Preface to Cuba-Nonviolent Resistance I

 Mario J. Viera

Popular resistance to the regime imposed in Cuba has been present, both in a disguised and open way, mainly since 1968 – when Fidel Castro launched his catastrophic "Revolutionary Offensive" and bowed to the Soviet Union and blessed the Brezhnev doctrine that crushed the Prague Spring. In subtle ways many, acting in isolation, have expressed their discontent with the system that Castro promoted, from the very moment he took political power of the Nation, refusing to be part of the satellite mass organizations of the Communist Party, refusing to participate in the campaigns of "voluntary" work, which the government massively organized or not participating in the parades and public concentrations that the Communist Party convenes in support of its dictates.

The violent resistance of the years of the 60s, left a long trail of terror, drowning in blood the guerrilla attempt to confront Castroism. Many of those fighters – defamed by the pro-government media as bandits and mercenaries, and as perpetrators of the most heinous murders of civilians – came from the same ranks of rebels who had stood up to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Trapped within the Cold War trap they sought support in the United States. In keeping with its geopolitical interests, the United States, through operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, began to supply weapons to the Escambray guerrillas. They were disposable but valuable elements within the plans that the CIA elaborated. That self-serving American support suited Castro's propaganda to discredit the libertarian movement; an insurrectionary movement that would be liquidated, in the military sieges, in the firing squad walls, in the prisons, in exile, and buried almost in oblivion by a powerful army that, armed and trained by the Soviet Union, surpassed it in number and troops.

Ostensibly opposing the government was and is, placing oneself on the margins, in internal ostracism, in disqualification as a person, and even repressed by the police and sentenced to prison by courts biased with the spheres of power and without respect for procedural guarantees.

The assault on the Embassy of Peru in 1980 by a large number of citizens, then represented the most definite expression of the discontent of the population; as well as now the spontaneous demonstrations of July 11, 2021 have expressed it.

In 1988, a new way of resisting the Communist Party-controlled government began in Cuba; the civilist resistance of the defense of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and under the inspiration of the reform processes, which appeared in the Soviet Union with Perestroika and Glasnost. 

Acts of civil disobedience were then undertaken by the Cuban Committee for Human Rights; by the Party for Human Rights of Cuba, both founded by Ricardo Bofill; by the Asociación Pro Arte Libre (APAL); by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) of Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz; by Friends of Perestroika by Félix Fleitas and by other small dissident organizations. They did not intend to overthrow the Castro government; they did not aspire to take political power; they manifested themselves as reformers, but that did not prevent the repression from leading to imprisonment and exile to many of their main activists, presented as retrograde and counterrevolutionary elements, in alliance with the interests of the always mythological "Yankee imperialism".

Despite the repressive acts, discontent grew and a large number of tiny dissident organizations emerged from 1991 onwards, defining themselves as "peaceful opponents". In 1996 a new challenge was posed to the Communist Party with the emergence of independent journalism or alternative journalism to the official one, which became a discordant voice with official discourse and propaganda. 

In a new attempt at a political challenge, in 1996, the groups of internal dissidence agreed on a pact of unitary collaboration within the structures of a mega organization of unity and consensus, the Cuban Council, a kind of independent Parliament in front of the National Assembly of People's Power.  State Security introduced agents into the structures of the opposition coalition to undermine it from within. With the arrest of its main promoters Leonel Morejón Almagro and Lázaro González Valdés, and the government's declaration that the Council conference, scheduled for February 24, 1996, was "organized, planned, sponsored and financed by the government of the United States", the Government prohibited the meeting of opponents. As for this and under the pressure of the repressive organs, the deputy delegate of the Cuban Council who was free, Héctor Palacio Ruiz, declared the suspension of the activities of that unitary movement until a new "propitious moment".

Opposition groups continued to grow, many under the strong inspiration, by and under the control of Cuban exile organizations, and, specifically, of the Cuban-American National Foundation with a marked tendency to right-wing radicalism. 

A strong activism promoted the reformist project of Oswaldo Payá ─ known as the Varela Project ─, managing to capture the support of more than ten thousand signatures, to be presented, under the supposed "legal loopholes" present in the totalitarian Constitution of 1976, to the consideration of the Council of State, the highest organ of the one-party National Assembly of People's Power.

In all this time the opposition groups failed to present a powerful front of civil resistance. The syndrome of paranoia, present within each group, made them see infiltrators of state security everywhere, stopped any attempt at unity or strategic concertation.

Projects and proposals were elaborated looking for a media effect abroad, while within the country they remained in a total ignorance. There was no adequate methodology for the development of a well-implemented line of conflict resolution.