Resorting to Lies

Resorting to Lies / Cuban Law Association
Cuban Law Association, Translator: Maria Montoto, Wilfredo Vallin Almeida
By Wilfredo Vallin Almeida

I always thought that when the situation came to be the present one, the
authorities (especially the political police) would behave with a
greater degree of seriousness and, above all, of professionalism. The
reality ruins my expectations.

Just moments before sitting down to write this post for the Asociación
Jurídica Cubana (AJC: Cuban Legal Association), the facts are as follows.

As is known, since we do not hide it at all, the AJC, in collaboration
with Estado de SATS, is recording a series of informative programs for
the legal education of the population. To those ends we have published:
"Detention" and "Searching Inhabited Homes".* Coming soon another
program will be published, this one with the title "Habeas Corpus".

Once edited, these programs are published by Estado de SATS on the
INTERNET so that they can be accessed by all those who want to do so
outside of Cuba. For the interior of Cuba, discs are burned or they are
recorded in (portable) memory; will we ever have Internet?

The programs to which I am referring have a didactic and informative
objective with a very precise subject: that which is established by
national law in relation to certain penal, procedural or constitutional
topics.

I don't believe that any government truly democratic nor certain of its
people would object to having its legislation spread among its citizens.
But, it seems, here we cannot count on either of those two characteristics.

That's how things are, and so that he would participate in this latest
program I have mentioned, I invited a young lawyer from Las Tunas, who
takes care of the activities of the AJC in that city in the Eastern part
of the country and he, kindly, accepted.

Since we do not feel that deception (in any of its forms) is a decorous
way of doing things, it was explained to the attorney Yunieski San
Martín Garcés, who furthermore knows well what we do and how we do it,
what his stay here would consist of and what would happen once the
material in question was recorded. In good faith, Yunieski boarded a bus
to Havana.

But… (and in the current state in which we live there will always be a
BUT), leaving the municipality, the bus on which Yunieski was traveling
was detained by various patrol cars. He was forced to get off, the bus
driver was told that he was transporting a well-known
counterrevolutionary, he was taken to a police station by State Security
and there he was informed that his arrest was due to the fact…he was
coming to film with us material to be turned over to USIS (the United
States Interest Section in Cuba).

Once again we find State Security, the USIS, the show in the middle of
the road, the plot in the shadows against the government, the
international intrigue, the treason by nationals against our worried and
self-sacrificing patricians (who, incidentally, in 50 years did not
fulfill the agreements of their own congresses), etc., etc., etc.

I already stated that we publish what we do on the INTERNET, something
the political police does not do with its arbitrary acts and especially,
with its illegalities of all types.

The people of Cuba have the right to know their laws and to employ them
to defend themselves against those who, incapable of showing themselves
with the truth, and hiding their identity, recur to this which is
nothing more than resorting to lies.

*Translator's note: Article 218 of Cuban criminal law authorizes the
search of inhabited dwellings even if the inhabitant refuses to allow it.

Translated by: Maria Montoto

May 28 2012

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