Committee for Free Trade Unionism

Mother of Orlando Zapata Tamayo: ‘Death Threats from Castro Mobs’

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:42:33 +0000

Banes, Cuba – Reina Luisa Tamayo is being harassed and threatened by mobs organized by the political police and military officials of the Castro regime. The latest affront took place in mid-August, when her house was surrounded by buses and trucks and crowds of Castro supporters, who prevented her regular Sunday visit to the Church of La Caridad and the cemetery where her son is buried.

According to Ms. Tamayo, the riotous crowd, carrying posters and wearing tee shirts with photos of Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro, danced as they used megaphones to scream offensive language and defame the family of the late prisoner of conscience, Orlando Zapata Tamayo. Tamayo died February 23, 2010, after suffering cruel and inhumane treatment at the hands of prison authorities in Cuba during an 86-day hunger strike.

Ms. Tamayo has recorded several interviews, in which she reports:

“For more than five months the repression against myself, my family, and those activists who accompany us every Sunday to the Church of La Caridad and to visit the tomb of my son, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, is becoming more violent and aggressive, involving larger crowds of policemen and military personnel, many dressed in plain clothes, some carrying metal rods wrapped in [...]
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Cuban Prisoners Exiled to Spain Face Maze of Immigration Rules

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:51:11 +0000

from news sources

Cuban refugee Jorge Pérez Fernández has the promise in writing: the Spanish government will grant him political asylum or residency within six months of his arrival in Spain.

Fourteen months after he landed in Madrid, he has neither — a harsh lesson on the vagaries of Spanish migration laws that he has already passed on to the former political prisoners who arrived from Havana in the past weeks.

“I told them to stay alert,” said Pérez, who has launched a hunger strike to push for a resolution of his case: he’s an undocumented migrant who can’t work legally and gets no government aid.

“Economically speaking, I am totally defenseless,” said the 42-year-old architect from the eastern Cuban town of Banes, who arrived from the Guantánamo naval base and now lives in Spain’s Canary Islands.

Jorge Graupera, a Cuban-born Madrid lawyer who specializes in immigration cases, is not surprised by Pérez’s case or by the many questions surrounding the status of the 23 ex-prisoners and 100 relatives who arrived from Havana since July 12.

Outside Spanish Laws

“There’s a lot of confusion, even among immigration lawyers. We have never [...]
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Major Realignment of Workers in Cuba Results In Losses of Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:51:27 +0000

Sources in the Cuban Communist Party say the government has started to “reorganize” its labor force, implementing a plan the government claims will relocate to more productive employment more than one million workers during the next five years.

The Communist sources were quoted in late July by the Madrid news bureau, “Agencias.”

According to the news source, the relocation of about one fifth of the country’s labor force would be accompanied by economic reforms. The stated objective of the Communist regime is to propel forward the nearly destroyed island economy, removing from government employment workers that President Raul Castro has described as “unnecessary.” The displaced workers would be placed in other jobs where “they really have to work,” according to Communist Party sources. An economist militant in the Communist Party – who requested anonymity – stated that “we hope to eliminate 200,000 jobs every year, some 100,000 of them during the next year but only in the capital Havana.”

A Return to Farming Those who refuse new jobs will have to go to Labor Ministry offices, request the assignment of parcels of land and dedicate themselves to agriculture, or live from the remittances they get from [...]
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CFTU Calls for Release of All Cuban Dissidents

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:13:06 +0000

The Committee for Free Trade Unionism (CFTU) welcomes the efforts of Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino to obtain the release of at least some of the political dissidents the Castro regime has imprisoned for many years.

According to the government of Spain, about 23 formerly imprisoned Cuban dissidents and their families have arrived in that European country.

Among those known to have been released is Dr. Jose Luis Garcia Paneque, who is suffering from a malabsorption syndrome acquired while in a Cuban prison.

Not Open to Democracy

One former prisoner, in an interview with the BBC, said Havana’s motives should not be misunderstood. “Cuba is not opening up to democracy,” he declared. “I personally think it is a trick by the Cuban government,” the former prisoner said. “The economic needs on the island are huge. The social situation is critical, the political stagnation… This is why it is important to draw the international communities’ attention to this aspect of the Cuban government so they don’t get fooled again,” he said.

The Cuban government has yet to acknowledge publicly details of the releases, or why the release of additional imprisoned [...]
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Dissidents in Vietnam – Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:42:32 +0000

In its summer issue, Dissent magazine, published in New York, breaks the silence on efforts to quell pro-democracy movements in Vietnam with an article titled “Vietnamese Dissidents: Absent from the Western Mind.”

Dustin Roasa, a free lance writer based in Cambodia, describes the most recent chapter in the history of Vietnamese dissidents, which began on April 8, 2006, when a group of activists posted on-line a “Manifesto 2006 on Freedom and Democracy.” The Dissent article was featured in a blog called Human Rights for Workers.

The “manifesto” was signed by more than 2,000 Vietnamese, including lawyers, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, ex-Communist Party members, writers, and intellectuals from all parts of the country. They became known as Bloc 8406, after the date it was posted.

In a visit to Vietnam in the winter of 2007, Roasa talked with several Bloc 8406 members and found their mood pessimistic. The movement was under siege and losing members to prison. It did not gain the attention of the foreign media.

“The dissidents I know hope for foreign involvement in their cause,” Doasa writes . The hope was that media interest would pressure the Party to listen to dissidents like Nguyen Dan Que, who after 20 [...]
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Amnesty Int’l: Cuban Courts Complicit in Stifling Dissent

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:52:19 +0000

HAVANA —(Associated Press) Cuba uses repressive laws, a well-oiled state security apparatus and complicit courts to stifle political dissent as it harasses, spies on and imprisons those who openly oppose its communist system, Amnesty International said in a report released July 14. 2010.

The 35-page analysis said restrictions on expressing views deviating from the official line are “systematic and entrenched,” despite the government’s taking “some limited steps to address long-standing suppression of freedom of expression.”

Cuba’s government did not respond to a request for comment. It routinely dismisses international human rights groups as tools of the United States.

Amnesty found that things have not improved since February 2008, when Cuba signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political [...]
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10 Trade Unions Still in Cuban Jails

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:51:36 +0000

Pressure Builds for Free Trade Unions in China

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:27:05 +0000

A wave of strikes in Chinese factories recently has highlighted the lack of authentic rights for Chinese workers and other inequities in Chinese society. In response, the Communist regime is launching a “Strike-Hard” campaign.

According to China analysts, the recent wave of strikes is a reflection of simmering social discontent and unrest as a result of social inequality, injustice, and rising inflation, The Epoch Times reports. Many of the striking workers are not only demanding pay raises, but are also asking for independent unions.

If the strikes escalate, they may threaten China’s position as the factory of the world, and thus threaten the communist regime’s popular legitimacy and survival. However, experts say that responding to the workers demands with brute force will not work.

On June 13, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security announced it would launch a seven-month-long “Strike-Hard” campaign to “crack down on violent crimes that seriously affect the public’s sense of security” as China goes through an economic transition and social transformation.

Xu Yimin, a migrant workers’ rights activist in Jilin Province, in his blog called for an independent labor union, stating that the string of suicides at Foxconn and the [...]
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CFTU Forum Rips Cuba on Rights Violations

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:35:29 +0000

There’s been no letup in Cuba’s harsh treatment and imprisonment of its citizens who want more political freedom and free trade unions that actually protect the rights of workers.

That’s the conclusion reached by participants in a forum on “Freedom of Association in Cuba,” sponsored in June in Geneva by the Committee for Free Trade Unionism (CFTU) and the Unitary Council of Cuban Workers (CUTC). The forum was held concurrently with the 99th annual conference of the International Labor Organization (ILO).

During the forum, panelists highlighted the plight of the independent labor movement in Cuba, the Cuban government’s continuing violations of human rights, its harassment of independent labor activists, and the inhumane living conditions of Cuba’s political prisoners.

As an example, Aurelio Bachiller, a former political prisoner and now general secretary in exile of the National Independent Workers’ Confederation of Cuba (CONIC), explained to forum participants how his son MacDiel Bachiller was arrested and imprisoned by the Cuban government. The senior Bachiller was arrested in 1993 after he attempted to create an independent labor union of agricultural workers. He spent three years in a Cuban prison and in 2008 was able to emigrate [...]
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ITUC Cites Cuba’s 2009 Labor Union Violations

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:57:17 +0000

In its annual survey of violations of trade union rights, the International Trade Union Confederation issued the following report about Cuba:

Background: Cuba saw a bad start to the year in the aftermath of the three hurricanes that struck the island in 2008, leaving damages estimated at 10 billion dollars. The government reduced subsidized food quotas in 2009, cut energy consumption and stopped its debt repayments. No change was seen, however, on the political and rights front. According to the majority of the analysts consulted, no substantial change was seen on the political scene, aside from the replacement of secondary figures such as Carlos Lage, the former vice president. The same applies to the civil and democratic rights situation.

Anti-union legislation: The regime continues to prohibit independent trade unions and the right to strike is simply not regulated by the legislation in Cuba. According to the government, the need to call strikes does not apply, as the official trade union organizations enjoy the guarantee that their demands will be heard by the authorities.

Right to form and register organizations declared illegal: A considerable number of trade union organizations have been declared illegal [...]
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