Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada, a Cuban legal expert, says that the status of Cuban human rights is getting worse. “”The already known crisis in the realization of civil and political rights, which is a consequence of the type of State and the type of political system that has existed in Cuba for more than 60 years, has been joined by a gradual deterioration of economic, social and cultural rights.”[1]
“The Cuban government defended itself for decades, especially since the 1980s, that the accusations made against it were related to a liberal or bourgeois interpretation of human rights, which apparently privileged civil and political rights over economic, social and cultural rights, which are those that Cuba defends as essential.”
“The argument was that we were living in a situation of a besieged city, which became a kind of political doctrine that justified the fact that there were reforms, changes and democratic adjustments within the country that the Cuban government could not undertake. That is an argument that has gradually stopped being used, and what has been said is that there is a Cuban socialist project and a Cuban democratic model, and that this is enough to have an alternative.”
“The crisis of civil and political rights in Cuba is evident in the limitations on freedom of speech, the press and association, as well as violations of religious freedom and the denial of the right to strike and to freely form unions. But the crisis is more serious in the constant repression against those who dissent and, ‘all this creates a scenario of limitations on rights, headed by the impossibility of creating and registering a political organization other than the Communist Party. This creates an evident scenario of political discrimination in the country, and is accompanied by persecution and censorship of political activism.’”
“In recent years, for quite a few years now, there has been a clear deterioration in the indicators of socioeconomic development in Cuba. There is a crisis in housing, transportation, garbage collection, the whole issue of sanitation, education, public health, with limitations not only in the quality of services, but also in access to services and important medicines.”
“We can no longer say that this is a bad scenario only for the development of civil and political rights, but also for all human rights. The most serious thing of all is that there is no sign of the Cuban government assuming responsibility for the problem, which only justifies itself and blames all responsibility on the dispute with the US, on the economic and cultural war that is being waged against the country and nothing else, without making a move.”
“The Cuban government ‘is a desperate government, looking for political, economic, financial, and commercial support, because it is experiencing a terrible crisis. Obviously, all of this has worsened considerably since the events of July 2021 , when it had to assume something that it had not had the need to assume before, which was the direct, massive repression of thousands of people, who demonstrated peacefully in most cases.’”
“At the same time, it was a very surgical thing done by the government, because it imprisoned around 1,000 people, which demonstrates the capacity of the Cuban repressive organs to dominate and resolve situations without having to be so overwhelming, and the use of all the means at the disposal of totalitarianism, of the control mechanisms that allow hundreds of people to be mobilized for repression , persecution, censorship, harassment, siege, as they continue to do, including another violation of human rights in Cuba, which is cutting off access to mass internet.”
“Cuban civil society, which is growing in tandem with emigration and the slow agony of the Revolution becoming deeper and more irreversible, is, ‘an enormous tidal wave of people from all over the world. I think that they do not yet have the level of organization and unity that we need, but they are working to show the world the situation of human rights in Cuba and also to condemn and denounce the humanitarian crisis that is taking place in the country, because it is a crisis that puts the Cuban nation at risk, politically and culturally speaking.’”
Conclusion
On July 23, 24 and 25, Fernandez Estrada, a Cuban and former professor at the University of Havana and now Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, will expand on all of these points at a virtual seminat on human rights in Cuba that is organized by the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America.[2]
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[1] Santana, Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada: ‘It is a crisis that puts the Cuban nation at risk, politicallly and culturally speaking, Diario de Cuba (July 18, 2024)
[2] Julio Antonio Fernandez, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (Harvard University).