Christian Liberation Movement All Cubans: The change is liberation
About nine years ago, for the first time in Cuba during the dictatorship, we presented the Varela Project with the support of over 11 000 people asking for political and economic rights for everyone. The Spring of Cuba had already begun when former President Carter decided to visit us. A Spring that the regime tried to shut down by imprisoning dozens of activists fighting peacefully for democracy. That chapter has not yet ended, because many of them were deported, because those who claim these rights are still repressed and persecuted, because the totalitarianism continues and because our fight also continues and will continue until the Cubans are free in Cuba.
We are subjected to a crossfire of repression, threats, false accusations, exclusion and silencing of media within and outside Cuba. Former President Carter has returned and once again he has the courage, almost exceptional, to meet with us. Thank you, Mr President Carter, friend of Cuba.
The government is committed to fabricate a false opposition and to unleash outrage and repression to create confusion and to compensate for the cowardice of others since there is an urgent need for an alternative to the peaceful opposition for democracy. Why? Because it is the real opposition that drives the real alternative to the regime, which is liberation.
We proclaim hope, announcing this great news of liberation, now very close.
The solution of the problems and the serious human, economical and social damage that the totalitarianism has generated can’t be achieved without overcoming the totalitarianism. The only way the Communist Party can do what’s right is if they return to the people what belongs to the people: all the rights and sovereignty. That no one speaks on behalf of the whole people, instead one should ask through a plebiscite.
We distinguish the Communist Party and the party congresses, which are mechanisms of oppression, from the members of that party, since they are all Cubans and we therefore consider them as our brothers.
The congress of a party, that triggers the mechanism that takes the freedom from the people, that imposes a culture of fear, that condemns the poor to an even greater poverty and that takes away their voice so that they don’t even can say that they are poor, that dominates it’s own members and compels the workers, that submerges the nation into unproductivity, the institutionalized corruption and the dependence on foreign tyrannies, holding the totalitarian power on top of the popular sovereignty, can’t be a congress of the whole people. The true congress of the whole people will be the realization of free and democratic elections preceded by changes in the laws that guarantee all the rights for all Cubans in a environment of reconciliation and transparency that cultivates peace, fraternity and justice in Cuba. No more “socialism or death” instead it will be ”Freedom and Life”
The solution is not the savage capitalism and unbridled privatization, nor savage communism with its one-party system and its closed group of supercapitalists, neither the market or the state should be above the people. The people of Cuba know what they want, they just have to take the word. No more permission to speak at meetings, but a permanent right to speak, to associate in political parties and social organizations, to freely leave and enter Cuba as requested by the Heredia Project, to elect and be elected by a new electoral law. Yes, there is a way, there is an alternative, the roadmap for a peaceful change among Cubans, which we call: ALL CUBANS.
The people of Cuba want to preserve the free health care and education, and all that they have created with work and love, but they want change, they want freedom. To keep the hands of the Cubans tied and their mouths gagged is to condition the nation to a greater inequality, an inequality that is already immense, so that the powers can divide Cuba as a cake, after it has been treated as a private estate for 50 years. Only the people, blessed by God, saves the people and that is a blessed people.
ALL CUBANS, ALL BROTHERS AND NOW… FREEDOM
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas
www.oswaldopaya.org
Havana, March 28, 2011