Congressional Testimony by Eudel Cepero

Good afternoon, and thank you for this opportunity to speak.

Only a grimly efficient machinery that imposes terror, misery, and fear is capable of maintaining totalitarian regimes in power. In the case of Cuba this machinery is symbolized in the personality of Fidel Castro. Lamentably,
we are brought here today to this forum by the latest acts of repression by the Cuban dictatorship. Facing non-violent democratic change the dictatorship has been driven by internal weakness and a growing national civic movement to imprison more than seventy key Cuban civic leaders in conditions that would horrify inmates in the worse maximum security prisons in the United States.

The statistics in this case do not lie and serve to expose the injust and lengthy imprisonment of members of Cuba’s national civic movement: Twelve condemned to 25 years; Twenty four condemned to twenty years; Individual cases ranging from 26 years and up to 28 years and cumulatively adding up to over one thousand four hundred years imprisonment for them. Who has Fidel Castro incarcerated? The dictatorship’s partisan media decries these prisoners of conscience with all sorts of vile epithets, but who are these threats to Fidel Castro’s four decade and counting dictatorship: poets, teachers, journalists, librarians, accountants, doctors, writers, engineers, people of faith, teenagers, the elderly, family men, wives, sons and daughters.

Cuban national hero José Martí said “an army of ballots has more power than an army with weapons” referring to elections in the United States a century ago. Their is no room for doubt that in Cuba today there is a growing
national civic movement that is thousands strong. It is precisely that “army of ballots” now in Cuba made known to the world by more than eleven thousand citizens who lost their fear signing the Varela Project and that the dictatorship knows that those ballots have already multiplied to thirty thousand even with all the ongoing repression, and can easily multiply into the millions that it fears.

The “army of ballots” terrorizes Castro and for that reason, repression, imprisonment, and firing squads are the order of the day. The dictator fears both truth, and freedom, but this time the difference is that the caudillo cannot take on the role of victim but is exposed as the victimizer of the Cuban people.

Castro declared a “war of ideas” but he dares not challenge opponents who do not expouse his ideas in the realm of the spoken or written word, but rather has to rely on censorship, repression, and prison as the only means with
which he can win. His war of ideas is in actuality a “war on ideas.” One should remember that the dictatorship bombards the Cuban people day after day with its two national television stations, fourteen provincial television stations, five national broadcast radio stations, more than fourteen radio stations in the provinces, and dozens more in the municipalities all of them knowingly broadcasting half truths, and outright lies. Cumulative broadcasts of all these government outlets totals hundreds of hours and for which their is no lack of resources, while Cubans suffer prolonged power outages. In addition the three national newspapers and fourteen provincial papers are all property of the Cuban Communist Party of which Fidel Castro is the head.

Confronting this immense state media monopoly used by the dictatorship without limits nor respite to misinform the Cuban people are independent journalists, many of which are today condemned to long prison sentences, armed solely with their courage, truth, a pen, and in a few cases with scarce resources such as a hand held recorders, cameras, or computers that have managed to make it through the dictatorship’s customs. One of the independent journalists that today the regime is trying to disqualify for not having graduated from one of their universities is Pedro Argüelles Moran to whom I owe thanks. In 1994 when the dictatorship did not allow me to leave Cuba to earn an academic degree in Holland, Pedro did not hesitate in denouncing what had taken place in a detailed report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission and denounced the actions of the government over
Radio Martí.

Pedro Argüelles Moran is a licensed surveyor, married, 58 years old, founder of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights in Ciego de Avila, since 1991 he has confronted the dictatorship using non-violent means. In 1996 he
was sentenced to six months for disobedience. Since 2000 he has joined the ranks of independent journalists. Detained and interrogated on numerous occasions neither warnings nor threats of years in prison where able to
deter him from what he always considered to be his duty.

One day he told one of his colleagues: “This is my destiny, you have sons, daughters, and parents, but I do not. I am prepared for prison.” Today sentenced to twenty years Pedro finds himself behind bars engaging in civil
disobedience (solely wearing his underwear) demanding that he be housed separately from common criminals.

It is these men and women that the dictatorship fears even when it jails them.

What to do in the face of this new wave of repression that seeks to frustrate the desires of the Cuban people to live in democracy, and to have their human rights respected? How will this latest crackdown affect a future
reconciliation of the Cuban nation and the manner in which crimes of the past should be judged? Their is no easy or brief answer to these questions.  Nevertheless the weakness of the dictatorship is clear: it fears freedom of expression; it fears the free market; it fears human rights; it fears having its ideas challenged; it fears the moral of its opponents; it fears the growing national civic movement and the regime is willing to sacrifice foreign investments, the lifting of economic sanctions, and international condemnation to crackdown on this movement.

Their is no other way to end but asking for solidarity with those who today suffer in Castro’s prisons demanding unconditional freedom for all political prisoners and support for the growing aspirations of the Cuban people for
democracy as embodied in this national civic movement .

Long Live a Free Cuba.
Eudel Cepero. Miami 4/15/2003