» From Cuba

Cuba: Open Letter to Raul Castro from Antúnez
By Jorge Luis García Pérez "Antúnez"

Mr. Raul Castro,

 

My name is Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez, a former political prisoner, I am writing you again not because I pretend to make you aware of something that is alien to you and is ordinary in Cuba and natural to the politics of your government. For several months now my wife Yris Tamara Perez Aguilera and I find ourselves under forced house arrest by your political police and a high ranking State Security officer the week before the Juanes concert in Havana after arresting me informed me that I had an order for my arrest throughout the island of Cuba. He emphasized that they were going to be watching every step I take. Since that date I have lost count of how many times I have been detained the majority of which were violent.

 

Mr. Dictator allow me a few questions that may help you clear up some doubts of those compatriots of mine who were hopeful in that your government would diminish repression or that even democratic openings could be made.

 

With what right do the authorities, without a prior crime being committed, detain and impede the free movement of their citizens in violation of a universally recognized right?

 

What feelings could move a man like Captain Idel Gonzalez Morfi to beat my wife, a defenseless women so brutally causing lasting effects to her bones for the sole act of arriving at a radio station to denounce with evidence the torture that her brother received in a Cuban prison or is it that for you there are only five families that exist in our country that have the right to protest and demand justice for their jailed relatives?

 

Should you not be ashamed that your corpulent police officers remain posted for days at the corner of my home to impede us from leaving our house and monitoring our movements in our own city?

 

Where is the professionalism and ethics of your subordinates that with their ridiculous operations provoke the mockery of the populace for these persons on an almost daily basis?

 

How do you feel when you encourage or allow these persons who call themselves “men” to beat and drag women through the streets such as: Damaris Moya Portieles, Marta Diaz, Ana Alfonso Arteaga, Sara Marta Fonseca, Yris Perez and most recently the blogger Yoani Sánchez?

 

How can you and your subordinates sleep tranquilly after deliberately and maliciously knocking down on more than one occasion Idania Yánez Contreras who is several months pregnant?

 

How can you and your government speak about the battle of ideas when you are constantly repressing them with beatings, arrests and years of incarceration?

 

Maybe your followers cannot find or attempt to find a response. However, I find myself in the long list of persons that are not afraid to respond.

 

You act this way because you are a cruel man and insensible to the pain and suffering of others because faithful to your anti democratic and dictatorial vocation you are convinced that dictatorships like the one you preside over can only be maintained through terror and torture and the most minimal opening can lead to the loss of the only thing that you are interested in which is maintaining yourself in power.

 

Lastly and returning to my case in particular I will respond without asking you beforehand the concrete motives of your continual repression against me personally. Your government and servants of the repressive corps cannot forgive my two biggest and only crimes: First that despite almost two decades of torture and cruel and inhumane punishment during my unjust and severe sanction you could not break my dignity and my position as a political prisoner. Second, because even though I was accosted and brutalized and above all the risk of returning to prison I have taken the decision not to leave my country in which I will continue struggling for a change that I believe is both necessary and inevitable.

 

From Placetas,

Jorge Luis García Pérez Antunez. December 2009.

 

 

Send by E-mail | Printable Version

Directorio Democrático Cubano
P.O. Box 110235
Hialeah, Florida 33011
Tel. 305-220-2713
info@directorio.org

© Copyright 2006 Directorio Democrático Cubano. All rights reserved.