After more than two years in hiding, Ali Abdulemam (right), a globally renowned blogger and free-speech advocate, has been freed from the Kingdom of Bahrain, writes Thor Halvorssen, president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. Abdulemam is now safely in Europe, after a dramatic escape in a secret compartment of a car, and will make his first public appearance in more than two years on Wednesday at the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF).

In 1999, Abdulemam created the pro-democracy news website Bahrain Online. Because of this, and his related efforts to promote human rights in his country, he was eventually imprisoned in September 2010 along with 25 other human-rights activists for “spreading false information” and defaming the king — and subjected to interrogation, beatings, and torture. Despite being blocked by regime censors, Bahrain Online still regularly gets more than 100,000 hits a day.

In February of 2011 Abdulemam accepted an invitation from the Human Rights Foundation to give a talk on dissent in Bahrain. Two weeks later, amid massive anti-government protests, he sent a cryptic tweet and abruptly disappeared. In June of 2011, Abdulemam was tried in absentia by a military court and sentenced to 15 years in prison for “plotting” an anti-government “coup.”

On a number of previous occasions, Human Rights Foundation personnel had gone to extensive lengths to obtain testimony for OFF from people who try to challenge arbitrary power and dictatorship. In 2010, HRF representatives traveled to Cuba with hidden camera equipment and were able to obtain the testimony of celebrated blogger Yoani Sanchez and the Ladies in White dissident movement. OFF personnel also traveled to Vietnam to visit persecuted Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do. The Vietnamese authorities intercepted one HRF staff member, who was arrested and severely beaten by their intelligence police, but the digital recording of the monk’s testimony made it safely to Oslo.

If Chen Guancheng’s escape from house arrest in China worked, why not in Bahrain?

Here’s how we hatched a scheme to get Ali Abdulemam out of Bahrain — and learned again how even the best laid-plans can be overtaken by random luck, Halvorssen writes for The Atlantic.

Read the rest.

Ali Abdulemam was a recipient of the World Movement for Democracy’s Courage Tributes.

European Parliament President Martin Schulz, left, hands over the 2005 Sakharov Prize to Berta Soler, the President of the Cuban “Ladies in White” (Damas de Blanco).

“The leader of Cuba’s dissident Ladies in White today called for maintaining the U.S. trade embargo and limiting travel to the island until the Raúl Castro government respects human rights,” The Miami Herald reports:

Berta Soler acknowledged that her hard-line views differ from those of other government critics such as blogger Yoani Sánchez, who opposes the embargo and favors more U.S. travel. But all dissidents agree that the Castro system must end, she added. Soler also argued that dissidents in Cuba require more financial support from abroad because the government, which is almost the island’s only employer, denies them jobs and other income yet calls them “mercenaries” paid by the U.S. government.

For the Communist authorities tourism is the sector “that lays the golden eggs,” she said, adding “that money arrives clean at the Cuban government.”

Soler is one of several prominent dissidents allowed to travel abroad where they have met with senior officials and politicians.

“The Cuban government officials are uneasy about what the bloggers and dissidents are saying outside of Cuba, and about all of the attention they are getting. The sharp criticism naturally makes them uncomfortable,’’ said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue.

“The authorities tend to be dismissive about the bloggers and insist that they don’t represent anyone in Cuba, that they have no constituency,’’ he said. “Of course, the bloggers claim no such thing; they are just expressing their views.’’

So why has the Communist regime allowed some of its most vocal and articulate critics to travel abroad?

“Is Cuba truly opening up — or just trying to burnish its image at a critical time when the future of its main benefactor, Venezuela, is uncertain and it needs to reach out to the world?” The Herald asks:

Regardless of the dissidents’ critical messages abroad, their travel gives the Cuban government the opportunity to appear less restrictive. “Every time they take a plane and travel they are proving this point,’’ said Domingo Amuchastegui, a former Cuban intelligence analyst.

But Pepe Hernandez, president of the Cuban American National Foundation, says that rather than giving more legitimacy to Havana, the trips are more advantageous to the dissidents and their views.

“They are giving a face to Cuban reality that is different from what the government is putting out. I think this will change the world’s view of the internal situation in Cuba,’’ he said. “We also have an opportunity to relate more personally with these people that we have been helping for quite some time.’’

Another benefit for the dissidents, he said, is “when they return, they will be protected by the knowledge and the contacts they’re collected outside.’’ And some will return with additional monetary support, he said, from the prizes they’ve received and the contacts they’ve made.

Rosa María Payá, daughter of the late Oswaldo Payá , probably the island’s most prominent dissident when was reportedly killed by state security agents in a suspicious car crash last year along with colleague Harold Cepero, has a more cynical take.

“This effort by the Cuban government to sell its reforms as democratic changes, as the beginning of an opening, is what we call cambio fraude” — fraudulent change, she said. “They are trying to clean up their image.”

“In Cuba there has been a change but it has nothing to do with the changes of the government. It has to do with changes that are occurring in the hearts of Cubans who are convinced Cuba needs change,’’ she added.

While on a world tour that took her to Spain, Sweden, New York, Washington and South Florida, Payá, 24, continued to press for an international investigation of her father’s death. The Payá family believes his death wasn’t accidental but caused by Cuban security agents who rammed the vehicle in which he was traveling.

“I think the Cuban government miscalculated and didn’t fully understand what the impact of the visits would be,’’ said Raúl Moas, who heads Raices de Esperanza (Roots of Hope), a group that sent some 1,500 new and refurbished cell phones to Cuba last year.

“For 50 years you had one voice coming out of Cuba. Now you have multiple voices,’’ he said. “It changes the narrative that the government has so long tried to control.’’

But with little Internet access available to the average Cuban, the ongoing policy of short-term detentions of dissidents who become too public in their protests, scant recognition at home of the names that have become so high-profile abroad, and a largely politically apathetic Cuban public, dissidents face an uphill battle in getting out their messages on the island.

“As long as the government can control the internal situation, they could care less what the international view is,’’ said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. The government has allowed dissident travel as a way to relieve pressure “There is no way Raúl Castro is going to lose control — yet.’’

Even Yoani Sánchez acknowledges the political malaise in her homeland.

“The average Cuban is apathetic and indifferent, doesn’t believe in the government but also doesn’t believe that anything is going to change,’’ she said.

“It is hard to know what the long-term effect of such travel might be on the political situation in Cuba,’’ said Shifter, a former program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy. “There is no evidence that it marks the beginning of the end of the Cuban system, but clearly some change is happening in Cuba — on that point, both the Cuban government and the bloggers seem to agree.’’
RTWT

Democracy, wrote Donald Kagan in “Pericles of Athens” (1991), is “one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience.”

Democratic governance relies on “free, autonomous and self-reliant” citizens and “extraordinary leadership” to flourish, even survive, he tells The Wall Street Journal.

These kinds of citizens aren’t born—they need to be educated. “The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make,” Mr. Kagan says.

“At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don’t have [that], it’s not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It’s that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial.”

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. “Crisis suggests it might recover,” Mr. Kagan shoots back.

“Maybe it’s had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy.”

There are also serious threats to democracy in Europe, albeit from a different source, according to the president of the European parliament.

“Our generation have [sic] lived in such certain times, secure times, that we cannot imagine how it was in the past,” German social democrat Martin Schulz tells the FT’s Gideon Rachman:

But nothing is excluded. Nothing. We have banished the demons of the 20th century but we have not eliminated them: hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, nationalism. Look at what’s happening in Hungary. Young students in Budapest are painting on the door of a professor – ‘Jew’. These are students doing this, not football hooligans. We have the privilege that we have never seen such people in power but there is no guarantee it will not happen. My protection against them is a strong European Union.

Schulz last week presented the parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to the Cuban Ladies in White dissident group. 

“No people can be oppressed forever,” he said at the award ceremony in Brussels. The prize “showed the valor you have displayed in your work, and that no dictatorship in the world can stop democracy in the long run.”

Schulz cited human rights reports that the number of arbitrary arrests for political reasons rose to a record 6,602 in 2012.

Members of the Cuban dissident group Ladies in White have finally collected their Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which was awarded by the European Parliament in 2005.

The group was awarded the prize for their campaign to free 75 dissidents jailed in the Black Spring of May 2003. The jailed activists included poets, doctors, journalists and democracy advocates, who received between 15 and 28 years in prison for allegedly threatening “the security of the State.”

Ladies in White began as a spontaneous political protest, but the women now meet every Sunday to pray at the Santa Rita church in Havana. The group had to postpone collecting the award  because Cuba’s Communist authorities banned members from travelling abroad until exit permits were allowed in January.

“Our dignity is much bigger than the hatred of those who repress us,” said Laura Labrada, daughter of the group’s late co-founders Laura Pollán.

One of the group’s co-founders Berta Soler (left), who attended the ceremony with several other members, said their work was far from over.

“We need a Cuba where there is proper freedom and human rights,” she said, urging “real reforms, not just cosmetic change.”

After accepting the prize, named after the prominent Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, Soler called for a minute of silence to honor Pollán and Oswaldo Payá, winner of the 2003 prize who was killed in a car crash last year, reportedly after being rammed by members of Cuba’s security services.

Cuba allowed Payá to collect his prize, but Guillermo Fariñas, winner of the 2010 award, was barred from travel. He is expected to do so in the next few months.

“No people can be oppressed forever,” European Parliament President Martin Schulz said at the award ceremony in Brussels. Highlighting the eight-year delay, he said it “showed the valor you have displayed in your work, and that no dictatorship in the world can stop democracy in the long run.”

Schulz cited human rights reports that the number of arbitrary arrests for political reasons rose to a record 6,602 in 2012.

“If the governing cupola believes it has the full backing of the people, if they really believe what they say in public, then they would not need those kinds of numbers,” Schulz added.

Celebrated dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez plans to establish an independent digital newspaper upon her return to Cuba.

She expected to be subject to surveillance and harassment back in Cuba, but expressed the hope that her celebrity, which she called “a joke of fate” and “a cross” that she bears, would serve as “a protective shield,” while insisting that she had no intention of seeking political asylum.

New social media platforms such as blogs and Twitter “have helped us create small cracks in the wall of censorship” in Cuba by creating a “black market of information.”

“You can’t imagine the speed with which information is circulating,” she said.

While it took ten years before she saw images of the Berlin Wall being torn down, her son was able to watch Egypt’s Tahrir Square revolt as it happened. But she has no illusions that technology per se will undermine the regime.

“By themselves, these aren’t the instruments that will bring democracy to Cuba,” she said.

The Communist authorities, who denied her applications to travel abroad 20 times over the past five years, probably relented this time because they hoped that she would not return.

“I’m not going to stay in another country, and I’m not going to be afraid,” she told a Washington meeting yesterday.

The fate of two of Cuba’s leading dissidents was a reminder of the threats facing activists, said Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (right), a photographer and editor of Voces, an independent on-line journal.

Oswaldo Paya* and Harold Cepero were killed in a car accident last July. The driver of the vehicle recently revealed that it rammed from behind by a car with official license plates.

“It is time for the international community to insist that a thorough investigation occur,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who had sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. 

Sanchez said she plans to move beyond her Generación Y blog and produce an independent newspaper, which would necessarily start as a digital publication since the regime bans independent print newspapers as “enemy propaganda.”

Earlier this week, she had hinted at the venture, in comments paying tribute to the ‘Black Spring’ dissidents, saying that “it is time to move beyond the realm of the personal and individual expression of the blog – the catharsis that is the 140 characters on Twitter – into a more civic exercise that would be expressed through an independent press in Cuba.”

Asked why she opposed the US embargo when leading dissidents like Dr. Oscar Biscet (left), and Ladies in White leader Berta Soler support it, she said that the dissident movement “is not monolithic” in its perspectives., while sharing the common goal of democracy in Cuba. Lifting the embargo would immediately remove the Communist authorities’ last remaining excuse for the system’s failures.

“I come from a generation of Cubans that have grown up with an official discourse constantly running through my ears that has expertly used the embargo as its foremost excuse,” Sanchez said.

“I have seen since I was a child how the official media constantly presents the embargo as the big bad wolf from the fairy tales I read as a child,” she continued. “I would love to see how the official propaganda apparatus would function without this big bad wolf. I doubt that it could.”

In a later meeting on Capitol Hill, she said the international community should not confuse Raul Castro’s anemic reforms “from on high” with genuine change.

“I am not here as a politician,” said Sanchez at a meeting in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “I am not here as a journalist. I am here as a citizen.”

“I am here to share and talk about the Cuba that is undergoing change and how we can help make that move forward,” she said.

*The regime targeted Payá because he “crossed a red line in challenging the government’s relations with the church, which had become a pillar of the government’s strategy of survival…. at a time when the regime, emboldened by the cardinal’s silence at the mass arrests during the pope’s visit to Cuba in March, was not about to tolerate criticism,” said the National Endowment for Democracy’s Carl Gershman.

Celebrated Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has paid tribute to the civil society activists of the Black Spring and called for a change in dissident tactics.

“I want to honor and remember those independent journalists, activists and peaceful opponents. They opened a road that we now continue to tread,” Sánchez said, referring to a wave of arrests of Cuban democracy advocates (above) a decade ago.

“They presented an opposition to which we feel we are heirs despite all the censorship and repression.”

Ten years ago today, the Communist authorities launched a violent crackdown, imprisoning 75 activists for up to 25 years.

Cuba’s most eminent blogger said it was time for a shift from cyber-activism to the more open exercise of freedom of expression.

“[I]t is time to move beyond the realm of the personal and individual expression of the blog – the catharsis that is the 140 characters on Twitter – into a more civic exercise that would be expressed through an independent press in Cuba,” she said:

On Sunday, Sánchez, 37, said that during the Black Spring, the political climate in Cuba was not only highly sensitive but also complex. The dissident movement had little means to share information with the world.

The 2003 summary trials and prison sentences of jailed opponents marked a new chapter in the human rights demands by the international community and the internal dissidence. The incident encouraged mothers and wives of political prisoners to organize a common front known as the Ladies in White. The group demanded the release of the prisoners.

Sánchez said that the campaigns and demands of the civil society have now an additional tool in technology, cellphones and services such as Twitter, among others.

“Those were times when social networks or Internet did not exist [in Cuba], there were no memory flashes, and it was impossible to have a computer,” she said.

 “Many independent journalists and peaceful activists who began their work precariously have now resorted to blogs, for example, as a format to circulate information about programs and initiatives to collect signatures.”

She cited the Citizens’ Demand for the Cuban authorities to ratify the United Nations political and civil rights agreements signed in 2008.

“It has been my fate to live in Cuba and that is why I have a commitment to the reality in which I live,” Sánchez said.

“Yet it is not a defense circumscribed to one geographic location, because it is a condition of citizen responsibility. It is important to have initiatives for transforming the law and demand concrete public spaces within the country.”

Capitol Hill Cubans report:

Cuban democracy leader Antonio Rodiles has just released the latest episode of his civil society project “Estado de Sats” (filmed within Cuba), where he discusses the importance U.S. sanctions policy with two of Cuba’s most renowned opposition activists and former political prisoners, Guillermo Fariñas and Jose Daniel Ferrer. The question posed was: What consequences would the unconditional lifting of the U.S. embargo have at this time?

“If at this time, the [economic] need of the Cuban government is satisfied through financial credits and the lifting of the embargo, repression would increase, it would allow for a continuation of the Castro’s society, totalitarianism would strengthen its hold and philosophically, it would just be immoral… If you did an opinion poll among Cuban opposition activists, the majority would be in favor of not lifting the embargo,” said Fariñas.

“In a cost-benefit analysis, travel to Cuba by Americans would be of greatest benefit to the Castro regime, while the Cuban people would be the least to benefit. With all of the controls and the totalitarian system of the government, it would be perfectly able to control such travel,” said Rodiles.

“To lift the embargo at this time would be very prejudicial to us. The government prioritizes all of the institutions that guarantee its hold on power. The regime’s political police and its jailers receive a much higher salary and privileges than a doctor or engineer, or than any other worker that benefits society. We’ve all seen municipalities with no fuel for an ambulance, yet with 10, 15, 20, 50 cars full of fuel ready to go repress peaceful human rights activists,” said Ferrer.

Credit: NDI

The Obama administration should back calls for an investigation into the death of a leading Cuban dissident, says the Washington Post:

Nelson Mandela was locked up on Robben Island. Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky. Vaclav Havel was thrown into a Prague jail cell. Aung San Suu Kyi was repeatedly placed under house arrest. All of these courageous, dissident voices were muffled at some time by authoritarian regimes, but in the end, they found their way back to freedom. Oswaldo Payá [left] of Cuba never got that chance.

His daughter, Rosa Maria Payá, this week presented a petition signed by 46 activists and political leaders from around the world to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, calling for an international and independent inquiry into Payá’s death.

“Mounting and credible allegations that the Cuban government may have been complicit in the murder of its most prominent critic, a leading figure in the human rights world, cannot go ignored by the international community,” said the appeal, organized by the UN Watch human rights NGO.

“After Mr. Payá’s death, the White House paid tribute to him, saying, ‘We continue to be inspired by Payá’s vision and dedication to a better future for Cuba, and believe that his example and moral leadership will endure,’” the Post notes:

When pro-democracy activists were arrested and beaten at his funeral, the White House again spoke up. But in the past week, since Mr. Carromero’s interview was published, the administration has not uttered a word. What if it had been Sakharov, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mandela or Havel who was run off the road? Would it have said nothing?

“At this critical juncture, with new information at hand, the United States ought not to be complicit in silence about who killed Oswaldo Payá,” the Post concludes.

In 2002, Payá initiated the Varela Project, a mass petition calling on Cuba’s Communist authorities to guarantee constitutional rights. He was killed alongside fellow activist Harold Cepero in a car crash in July. The car’s driver, Spanish rights advocate Ángel Carromero, was imprisoned on charges of vehicular homicide, but released to Spain in December. He told the Washington Post last week that the car was hit by a vehicle with official license plates.

Shortly after the crash, Payá’s widow, Ofelia Acevedo, said that a survivor of the crash had sent text messages from his cell phone reporting that the car crashed after it was repeatedly rammed by another vehicle. 

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo yesterday told Berta Soller, the leader of the dissident Ladies in White, that the European Union will continue its tough “common position” toward the Communist regime:

Garcia-Margallo offered Spain’s help in a “transition” to democracy in Cuba, drawing on the Iberian nation’s return to representative government after the 1975 death of dictator Francisco Franco, the dissident said.

The latest revelations regarding Payá’s death appear to confirm suspicions of foul play voiced at the time of the crash by his fellow dissidents and democracy advocates.

The regime targeted Payá because he “crossed a red line in challenging the government’s relations with the church, which had become a pillar of the government’s strategy of survival…. at a time when the regime, emboldened by the cardinal’s silence at the mass arrests during the pope’s visit to Cuba in March, was not about to tolerate criticism,” said the National Endowment for Democracy’s Carl Gershman:

Visiting Bayamo with foreigners — the two survivors of the crash were fellow Catholics from Spain and Sweden — crossed another red line. The city is the center of the cholera outbreak in the eastern part of Cuba, and for the regime, the disease is not just a medical problem but also an economic and political threat. ….The spread of the disease also challenges Cuba’s self-image as a medical superpower and could arouse anger in citizens who believe that sending Cuban doctors to Venezuela and other countries detracts from the care they receive at home. The fact that Bayamo has experienced labor unrest the past two years and was a rebel stronghold during Cuba’s war of independence against Spain and the uprising against Batista further arouses the regime’s anxiety.

“He had said they were going to kill him. And this was the third accident he had this year,” charged Martha Beatriz Roque, a well-known dissident economist.

The Communist regime had a further incentive to remove Paya, said analysts.

“What really distinguished him was that unlike almost all the others, he engaged in retail politics,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert with the Lexington Institute. “His Varela Project stands out as the only initiative of its time that enlisted citizen participation on a large scale. No one else did that, before or since.”

“There is something irreversible happening,” in Cuba, says dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez. “And that is the need people have to express themselves.”

Her comments coincide with demands that the United Nations investigate the suspicious death of rights advocate Oswaldo Paya and that the European Union support Cuban democrats.

Credit:MarcMasferrer

Paya’s daughter, Rosa Maria Paya (right) today handed over a petition to the UN Human Rights Council, calling on UN head Ban Ki-moon and his human rights chief Navi Pillay to launch “an international and independent investigation” into his death.

“They say that my father died in a car accident, but we have confirmed … that they were actually crashed into and run off the road by another vehicle,” she told reporters in Geneva.

“Mounting and credible allegations that the Cuban government may have been complicit in the murder of its most prominent critic … cannot go ignored by the international community,” read the petition, signed by 46 politicians, parliamentarians and human rights activists from around the world.

Cuban officials tried to block her speech, according to the human rights group, UN Watch, which organized the petition.

“A well-known Cuban dissident urged support from Europe on Tuesday for her group advocating democracy in Cuba, and wasn’t fazed when protesters disrupted her first appearance abroad by unfurling a pro-government banner and yelling that she was lying about harsh conditions for citizens of the island nation,” AP reports:

Berta Soler (left), the most prominent member of the Ladies in White group, told the audience that she welcomed the demonstration, similar to a protest in Brazil last month when pro-Cuba protesters halted an event featuring prominent Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez.

“What has happened is normal because we are in a country where democracy and liberty exist. If they want to talk, let them talk,” Soler said to applause from an audience that shouted “Cuba Yes!, Castro No!” in response.

“Repression has worsened” in Cuba and the regime is acting “with impunity in the streets, is beating us, is dragging us away, is taking us to jail,” she said.

Soler is in Europe to accept the EU’s Sakharov human rights award. She said that small amounts of the €50,000 ($65,000) cash prize will be transferred periodically to Cuba to support the Ladies in White.

Sanchez’s Generation Y blog posts are read by half a million people, writes the Washington Post’s Juan Forero:

Her Twitter followers increased by 35,000 after she arrived in Brazil, where pro-Castro protesters met her at an airport and then broke into a film screening she was attending, forcing the organizers to cancel… The Brazilian press later revealed that a Cuban official had met with pro-Castro groups and passed out dossiers on Sanchez…. In televised reports of the protests, Sanchez spoke with calm, a slightly bemused look on her face as demonstrators shouted her down. In the end, she went to Brasilia and addressed the country’s congress.

“They were small but very noisy groups that shouted the same insults Cuban propaganda uses, that I’m a mercenary, a traitor, anti-fatherland, anti-Cuban, all the usual lexicon,” she said.

“I very much like the plurality of ideas and wish it was like this in my country.”

Frank Calzon, who directs the Center for a Free Cuba, said Sanchez obsesses the regime because she writes in a vivid, engaging style and because she has mastered technology that dictators fear.

“After 50 years of controlling what Cubans read and what they wrote and even whom they could hate, here’s a woman speaking her own mind,” Calzon said.

It is a sad reflection on Cuba’s sclerotic regime that it has grown dependent on Venezuelan subsidies, said Sanchez.

“I lament that the life of a nation depends so much on the death of one man,” she said. “I feel that the political absence of Hugo Chavez will, without a doubt, influence the national destiny.”

Hugo Chavez’ passing should serve as “a reminder to the Castro brothers that power is ephemeral,” according to two prominent commentators.

“Cuba is ready for change. In spite of the efforts by the regime to paint a rosy picture, eye witnesses tell a sad story,” according to András Simonyi and Jaime Aparicio Otero:

Living conditions are bad, the economy survives only at the mercy of Venezuela. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission, in its 2012 a report on Cuba, speaks of “permanent and systematical violations of the fundamental rights of Cuban citizens.” Ironically, however while the Cuban people suffer, the regime is internationally stronger than ever.

“Cuban society is fractured, with the supporters of the regime and those who reject it altogether representing approximately 25-30 percent each. It is however the remaining silent 40-50 percent that can make transition a success or a disaster,” they write for the Huffington Post.

“To understand today’s Cuba, one must better study the history of communist Eastern Europe, rather than that of Latin America. The resemblance is striking,” they contend:

The inner workings of the regime are similar to the more conservative countries of the former communist bloc in 1989. …..Halfhearted, thus unsuccessful economic reforms, the total control of the media, isolating the population from the world, harassment of the political opposition and the communist elite clinging to power. At the same time a disenchanted population, including a big part of the party membership, the majority of which does not any longer believe in the ideology or the future of the system. It is more like East Germany or Romania, rather than Hungary or Poland of the day.

“We now know how difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy was, in Spain, in Eastern Europe or South Africa. There are valuable lessons learned, Cuba need not repeat the mistakes of others,” say Simonyi, Managing Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C. , and Otero, a former Ambassador of Bolivia to the US:

It is easy to erect institutions of democracy, create a free press, a free and independent judiciary. It is far more difficult to guard these institutions. Beware of populism, smart and attractive, but equally dangerous leaders. It is now also understood, that success of change hinges on economic success. The wider population will embrace democracy only if it associates more freedom with a better life. For a country without natural resources the only source they can exploit, it the smartness of its people. Only full-fledged democracy can ensure the frameworks for that.

RTWT

The Center for a Free Cuba is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Cuba’s Communist authorities denied Yoani Sánchez (right) the right to travel twenty times, but she has now arrived in the Czech Republic, Radio Praha’s Jan Richter reports:

Sánchez, who said she only knew Prague from the books of Milan Kundera, will attend the One World Festival of human rights documentaries and appear at a concert in support of Cuban artists, organized by the humanitarian Czech NGO People in Need,* which provides support for Cuban journalists and opposition activists.

But the dissident blogger warned that the partial relaxation of travel curbs did not signify a real shift in government policy.

“I don’t think that this is a sign of significant political change,” she said. “Instead, the government is trying to create the impression that Cuba is progressing and improving, that the country has begun to open up. The reality is that repression continues on the island [see videos below], and that human-rights and opposition activists continue to be violently oppressed.”

“I do hope that there will be change. But I don’t believe it could come from the government. Rather, the civic society, which has developed and acquired new tools such as technology, can push for a process of democratisation. That’s my hope.”

Cuban dissidents are equally skeptical that Raul Castro’s announcement that he will step down in 2018 will do more than re-allocate authority within the ruling elite. Castro’s appointed “dauphin,” Vice-president Miguel Diaz-Canel, would be the first leader not to be a veteran of the Cuban revolution – assuming he ever takes office.

“It’s going to be a challenge,” said analyst Brian Latell. “The record of the Cuban revolution is littered with the names of people who were thought to be No. 3 or 2 and all of them fell by the wayside, going back to Che Guevara.”

Diaz-Canel’s elevation is a sign of continuity rather than change, observers suggest.

“It confirms the gradualism of Raúl’s approach,” said Geoff Thale, program director for the Washington Office on Latin America, referring to Castro’s modest economic reforms. “I don’t think there’s any evidence that he is someone looking to bring rapid or dramatic change to Cuba’s political or economic system,” he tells the New York Times:

Raúl Castro has mostly praised [Diaz-Canel] for his hard work, and his “ideological firmness” — more than enough to attract the ire of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans who have already criticized him for being a Castro protégé. American officials have expressed skepticism, noting that the top-down selection of a new leader does not amount to democracy.

Mr. Díaz-Canel may in fact find himself on a lonely perch if he manages to seize the top job. He will be surrounded by pent-up demands for more significant change, but without the heft attributed to the Castros and the revolutionaries who fought with them.

“He will have to watch his back,” Mr. Latell said.

The ruling Communist party’s determination to retain its political monopoly explains why external actors need to keep up the pressure, and post-Communist states like the Czech Republic have a special role and responsibility, said Sánchez.

“The position of the Czech government towards the opposition – one of solidarity, collaboration and support, is very important at this moment,” she said. “It seems that for many, Cuban affairs are beginning to lose importance because many people believe that Cuba is changing. Maintaining the pressure is crucial.”

Sánchez arrived in Prague after a visit to Brazil, where she received a hostile reception from Leftist demonstrators, reportedly orchestrated by the Cuban regime, who on one occasion, “burst into an event at a bookstore, forcing organizers to cancel it,” the Wall Street Journal reports:

For many Brazilians, the headline-making attacks are a national embarrassment. In one dramatic scene in Bahia this week, the 71-year-old Brazilian Sen. Eduardo Suplicy put himself between an angry mob and Ms. Sánchez to protect her. “Have the courage to listen!” he shouted. They didn’t, and the event was canceled for safety reasons.

“Why are we talking so much about Cuba and Yoani Sánchez? Because this woman is living proof of the Castros’ unfulfilled promise of liberty, a promise that seduced and involved, from the start, some of the greatest intellects of our continent,” wrote O Estado de S. Paulo columnist Eugênio Bucci.

Sánchez noted that the demonstrators were exercising the rights to protests and free speech denied to Cuba’s people.

“I am a self-taught democrat. I believe in the plurality of ideas. But when it comes to verbal or physical violence, that’s no longer plurality, that’s fanaticism,” she said, explaining Latin America’s “illusion” about Cuba.

“There are young people attracted to the idea of revolution. And there are not so young people who can’t accept that the ideas they believed in are defunct, or for whom it is too late in life to say ‘I was wrong.’ ”

Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party has remained supportive of Cuba’s Communist dictatorship. Pro-democracy activists criticized then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he suggested that hunger-striking dissidents were common criminals. Labor unionists have also highlighted Lula’s hypocrisy, recalling the international solidarity he received while struggling for the same democratic rights as a young union militant.

Brazil’s stance could backfire when Cuba becomes a democracy, said Sánchez.

“There’s been a lack of toughness or frankness [from Brazil] when it comes to talking about human rights on the island. I would recommend a more energetic position, because the people don’t forget,” she said.

Capitol Hill Cubans add: Last week, we posted a video of Cuban pro-democracy activists Rosario Morales la Rosa and Melkis Faure Echevarria courageously leading a protest in Havana’s Central Park, calling for an end to for the Castro regime’s repression. They were arrested pursuant to the protest.

A new video has surfaced showing the commotion caused by Castro’s police — simply due to a peaceful protest by two women in a park — and foreign tourists being arrested for unwittingly taking pictures. Ironically, only the images captured by a Cuban pro-democracy activist with a hidden camera saw the light of day.

The second video (above) shows 30 Ladies in White protesting at the bus terminal known as “La Coubre,” where they were purposefully stranded at 2 a.m. They were all thereafter violently beaten and arrested.

*People in Need is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. 

Dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez (above) was warmly welcomed by Brazilian lawmakers today “in sharp contrast with the hostile reception she got from pro-Havana protesters in northeast Brazil,” AFP reports.

“We are making up for the unacceptable violence shown toward a visitor to our country,” said Octavio Leite, a deputy from the opposition Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB).

Sanchez’s Brazilian critics parroted the Cuban regime’s standard characterization of Sanchez as a pro-American “mercenary,” but it appears that it was the protesters who were acting at the behest of a foreign power.

According to local news magazine Veja, Cuban diplomats recently met with militants from Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party in Brasilia and asked them to organize protests against Sanchez during her stay in the South American country, Reuters reports. One junior official in the Rousseff administration was present at the meeting, Veja said.

Sanchez’s visit touched a political nerve in Brazil, where the left-leaning government of President Dilma Rousseff is often criticized for not taking a more critical stance with Cuba’s one-party system and the repression of political dissent there.

The celebrated blogger noted that the Leftist protesters were exercising the rights to protest and free speech denied to Cuban citizens.

“I am so happy. It has been five years of struggle,” Sanchez told local media.

“Unfortunately, in Cuba you are punished for thinking differently. Opinions against the government have terrible consequences, arbitrary arrests, surveillance,” she said in an interview with GloboNews television.

The demonstration was not the first act of officially-orchestrated repudiation she has witnessed, Sanchez observed.

“The first act of repudiation that I saw in my life was when I was only five. The commotion in the tenement caught the attention of the two girls we then were, my sister and I,” she blogged today:

We peered over the railings of the narrow corridor to look down to the floor below. People were screaming and raising their fists around a neighbor’s door. As young as we were, we had no idea what was going on. ….. Years later I could put together that kaleidoscope of childish evocations and I knew I had been a witness to the violence unleashed against those who wanted to emigrate from the port of Mariel.

She has since “experienced several acts of repudiation up close…whether as a victim, observer, or journalist… never — I should clarify — as a victimizer,” she wrote:

I remember a particularly violent one that I experienced with the Ladies in White, where the hordes of intolerance spat on us, pushed us and even pulled our hair. But last night was unprecedented for me. The picketing of the extremists who blocked the showing of Dado Galvao’s film in Feria de Santana was something more than the sum of unconditional supporters of the Cuban government. They all had, for example, the same document — printed in color — with a pack of lies about me, as Manichean as they were easy to refute in a simple conversation. They repeated an identical and hackneyed script, without the least intention of listening to any reply I could give them. They shouted, interrupted, and at one point became violent, and occasionally launched a chorus of slogans that even in Cuba are no longer said.

But, with the assistance of Senator Eduardo Suplicy, Sanchez managed to exercise her own right to free expression over the objections of those who “only knew how to yell and repeat the same phrases, like programmed automatons,” she wrote:

Their neck veins swelled, I cracked a smile. They attacked me personally, I brought the discussion back to Cuba which will always be more important than this humble servant. They wanted to lynch me; I talked. They were responding to orders; I am a free soul. At the end of the night I had the same feelings as after a battle against the demons of the same extremism that fueled those acts of repudiation in 1980 in Cuba. The difference is that this time I understood the mechanism that foments these attitudes, I could see the long arm that controls them from the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana. RTWT

Yoani Sanchez will be one of the speakers at The Revolution Recodified, a three-day conference at The New School and New York University about the impact of digital technology in Cuban culture and society. 

For more than a decade, Cuban artists, musicians, independent journalists and librarians have teamed with computer scientists and engineers on the island and in the diaspora to foment a socially engaged and politically independent culture using digital technology. The conference will explore the ways that digital technology is transforming Cuba’s cultural and political landscape by challenging the state’s longstanding monopoly on communications media and its hegemonic control of cultural production and distribution.

Further info here.