By Julio Antonio Fernandez (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Dissidence and political opposition in Cuba have been repressed in many different ways since the Revolution triumphed in 1959.
I’m not adding anything here that we don’t already know. Political and civil liberties have been silenced ever since that date, with the use of an enormous arsenal of repressive methods and practices.
Freedom of expression has been strangled, as has press freedom and the rights to assemble, protest, associate, demonstrate, strike, or form political organizations. In the same way, there’ve been limits on religious freedom, trade unions, and parents’ right to make decisions regarding the education of their children.
The Cuban government has found an immoral (but successful) justification to legitimize the repression of political pluralism in the country: the doctrine of Plaza Sitiada [besieged plaza] and the undeclared state of exception – first because of the Cold War, and always due to the US blockade or embargo, which in turn forms part of a long historic rift with the government of the United States.
The dispute with the US government is a fact – or rather a complex political, economic, cultural, and legal process – in which the ones who have essentially been harmed are the peoples of Cuba and the United States.
The blockade-embargo is also a composite of administrative laws and decisions that for over 60 years has damaged the people of Cuba and the citizens of the US who have aspired to establish economic, political, commercial, cultural, academic and scientific relations within a framework of normality and legality.
The historic divide between the Cuban and the US governments, especially since 1959, and the blockade-embargo have only served the political, economic, and cultural interests of the political extremes of each country which has impeded the possibility of relaxing the policies and moving towards a rapprochement between the two nations.
The immorality of the Cuban government is rooted in its use of these circumstances to justify and implement an authoritarian political regime. The immorality of the US government has consisted in pressuring the Cuban government to enact supposedly democratic political and economi
