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Nonviolent activists writing Castro's final chapter
By John Suarez

MIAMI, July 26, 2003 -- Today, Fidel Castro will celebrate with rallies and speeches the 50th anniversary of the violent act that helped establish his dictatorship. In 1998 the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was observed by beating and arresting activists.

Fifty-five years ago, a Cuban delegation representing a constitutional republic wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They recognized that this document would have been, "accepted by that generous spirit who was the apostle of our independence: Jose Marti, the hero who-as he turned his homeland into a nation-gave us forever this generous rule: 'With everyone, and for the good of everyone.' "They represented a republic that abolished the Platt Amendment; provided an eight hour work day; the right to strike; university autonomy; and had a public space with large numbers of newspapers and radio stations with diverse political and ideological viewpoints.

On March 10, 1952 Fulgencio Batista destroyed the Constitutional order and wounded the republic establishing a dictatorship. The Cuban people outraged at this assault on the young republic fell under the sway of a charismatic and politically capable young lawyer who promised the return of democracy and constitutionalism through violence. On January 1, 1959 Castro came to power and has remained there. What of the values of Jose Marti, the men who fashioned the first draft of the Declaration, and what of the men who in good faith used violence to effect democratic change? They did not fare so well. One example, of many, is Mario Chanes de Armas.

Both Mario Chanes de Armas and Fidel Castro survived the Moncada barracks attack, served a three year prison sentence together, trained in Mexico, returned to Cuba on the yacht Granma and Chanes de Armas, lived to greet Castro in Havana. Chanes de Armas could have had any position in the new regime, but opted to return to his job in a brewery. For two years he watched Castro betray their movement. Finally, he spoke against the growing communist influence in the regime. He was tried as a "counterrevolutionary," and on July 17, 1961, was imprisoned for 30 years. He spent six years of those years in solitary confinement.

The men and women who battled Batista's dictatorship found that what they hoped would be a rebirth of the Cuban republic and restoration of the 1940 Constitution had become a totalitarian dictatorship. From the urban resistance in the cities to the hills of the Escambray they fought Castro for six years in a civil war with casualties on both sides substantially higher than the struggle against Batista. At the end of this period the opposition was either in exile, in a Cuban prison, or in a grave, victim of the regime's efficient firing squads. Yet, within the prisons and labor camps Cuba's human rights movement was forged. A movement that saw the power of non-violent resistance exercised by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., practiced it in the prisons, and saw it as a means to mobilize the Cuban populace.

This movement emerged from Castro's dungeons and grew into a national civic movement challenging the dictatorship's monopoly of political power in Cuba. It has as its means and ends a civic, non-violent struggle that educates citizens, rebuilding a democratic culture that reclaims human rights, refuses to cooperate with injustice, and challenges the dictatorship 's authority to repress. Exposing the internal contradictions of the dictatorship by demanding that it respect the democratic aspects of its own constitution the dictatorship never meant to enforce. Oswaldo Payá, one of the movement's leaders, observes: "What we are seeing, with this crackdown, is the last chapter of this system." Laurent Fabius, a prominent French socialist and former prime minister under François Mitterrand worries that "Americans have an interest in being the only opponents of the Castro regime because they will have greater access to the island's resources when the regime falls," signals that the last chapter may be shorter than we imagine.

 

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