Cuba: “Police Brutality” or “Natural Causes” in Dissident's Death?”

Cuban bloggers continue their outcry over the death of dissident Juan Wilfredo Soto, especially in light of an official statement which suggests that Soto, popularly known by his nickname “The Student”, died “of natural causes”.

On hearing the position of the Cuban government, Uncommon Sense quips:

That could be true, of course, because in Cuba under Castro, the police beating a dissident is as natural as it comes.

Then his tone becomes serious, saying:

But the party line has been undermined by witnesses who have stepped forward to tell what they know about Soto's death. The party line is being undermined by the truth.

For instance, there is Mario Lleonart Barroso who says he spoke to Soto after he was beaten and before he was readmitted to a hospital in severe pain.

The blogger also speaks of “other witnesses ready to testify not to what they saw but ready to risk their own lives to ensure that justice prevails in Soto's death” as well as “numerous dissidents ready to go on hunger strike if by July 26, 2011, the dictatorship does not properly investigate what happened to Soto.” One dissident has reportedly already begun [es] his hunger strike.

Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia.

 
The two accounts of Soto's death could not be more contradictory, with local dissidents insisting that he had been beaten by police and officials maintaining that his “acute pancreatitis…led to multiple organ failure” and calling the allegations of police brutality a “'smear campaign' aimed at weakening the Cuban revolution.”
Babalu does not accept the official line, saying:

Apparently, a vicious and brutal beating by State Security is considered a natural cause of death in Cuba.

The blog also takes issue with this post, saying:

Once again we have a ‘Cuba Expert' blaming the victim instead of the assailant. Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia is dead not because Cuban security agents beat him to death, but because Soto Garcia ‘resisted their entreaties to leave the area.'

Meanwhile, Pedazos de la Isla spares a thought for Soto's mother, who “must accept the harsh reality of no longer being able to see her son just because chose to defend human rights in a country where all that is just is considered illegal.” The blogger goes on to question the position of the Cuban government:

The only thing that is clear is that they have responded with fear, quickly asserting that it was all a lie. Now we must wait and see if the international media will repeat the absurd fallacies created by the Castro government, as many did with Orlando Zapata.

Octavo Cerco offers a more personal perspective on the situation:

The last image I have of Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia is at my side running around under the Santa Clara’s relentless sun. We tried to get permission from the Bishop so that Padre Dominico–who had come halfway around the world to get to Cuba–could go see Guillermo Fariñas in Intensive Care at the scheduled visiting hours.

Now I look at the photo in Penultimos Dias of the Student and I don’t recognize him. It must be that I refuse to accept that they beat him to death. It must be that I can’t admit that this time of horror has come to this Island. And I ask myself–is it the obvious uncertainty of rationalism–how many Wilfredos have there already been and how many are still to come? While sitting in a park, an incomprehensible crime, the massive weight of half a century of police impunity falling on his body.

Finally, the blogger goes on to say of the Cuban police, whom she calls “anonymous faces in blue”:

For a long time people have feared them more than the thieves, scammers and criminals. “Call the police” has become the last card in the deck. Because justice does not come with them. Because they are not here to protect us, but to control us at any price.

Written by Janine Mendes-Franco

From: Global Voices

Video of one of the few testimonies of police violence in Cuba. To film or photograph the police in Cuba it's a crime punished by the "law".  The "press" and the "tribunals" work for the dictatorship. So there's no way the citizens could defend themselves against the state.  

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Women’s History Month and Castro’s Female Victims

1994: Cuban women fleeing Castro's  “improvement of status” and “good life”.

When Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.” dozens of Cuban suffragettes suffered in torture chambers within walking distance of the hyperventilating Ms. Walters.

“They started by beating us with twisted coils of electric cable,” recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls Manuela Calvo from exile today. “But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us unto the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us, male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely with their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls Polita Grau in Unvanquished: Cuba's Resistance to Fidel Castro

Ok, I apologize for baiting feminist readers during this Women’s History Month “with the term “suffragette.” In fact, voting was merely one of the rights these heroic Cuban ladies sought. Castro’s Stalinist regime jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s own, murdered more political prisoners in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six, and abolished private property. And yes, Castro also outlawed voting. So you’ll please excuse these Cuban ladies if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as a trifle overblown.

I also apologize for singling out Barbara Walters. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell also had praise for the tryant: “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!”

Back in 1996 Fidel Castro was hosted by Mort Zuckerman at his Fifth Avenue pad. A throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer all jostled for a photo-op and stood in line for Castro’s autograph. But Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-murderer’s presence that she lost control, rushing up, breaking into that toothy smile of hers, wrapping her arms around Castro and smooching the Stalinist torturer on his bearded cheek.

“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the Stalinist/terrorist to the smiling throng he’d come within a hair of nuking in 1962.

“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests, while tinkling their wine glasses in honor of the smirking agent of their near vaporization.

We’re smack in the middle of “Women’s History Month.” So let’s chew on this: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown–not only in Cuba–but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer came into power. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo: “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

Many of these heroic ladies (Ana Rodriguez, Miriam Ortega, Georgina Cid, Caridad Roque, Mercedes Pena, Aída Díaz Morejón, Ana Lázara Rodríguez, Ágata Villarquide, Alicia del Busto, Ileana Curra) live in the U.S. today. But no producer for Oprah or Joy Behar or Katie Couric, none from the Lifetime or Oxygen TV–much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either.

But you’ve certainly seen their torturer hailed by “Feminist” reporters.

Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006, the Washington Post gushed that: “She was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, in 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S.

This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life” for Cuban women also somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.

On Christmas Eve of 1961 a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Castro’s Russian-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cubans who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet –style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant. These Taliban-like atrocities against women were perpetrated by a regime gushed over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Medea Benjamin, Maxine Waters and so many other “feminists.”

Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee the Washington Post’s dutifully transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from same.

By Humberto Fontova

From: FrontPage Magazine

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