Vol. 74/No. 13      April 5, 2010

Below, the Militant prints a response to the slander campaign from the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the Brothers Saíz cultural association.

The statement refers to a petition that has received widespread media coverage around the world and especially in Spain, where major capitalist papers have almost daily promoted the recent attacks on Cuba. While many of the signers of the petition are notorious longtime opponents of the Cuban Revolution, they have been joined by some artists and intellectuals, including film director Pedro Almodóvar and singer Ana Belén.

Some who have opposed the slander campaign, like Spanish actor Willy Toledo, have themselves come under a barrage of insults.

The attacks on the Cuban Revolution are being actively promoted in the United States, including by the Miami Herald and its Spanish-language sister publication El Nuevo Herald.

The UNEAC and Brothers Saíz statement refers to the International Book Fair, which started in Havana for 10 days in February and then began visits to every province in Cuba, to make a wide range of books accessible to workers, farmers, and others across the island.

The statement also refers to Haiti, where more than 1,400 Cuban-government organized doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel continue to provide health care in the aftermath of the earthquake there, while the U.S. government is pulling out the doctors it is responsible for.

The subheading and translation of the statement are by the Militant.
 

While the Book Fair was traveling from one end of our country to the other and hundreds of Cuban doctors were saving lives in Haiti, a new campaign against Cuba was being cooked up. A common criminal with a proven history of violence, transformed into a “political prisoner,” announced that he was undertaking a hunger strike for the installation of a telephone, stove, and television in his cell.

Encouraged by unscrupulous individuals and despite everything that was done to prolong his life, Orlando Zapata Tamayo died and has now been converted into a pitiful symbol of the anti-Cuba machinery.

On March 11, the European Parliament passed a resolution “strongly condemning the avoidable and cruel death of the dissident political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo,” and in an offensive act of interference in our internal affairs, “urged European institutions to give their unconditional support and full encouragement to the launching of a peaceful process of political transition to multi-party democracy in Cuba.”

A petition titled “Orlando Zapata Tamayo: I accuse the Cuban government,” is being circulated to collect signatures against Cuba. The petition claims that this inmate was “unjustly imprisoned and brutally tortured,” and that he died “denouncing these crimes and his country’s lack of rights and democracy.” At the same time, it shamelessly lies about our government’s alleged practice of “physically eliminating its critics and peaceful opponents.”

On March 15 a Spanish newspaper displayed the face of Zapata Tamayo, already deceased and in his coffin, at the same time that it announced that some intellectuals had added their signatures to the petition alongside those of old and new professionals of the internal and external counterrevolution.  
 
Distortion of Cuban reality
We Cuban writers and artists are fully aware of how the media corporations, hegemonic interests, and international reactionary forces join together on any pretext whatsoever to damage our image. We are aware of the cruel and morbid distortion of our reality and how they lie about Cuba every day. We also know the price that is paid by those who have tried to express themselves within culture with their own nuances.

Never in the history of the Revolution has a prisoner been tortured. Not one single person has been disappeared. There has not been one single extrajudicial execution. We have founded our own form of democracy, imperfect, yes, but far more participatory and legitimate than the one they want to impose on us. Those who have orchestrated this campaign do not have the moral authority to teach us lessons in human rights.

It is essential to halt this latest aggression against a country that is blockaded and harassed without mercy. To that end, we appeal to the conscience of all the intellectuals and artists who do not harbor spurious interests with respect to the future of a revolution that has been, is, and will be a model of humanism and solidarity.
 
 
Related articles:
Cuban youth arrive for U.S. tour
Cuban youth begin U.S. speaking tour
‘Cuban Revolution carries out course of proletarian internationalism’
Cuba aids Chile quake victims  
 
 
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