, how can the Cuban government not impose a Criminal Code that is, as Yoani Sanchez defined it, “a detailed compendium of the main fears of the government… This is, in fact, a glossary of the terrors of Castroism and of its desperate attempts to stop what will come anyway”.
Sanchez also pointed out that “The Criminal Code designed to bind us all points to the fact that it has been drafted by a system mired in mistrust towards society and in fear of the future”.
It is precisely because of this context of a Cuba of pain, silences, prisons, and repression that the attitude of President López Obrador (and, in general, of the Latin American left) is discouraging because of his complacency towards a government that justifies its civil-military dictatorship with a narrative designed to remain in power, based on the existence of the unjust and unnecessary US blockade, which, by the way, the Cubans have been able to evade for the most part. This change to the Criminal Code was approved a week after the Mexican President’s visit. Did it have anything to do with it?
The Cuban dictatorship is not a consequence of the US blockade, as López Obrador refers to it. No: the dictatorship is a direct product of the conception of a single-party political regime, merged into the State, and loaded with definite answers for all citizens in all aspects of their lives, down to the smallest details. That political conception of the regime built in Cuba existed before the blockade, before the association with the Soviet Union. It was born within the movement of Fidel, Raul, and Che Guevara. First came the political conception, then the overthrow of Batista, and then the establishment of the one-party regime. It was the time of the decolonization struggles after World War II in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Real socialism prevailed, which proclaimed the one-party system fused into the State.
The conception of the one-party regime comes from the former Soviet Union, as a supposed contribution of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, although none of them proposed the need for the one-party system. This was a creation of Stalin, who today has become the muse of Putin and many leftists, especially the Chinese and Latin American ones.
Democracy, which should be a central concern of the left, barely appears on their agenda and is supplanted by their concern for the poor. It is a great civilizational debate: which comes first: democracy or the fight against poverty? Leaders who call themselves leftists, such as those in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, -and Mexico?- seem to tell us that the poor come first and then democracy. And since they cannot solve poverty, there will be no democracy either.
Cuban society does not enjoy democracy and lives in material misery for the time being. And the new Criminal Code intends to extend the impediment to the exercise of political freedoms in time.
And Mexico is living on the wrong side of history.
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