Sunday, April 1, 2012

The Streets Belong to Cubans / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

The Streets Belong to Cubans / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado
Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado, Translator: Unstated

Cuba's leaders and their acolytes have warned for years and without the
least reserve, that the streets belong to the Revolutionaries. This
amounts to the segregation that only government sympathizers can march
and protest peacefully and publicly, but always in favor of the only
party legally recognized which has been in power for 53 years. It is
another example of intolerance and the violation of the rights of a society.

It's true that all totalitarian regimes — of the right and left — like
children of the same dictatorial sperm, converge in these aspects and
maintain an iron control that enables their gigantic police apparatus.

The firing pins of the monitoring, information, immobility, lack of
sociopolitical and economic freedoms, and the fakery have exploded, for
decades, the cork of the exodus, which has driven citizens to multiple
points around the globe; and our country, which was a receiver of
immigrants, became a producer of them beginning in 1959. We how have a
population living abroad of two million people.

Today it seems that there is no leadership crisis, but a relaxation of
the same or the mythologized personification that imprints the figure of
the Cuban maximum leader. The former president and his work and
propaganda team — which took a break starting in 2006 — keeping society
suffocated and repressed — in endless marches, events and political
acts, and making people used to his persistent presence and keeping the
first president in the Cuban media.

His successor and brother — I don't know if voluntarily or conditions —
doesn't have the same importance, and this combined with the systemic
crisis, the corruption, and the long stay in power of the primal
guerrillas, the lack of perspectives and the accumulation of unresolved
problems, makes people restless and it begins to show more and more in
visible signs of being fed up.

The Ladies in White, humiliated, harassed, insulted and beaten by
pro-government mobs for years, never ceased to demand freedom for
political prisoners, and with constancy and courage demanded rights for
everyone and exercised their peaceful protest in our streets. With
perseverance, bravery and at a high price, they won, despite historical
discrimination and intimidation, that not only the president's daughter
may demonstrate in our streets with people of similar interests. The
street belongs to all Cubans who travel through them in search of
sustenance, the food of the day, public transport that never comes or is
over-crowded after so much waiting, or what they do every day in long
lines of despair.

After decades of harassing peaceful citizens with the intent to
terrorize them — as well as all of society — many Cubans, who know the
occupiers who protest today in different countries, whom our media
supports, and embedded in the example of the Ladies in White, they begin
to shred, publicly and spontaneously, the rags of fear, and are
beginning to show their disagreement in various ways. Society has begun
to "scale the fence" of dissent and to demand their rights as an
intrinsic part of the personal and community freedom of the Cuban nation.

March 27 2012

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=17197

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