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Cuban Government’s ‘Thug’ Tactics Continue

December 22nd, 2011 , By admin

Find Under Focus on Cuba

Cuban state security police are now telling the Ladies in White not to attend Sunday mass.

Recently, six Ladies in White, among them Sandra Guerra, Elizabeth Kawooya, and Dignora Figueredo, were called in and threatened at dawn on a Saturday by the political police in Havana and told not to attend Sunday services at Santa Rita’s Church. Megaly Norvis, leader of the Ladies in White and an independent journalist, was detained by police. Hours later, Ms. Guerra reported that while they were getting ready to protest in front of the Capitol, Ms. Norvis had had been released.

In mid-December, the Ladies in White paid homage to their late leader while observing International Human Rights Day at her home. A jeering pro-government crowd surrounded them.

Photos of the late Laura Pollán and messages of condolence adorned the wall of the house where she lived in central Havana and that served as a headquarters for the Ladies since the group was formed in 2003. Next to a lit candle, an empty chair was draped with white clothing that belonged to Pollán. A single gladiola and a tiny Cuban flag rested on the lap.

“Laura Pollán lives!” the Ladies cried, and “Freedom for political prisoners!”

Outside, dozens of supporters of President Raul Castro’s government, many of them students, massed at the front door and shouted revolutionary slogans and insults at the women inside.

“Viva Fidel! Viva Raul!” they chanted, draping huge Cuban and revolutionary flags from the roof.

Bertha Soler, one of the founders of the Ladies and its unofficial leader since Pollán’s death in October, blamed authorities for the crowd.

“We want to go into the streets, which is the right of the Cuban people, but the Cuban government prevents us from doing so with these organized mobs,” Soler said. “The aggression is psychological, not physical, and it’s a demonstration of the Cuban government’s intolerance.”

Cuban authorities insist such counterprotests, known as “acts of repudiation,” are spontaneous acts by citizens disgusted by the dissidents, whom authorities accuse of being mercenaries paid by the U.S. to destabilize the island. Little is done to hide coordination with state security, however.

The Castro government, according to independent news reporters in Havana, is also stepping up its violence against other protestors. In a recent crackdown, police arrested 48 critics of the government and in the process several protestors suffered head wounds and broken ribs. Ten of the protestors were held in jail. Police also severely beat Angel Moya, a well-known former political prisoner, while he was in a lockup because he would not stop shouting anti-government slogans.

Dissident Danis Lopez de Moya said the harsh crackdown took place as protestors started a march from his house in the eastern town of Palma Soriano.

Wildo Izaguirre, one of the 38 freed, told El Nuevo Herald that

“As we left the house in groups of five, police jumped us, beat us and dragged us to the parked buses.” Izaguirre said he was pushed to the ground and kicked in the face. The police, he said, continued beating the dissidents once they were inside the government buses.

The latest protest was to have been part of a rotating series of street demonstrations starting in Cuba’s easternmost province of Guantánamo and following later from towns and cities to the west.

The “National March Boitel-Zapata Live!” named after two dissidents who died during prison hunger strikes, was designed to demand the release of all political prisoners and an end to human rights abuses.

CFTU Updates

  • The Passing of Bill Doherty

    Bill Doherty, 84, Executive Director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, AFL-CIO

    William Charles “Bill” Doherty Jr., who led the AFL-CIO’s outreach to trade unions in Latin America for 35 years, died August 28 after a long battle with bone marrow cancer. He was 84.

    Born in Belleview, Ky., the oldest of nine children, Doherty was raised in the Washington, D.C. area where his father, William Charles Doherty Sr. was president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, and later the first U.S. ambassador to Jamaica. He graduated from St. Paul’s Catholic Academy High School, where he met his future wife, Jane Catherine Donovan, a Boston native.  He worked as a Capitol Hill police officer while completing his degree in philosophy at Catholic University of America, where he played defensive lineman for the football team. He also attended Georgetown University School of Linguistics and Georgetown Law School.

    Doherty’s life was defined by his Catholic faith (he spent a brief period of his life in the St. Charles Seminary, studying to be a priest) and his conviction that democratic trade unions held the key to freedom and prosperity around the world. His work with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Postal Telephone and Telegraph International (PTTI) and the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), took him to 129 countries over his career.

    After serving as an aerial photographer with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, Doherty assisted in rebuilding the trade union movement in Germany, supporting the anti-Nazi, dissident labor leaders and nascent democratic trade union movement that is today known as the Confederation of German Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerteschaftsbund, DGB).  He served in Belgium, Europe and Latin America as an AFL-CIO representative to the PTTI, an international trade secretariat.

    When President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was initiated in 1961 to support labor’s international role in nurturing democratic trade union movements abroad, Doherty was the logical choice to serve as AIFLD’s Director of Social Projects, and later as Executive Director.  He led the AIFLD under the direction of four AFL-CIO presidents, retiring in 1996.

    Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Jane Catherine Donovan, eight children and 25 grandchildren.

  • The CFTU Website

    Welcome to the CFTU website!

    We’ve designed it to keep you better informed about developments in the continuing struggle of workers everywhere to establish and maintain the right of Freedom of Association – the right to form and join unions of their own choosing, run by people they elect.

    The CFTU has been active in recent years in attempts to assist workers in Cuba struggling to assert that right – in the face of their government’s insistence that only one union, guided by the Communist Party, can represent them,  and against the background of continuing imprisonment and harassment of those who think otherwise.

    Cuba is not the only country in the world denying workers their rights.  Sadly the list is long – Burma, Vietnam, North Korea, China -  to cite a few.  But too many trade unionists in the free world are unwilling to speak out, apparently believing that somehow these regimes will transform themselves into democratic societies and that through contact with free world unions, the non-representative unions in those police states will remake themselves into legitimate unions. Such a belief flies in the face of 90 years of experience to the contrary.

    The recent hunger-strike death in a Cuban prison of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a 42-year old brick mason serving a 26-year sentence for his political activities, and the long hunger strike of  dissident journalist Guillermo Farinas, provide eloquent testimony to the determination of those heroes to see their country free and democratic and observant of all the rights of free people.

    Our committee believes that neither dictatorships nor their hand-maiden unions ever yield power willingly and that free trade unions must not be complicit in the denial of freedom of association to workers.  Rather, we believe that those who are joined in the struggle to assert workers’ rights in the face of dictators, those who risk imprisonment and harassment, need and deserve our moral and material support.  We hope you will join us in those struggles.

    Tom Donahue, CFTU Chair