The history of persecuted people
In Cuba, emigration means more than its insular condition would imply, and it is known that emigrating from an island sticks to a person like a middle name.
The Cuban has emigration and emigration in his genes, they are his past, present and inevitable and imminent future. It’s like his pre-republican, pre-civic fate.
Cubans are lurking and accompanying them every day, in conversations with their compatriots and with themselves, in the depths of their own thoughts, two types of alienation. This is prison and emigration. This is because for the military-political power, any disobedience or dislike towards it must mean punishment, penance.
The history of Cuba is one of recalcitrance and penance, imprisonment or exile.
Our entire short history, from when the Spaniards came to power until today’s communist rule, is full of such individual and collective stories. Abuse of power and sheer despotism in all conceivable forms have marked all the social and cultural behavior of the Cuban people. From the very discovery of the island, they were accompanied by a militaristic drill, from preventive repression to punitive repression. My life, our Cuban life, is the story of people persecuted and punished, the story of an island inhabited by those punished, imprisoned, condemned, expelled, deported, tortured, shot. This is the story of the penitent island.
All these forms of political violence are part of the Communist Party’s repressive arsenal to gag and suppress any civil or cultural disobedience. The last five years of Miguel Diaz-Canel’s rule are merely an update of the same pattern of political repression of the Soviet family. The same model of violating civil liberties is used by “fraternal” regimes in Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Cuba supports and even exports to countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua the same model of punishment and penance to which it has condemned its own society since 1959. Punishing any social group that dares to raise its voice is the essence of life in Cuba.
Exile or expulsion are one of the forms of this violence.
“Unwanted” and “regulated”
Barely a month ago, Daniel Ortega’s regime expelled 222 political prisoners to the US, and immediately followingwards completely unlawfully stripped them of their citizenship, trampling on the norms of international law. The Cuban regime has been using the same methods for decades, de-nationalizing Cubans.
It begins with illegal detention and kidnapping, followed by illegal trials, equally illegal prison sentences, and finally illegal expulsion and withdrawal of citizenship.
Expulsion is a systematic practice of the regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua. In the case of Cuba, the regime tries with threats, harassment and endless interrogations to get a man to prefer to leave the country, and then escort him to the border straight from his prison cell. This was the scenario used once morest me and several others. Not the first time. This method – arrest – kidnapping – arrest – prison sentence – exile – was applied in 2010 to prisoners sentenced during the so-called black spring. 52 of the 75 prisoners sentenced in 2003 were released and forcibly exiled from Cuba to Spain.
More recently, the same pattern has been applied to journalists Esteban Rodriguez and Hector Lusia Valdes Corcho, and others deemed undesirable: Karl Maria Perez, Anamely Ramos, Omar Ruiz Urquiol, Carlos Manuel Alvarez, to name but a few.
The “undesirables” have existed in Cuba since the beginning of the dictatorship, but according to the Migration Law No. 1312, Art. 24 and Art. 25 of 2012, Cuba has become an extraordinary factory of “undesirables” and “regulated”, i.e. people who are forbidden to leave. Thus, Cubans at home and abroad are held hostage by a communist regime that decides their fate at its own political discretion. The reasons for doing so are cited as “national defense and security” and “public interest” requirements.
Banned from the country
The regime persecutes and violently suppresses dissent or dissent in order to thwart any civil or political activity. It smothers all inconvenient citizens, for completely arbitrary reasons.
I was detained by the security services on June 21, 2021. I was taken to the SB headquarters in Villa Marista, where I was deprived of all contact with reality. I was interrogated constantly. The psychological torture was endless questions, forcing answers just to break me.
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For three months I was not charged, no trial took place, I saw neither the prosecutor nor the judge. It was in fact a kidnapping by the security service, i.e. an organ of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that investigates “crimes once morest state security”.
It was only in the last weeks of the interrogations that my trip abroad began to be planned, although I had neither proposed nor suggested it nor wanted it. It was from the beginning a kidnapping in order to lead to my departure. So did my friends and activists who showed solidarity with me, including my then-partner, the poet Katherine Bisquet.
Then I was taken in a head-to-legged position from Villa Marista to an “operating room” on the outskirts of Havana. I was kept there for six days. “You won’t go to prison, but you won’t go home either,” they said.
Finally, a convoy of camouflaged political police cars drove me to the airport right under the plane’s gangplank.
My eventual expulsion from Cuba was the last step in the process from detention/kidnapping to disenfranchisement.
Republic of exiles
Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, Belarus, Russia are brother countries not only because of similar repressions. For in exile the “undesirables” and “inconvenients” become brothers, they recognize each other as relatives, they form a republic of exiles. But the expellees are unable to integrate into the new societies. The only thing they have in common is a culture of fear of the police state that drove them out. It makes us the political opposite to this country. And so we remain in a hybrid archipelago of small islands of disobedience and civil resistance.
I am thinking of this gigantic republic of kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, persecuted and expelled victims of the systematic trampling of human and civil rights. This “undesirable” republic dreams of another – one where political and civil rights are upheld and respected. The exiles want their rights back and want revenge once morest the police state.
Today, thanks to the Internet, civil society in exile has much more opportunities to act and react than it did just a few years ago. Undesirable Cubans have at their disposal hundreds of independent newspapers, dozens of NGOs and platforms where they can express their opposition and disobedience.
The judiciary and the jargon of the regime constantly objectify citizens, making them “elements”. So there are “counter-revolutionary elements”, “destabilizing elements”, “mercenaries”, “criminal elements”. When that is not enough, the state imprisons them without trial, destroys their reputation expels him from the country.
Far from strengthening the regime, this violence weakens it. Only the strength of the army and police is able to stop the dissatisfaction of society. The protests of July 11 and 12, 2021 proved this. The very fact that the regime has to militarize the state apparatus and the entire social space and resorts to naked violence proves its political powerlessness.
The Communist Party is politically helpless because it no longer practices politics. The communist party itself banished itself from social reality and expelled itself from the community of citizens.
Hamlet Lavastida (born 1983), artist, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. He was active in the independent artistic groups Movimiento San Isidro and Movimiento 27 de Noviembre. They practiced political art, the element of which was public space. The artists mixed genres: videos, collages, posters, drawings, photographs, paintings. They exposed the falsehood and emptiness of communist iconography and propaganda. In their environment, a rebellious song “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and life) was created, which dealt with the slogan of the dictator Fidel Castro “Patria o Muerte”. The song became the anthem of the young generation of Cubans on the island and in the diaspora.
Artists rebelled once morest censorship, demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Culture in Havana, organized happenings and hunger strikes. Lavastida’s Hamlet has become one of the faces of the Movimiento.
He lived and worked for several years abroad, e.g. in Poland, where he is married and has a 9-year-old son, Leo. In 2020-21 he was on a one-year scholarship in Germany. Immediately following returning to Cuba in June 2021, he was arrested. While he was in custody, he was constantly interrogated by the security services. After Hamlet was arrested for 90 days, Lavastida was expelled from Cuba. He lives in Berlin. He often comes to Poland.
