About the blog

Human rights are being violated daily in Cuba and have been for over 50 years.

Internet access on the island is almost impossible to come by for a Cuban citizen.

When they are able to obtain it, it is an extremely censored version. This extremely limited access to the average Cuban citizen is a means to keep the people of Cuba silent and to keep the rest the world from knowing the truth about the tortured about the oppressed lives of the Cuban people on the island.   As demonstrated by the Arab Spring, the rebels of the decade are Twitter users, bloggers and people with cameras. This site aims to be a catch all for all SOS messages sent out by the citizen journalists on Cuban soil.

The mission of this blog is to sustain the lives of the current Cuban heroes. The rebels brave enough to speak out against the Castro regime by publishing blogs and uploading videos of human right violations of the government on sites such as YouTube. You may ask how have they been able to get away with these acts of dissidence? They do this by maintaining a certain visibility.  Speaking out against the Cuban government is punishable by death and torture. These rebels are placing their lives on the line.  A visibility this site hopes to promote above all.  The method of creating a shield around these rebels is done simply by the spreading of information. Once their voices have been heard by the world it would be difficult to deny their existence and or to deny the blatant violations of the most basic of human rights by the Castro Regime. We keep them brave by providing them the access to maintain an open line of communication with the outside world. One of the best tools we can offer this cause as a community of Exiles in the US and as US citizens accessing the first amendment’s right to freedom of expression, is to share the voices of those less fortunate.

This blog condenses the information on this movement. To seek and to share the work of artist, writers, photographers, filmmakers, journalists, poets and the messages from a people unable to exercise the basic human right of freedom of speech. In this way the site will act as a funnel for all information coming out of Cuba present-day. In this site you will discover and share alternative methods of supporting these messages from the Cuban people by providing them with access to the tools they need to create their work and messages. Tools like video cameras, video editing software, still cameras, flash drives, cd roms, old smart phones and translating services for writers are just a few of the services and materials needed for the information to spread amongst the people on the island as well as the rest the world. The makers of this blog will seek to discover and research secure methods of delivery and distribution of materials to the people of Cuba.

Join us in this exciting revolution. Thanks to sites like this. This revolution will be televised. The site will point out the easy ways you can help.  Start by spreading the word. By posting, reposting and distributing their tweets, videos, photos, we make their messages louder and louder.

If you would like to contribute to this blog and its mission feel free to reach out.

Also feel free to contact me with any updates or new videos or messages for posting.

The Cuban Memorial displayed at Tamiami Park, Miami, Florida: Each cross bears the name of a victim of Castro's genocide against the Cuban people

Why is the entire World blind to a half century of Castro's Crimes?

                                                                                                  

Shopping in Cuba BY BARBARA DEMICK

The New Yorker

A Spanish-English dictionary, sunscreen, insect repellent, a towel, chocolate ice cream: these are the items that eluded me during a recent trip to Cuba. For all the hoopla about the island’s opening and the more than three million tourists who swamped it last year, Cuba is no country for shoppers. The more mundane the object of desire, the more exasperating it can be to find.

I’m not saying that these common items are completely unavailable in Cuba—I’m sure they are for sale somewhere on the island—but I couldn’t locate them. And I did look. The problem might be that I spent half of my trip in Trinidad, a cobblestoned colonial city on the Caribbean coast. When I ventured out to the Galería Comercial Universo, which my Lonely Planet claimed featured “Trinidad’s best (and most expensive) grocery store,” it was closed due to lack of electricity. I was able to peer into the darkened grocery store to see considerable yards of empty shelves. Electricity woes might have accounted as well for my inability to obtain ice cream for my son. When we finally found it, on the menu of an expatriate beach club in Havana, it arrived melted. And the waitress couldn’t find a spoon.

At the Plaza de Armas in Havana, the large open-air market, my inquiry about a Spanish-English dictionary was met with “no es fácil,” an answer I heard often in Cuba. The bookseller did offer up a Russian-Spanish dictionary. At a kiosk in a suburban neighborhood, which the proprietor proclaimed “not just the best bookstore in Havana, but all of Cuba,” I found a Larousse dictionary from 1987, with yellowed pages that crumbled as I opened it. It was for sale for the equivalent of five dollars, a week’s salary for most Cubans. (After I returned from Cuba, I was told I could find a decent used dictionary at Cuba Libro, an English-language bookstore that opened in 2013.) I never found a state bookstore that was open.

Having been a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-nineties, and more recently in China, I have some experience with Communist and post-Communist countries. In Cuba I saw elements of many of them, from Albania to Vietnam. Like Prague in the nineteen-nineties, Havana’s old city is swarming with tourists who gaze at the faded splendor of its Belle Époque architecture. Private restaurants inside these elegant wrecks, called paladares, beckon tourists with creative meals made out of the few ingredients available locally, mostly chicken, pork, cabbage, rice, and beans.

But Cuba also looks to me like a North Korea with palm trees. To be sure, Cuba has evolved politically, investing in education and health care rather than weapons of mass destruction. But the economic fundamentals in these last bastions of Communism are much the same. Like North Korea, Cuba maintains a distribution system in which citizens pay a low cost for inadequate rations of staple foods. (At one state shop, the provisions, listed on the blackboard, were grains, washing soap, bathing soap, toothpaste, sugar, salt, coffee, evaporated milk, eggs, and oil.) As in North Korea, archaic laws prevent the private sale of commodities that have been deemed strategic to the nation. Fishing is limited in both countries on the grounds that the bounty of the seas is the exclusive property of the state.

At a mercado agropecuario (basically a licensed farmers’ market) in a residential neighborhood of Havana, I was amazed by products that appeared to have been crafted in people’s basements or garages. There were homemade clothespins and clothes hangers, soup ladles and sieves, cast-aluminum pots and pans with hand-carved wooden handles. (The pots were offered for the equivalent of two dollars.) Plastic molded toy cars were so flimsy that they made the cheapest made-in-China toys look as sophisticated as Swiss watches. Homemade vinegar and ketchup were sold in repurposed beer bottles. This is not unlike North Korea, where people desperate to earn money used to make sneakers to sell at the market.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, both the Cuban and North Korean economies went into a free fall—the Cubans call this time “the special period” and the North Koreans “the arduous March”—and neither country has completely recovered. In Cuba, the loss of cheap petroleum led to the breakdown of highly mechanized agriculture and food distribution systems, and the almost complete collapse of the manufacturing sector. Even today, neither country has much of a manufacturing sector. Imports to both countries are also limited by sanctions and hard-currency shortages. Although the United States restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, in July, the island remains under a trade embargo.

“Almost all legal imports in Cuba are handled by the government international-trading monopolies,” Richard E. Feinberg, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Latin America adviser to the Clinton Administration, told me. “Their choice of products is not necessarily driven by consumer demands.” He went on, “This is like eastern Europe in the old days, where you might see a hundred cans of sardines imported from Thailand that obviously nobody was interested in buying.”

Cubans are not starving like North Koreans, but many do lack basic consumer goods. Whereas just about everything used in North Korea—be it plastic sandals or hairbrushes or umbrellas—seeps across the eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile border with China, Cubans are dependent upon what can be stuffed into a suitcase and carried by airplane. The Miami-based Havana Consulting estimates that visitors carried three and a half billion dollars’ worth of goods into Cuba in 2013.

There are stores in Miami that specialize in spare parts for the Russian-made Lada and Moskvitch clunkers that Cubans still drive. The burgundy-colored official Cuban school uniforms are strangely easier to buy in Miami than Havana. Cloth diapers and diaper pins are another popular item brought into Cuba by plane. It is not legal to resell these items in Cuba, but everybody seems to do it, often through word of mouth. When I asked a Cuban driver with whom we were snorkeling where he had acquired a rather smart Spiderman beach towel, he gave me a long-winded explanation of the market system, which boiled down to this: “Sometimes somebody has something that I want to buy, but if I ask them where it came from they won’t sell it to me.”

Raúl Castro, effectively Cuba’s ruler since 2006, when he took over for his ailing older brother, Fidel, has been easing up controls on economic activity. Private employment is now allowed in two hundred and one categories. Farmers are allowed to sell fruits and vegetables that they produce over their quota. Homeowners are allowed to rent rooms in their houses to tourists (a freedom that would be unthinkable in North Korea). An exemption to the prohibitions on manufacturing also permits Cubans to make and sell the goods I saw at the Havana neighborhood market, which are classified as handicrafts.

The result is that almost every home in the heavily touristy old center of Trinidad has thrown its shutters open to offer something for sale—hand-painted T-shirts with images of Che Guevara, paintings of vintage cars, macramé handbags, or visors made of old soda cans—a profusion of Cuban-themed kitsch that is cheerful if not particularly useful. Alas, none of it was what I wanted to buy in Cuba, but it provided a glimpse of the possible.

Cuba Decides

http://www.cubadecide.org/

Che Guevara_ Desmitificación - YouTube [360p]

Che Guevara - Desmitificación

Mary Anastasia O’Grady: Cuba’s Democrats Need U.S. Support

Mary Anastasia O’Grady, The Wall Street Journal

Obama has helped the dictatorship but ignored the dissidents.

Cuban dissident leader Antonio Rodiles has been harassed, beaten, imprisoned and may have been injected with a foreign substance—more on that in a minute—by Castro goons. Yet he is calm and unwavering: “They are not going to stop us,” Mr. Rodiles recently told me over lunch here with his wife,  Ailer González.

Soviet-style Cuban intelligence is trained to crush the spirit of the nonconformist. Yet the cerebral Mr. Rodiles was cool and analytical as he described the challenges faced by the opposition since President Obama, with support from  Pope Francis, announced a U.S. rapprochement with Castro’s military dictatorship in December 2014.

One of the “worst aspects of the new agenda,” Mr. Rodiles told me matter-of-factly, “is that it sends a signal that the regime is the legitimate political actor” for the country’s future. Foreigners “read that it is better to have a good relationship with the regime—and not with the opposition—because those are the people that are going to have the power—political and economic.”

The Cuban opposition is treated as superfluous in this new reality. U.S. politicians visiting the island used to meet with dissidents. Now, Mr. Rodiles says, “contact is almost zero.” When the U.S. reopened its embassy in Havana last year it refused to invite important dissidents like Mr. Rodiles or even  Berta Soler, the leader of the Ladies in White, to the ceremony.

Mr. Rodiles said the mission of pro-democratic Cubans is critical and urgent: “We need to change the message,” making it clear that the regime is “not the future of Cuba.” And this, he says, is the defining moment.

If the Castros hope to transfer power to the next generation—be it to Raúl’s son Alejandro or a Cuban  Tom Hagen—as Russia’s KGB forced  Boris Yeltsin to yield to KGB veteran  Vladimir Putin, they need to do it soon.

Yet at the same time, Mr. Rodiles says, “if they give the country to their families in the condition it is in right now, it will be like handing them a time bomb” about to go off. That’s why, he tells me, this is a unique opportunity for freedom to emerge: The odds of successfully passing the baton in the current economic meltdown are low.

Or at least they would be if Mr. Obama were not offering the regime legitimacy and U.S. greenbacks while refusing to officially recognize the opposition.

Mr. Rodiles has a master’s degree in physics from Mexico’s Autonomous National University and a master’s degree in mathematics from Florida State University. The 43-year-old returned to Cuba in 2010 and is a founder of Estado de SATS, a project to “create a space for open debate and pluralism of thought.”

The police state views this as dangerous and has come down hard on the couple. Amnesty International was among those that called for his release when he was jailed in 2012 for 19 days. In July a state-security agent punched him in the face while his hands were cuffed behind his back.

On Jan. 10 he and Ms. González, along with other government critics, were again attacked by a rent-a-mob on the streets of Havana. This time they were left with what looks like identical needle marks on their skin.

Those wounds are worrisome. More than once the former leader of the Ladies in White,  Laura Pollán, was left with open wounds after being clawed and scratched by plainclothes government enforcers. After one such incident in 2011 she mysteriously fell ill and died in the hospital. The government immediately cremated her body and the dissident community has long suspected that she was intentionally infected with a fatal virus by the regime.

Under normal circumstances, the Castro family would have reason to fear the future. Totalitarian regimes collapse, Mr. Rodiles reminds me, “when the people inside the system, not just the elite, but the people who are in the middle, the ones who sustain the system, start to go and look for another possibility.” They do this because they recognize the future is elsewhere so they “move or at least they no longer cooperate.”

Today young Cubans are looking for that alternative. The regime’s promise to Mr. Obama of economic opportunity and growth through small-business startups is a farce because the Castro family operates like a mafia, “and always has,” says Mr. Rodiles. To do well in the current environment the young have to join the system, or else they flee.

Those who join are not ideological but only seek power. “If we can show that we are the ones with the power to transform the country, then these people for sure are going to prefer to be with us.”

Failure is unthinkable for Mr. Rodiles. “We cannot allow the transfer of power because if they transfer the power, we can have these people for the next 20 or 30 years.”

Cuban artists still condemned to silence

XIndex

By Ryan McChrystal / 12 January 2016

Dissident artists are no better off post-Fidel, and renewed relations with the US haven’t helped as many hoped or claimed they would

“[T]he fault of many of our intellectuals and artists is to be found in their ‘original sin’: they are not authentically revolutionary.”
— Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba, 1965

Last year was a good one for Cuban artists. With renewed diplomatic relations with the US, a boom in Latin American art and Cuba’s exceptional artistic talent — fostered through institutions such as the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana — works by prominent Cuban artists fetched top dollar at international auctions, and the Cuban film industry was firmly in the international spotlight.

While the end of the embargo brought with it hope for political liberalization on the island, as with previous periods of promise in Cuban history cases of repression and censorship of dissident artists were rife in 2015.

So let’s begin again: Last year was a good one for Cuban artists who adhere to the country’s long-established revolutionary narrative and don’t embarrass the regime.

The fear of censorship for art that is critical of the government has been fostered through decades of laws and repression that limit freedom of expression. This can mean stigmatization, the loss of employment and even imprisonment. Charges such as “social dangerousness” and insulting national symbols are so vague they make convictions very easy.
“Artists are among the most privileged people in Cuban society — they make money in hard currency, travel, have frequent interaction with foreigners and they don’t have boring jobs,” explains Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American artist, 2016 Index Freedom of Expression Awards nominee and author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. “Artists function as a window display in Cuba; proof of the success of the system.”

But if an artist engages in political confrontations, they can draw unwanted attention, says Fusco.

One artist accused doing just that is critically-acclaimed Cuban director and fellow nominee for this year’s Index Awards Juan Carlos Cremata. In 2015, he staged a production of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, about an aging ruler who refuses to give up power. The play lasted two performances before being shut down by the National Council of Theatre Arts and the Centre for Theatre in Havana.

“Exit the King was banned because according to the minister of culture and the secret police we were mocking Fidel Castro,” Cremata told Index on Censorship. “This wasn’t really true; what they fear is real revolutionary speech in theatre.”

When he spoke out against the move, Cuban authorities terminated his theatre contract, effectively dissolving his company, El Ingenio.

Cremata, whose career spans three decades, confesses the shutting down of Exit the King took him by surprise. “We are living in the 21st century, and according to the official propaganda, Cuba is changing and people can talk about anything,” he says. “This, as it turns out, is a big lie by people who are still dreaming of the revolution.”

“With their censorship, they show how stupid, retrograde and archaic their politics are,” he says.

As so much funding for artists comes from the state, non-conformist artists often find themselves in difficult financial situations. “I’ve had to reinvent my life,” Cremata says. “I’m trying to receive some help from friends who offer to work with me for free, but this will not be eternal, as they have families.”

Cremata himself has an adopted daughter and has her future to think about. “I truly believe life will change and better times will come with or without their approval, but it is very, very hard.”

Art has always been at the centre of Cuban culture, but under Fidel Castro it became a tool for spreading socialist ideas and censorship a tool for tackling dissent. Evidently, Cuba isn’t entirely post-Fidel, explains Fusco. “Fidel is still alive, his brother is in charge and his dynasty is firmly ensconced in the power, with sons, nieces and nephews in key positions,” she says. “Although I don’t think anyone over the age of 10 in Cuba believes the rhetoric anymore.”

Very few may believe the rhetoric, but going against it can still land you in prison, as was the case with Index Awards nominee Danilo Maldonado, the graffiti artist also known as El Sexto. Maldonado organized a performance called Animal Farm for Christmas 2014, where he intended to release two pigs with the names of Raúl and Fidel Castro painted on them. He was arrested on his was to carry out the performance and spent 10 months in prison without trial.

International human rights organizations condemned his imprisonment — during which he was on a month-long hunger strike — as an attack on freedom of expression.

The prospect for improving political freedoms doesn’t look good, and anyone who expected any different due to Cuba’s normalization of relations with the US is naive, says Fusco.

“Washington is not promoting policy changes to improve human rights,” she says. “Washington is promoting policy changes to 1. develop better ways to exert political influence in Cuba; 2. to revise immigration policies and control the steep increase in Cuban illegal migration to the US; 3. to give US businesses and investment opportunity that they need (particularly agribusiness); 4. to avoid a tumultuous transition at the end of Raul Castro’s term in power that would produce more regional instability (i.e. the US does not want another Iraq, Libya or Syria).”

Even within Cuba there is an absence of discussion about civil liberties, strong voices of criticism of state controls and collective artist-based efforts to promote liberalization.

“Artists are generally afraid to mingle with dissidents,” says Fusco. “There are a few bloggers who post stories about confrontations with police and political prisoners, a few older human rights activists who collect information about detentions and prison conditions, a handful of opposition groups who advocate for political reforms, but they have virtually no influence on the government.”

In the past, Cuban authorities used the US embargo as an excuse to justify restrictions on freedom of expression. Now that the excuses are running out, it is time for the Cuban government allow its dissidents the same freedoms as its conformists.

VIDA LOCA DE RAUL CASTRO - YouTube [360p]

VIDA LOCA DE RAUL CASTRO

Political Repression Increase in Cuba Criticized by Opposition Group

Latin Post

By Alyza Katrina C. Torres (staff@latinpost.com)

A known opposition group in Cuba, the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, recently released its latest report on the increased political repression happening in the communist government.

In light of the recent actions by Washington and Havana diplomatic reconciliation, according to AFP, which freed five dissidents, the group urged that the government has sustained the political repression last 2015.

According to the report of the opposition group, which is known to be outlawed but tolerated in Cuba, they clarified that the five of the 53 listed prisoners, as part of the reestablishment of the Cuban-U.S. diplomatic relations, were freed but were previously “confined in high-security prisons in the second half of 2015.”

The group also stressed that the five prisoners — Wilfredo Parada Milian, Jorge Ramirez Calderon, Carlos Manuel Figueroa, Aracelio Ribeaux Noa and Vladimir Morera — were jailed “as a result of rigged trials and without due process.”

Furthermore, Morera was in a hunger strike for the past few months starting Oct. 9, 2015 and just started eating again on Dec. 31, 2015.

“All I know is that he is eating again, and that he is speaking incoherently because the doctors say he was very weak,” Morera’s son said as quoted by the news agency.

And while the Cuban government remains silent on the matter, the commission reports that in January 2015, there have been 178 cases of political arrests. Meanwhile, throughout the past year until December 2015, the commission reported 930 arrests for political reasons, which is considered the third highest number of the year, EFE reports.

The group further clarified that the repressive acts include “acts of vandalism and the extrajudicial confiscation of toys for distribution to poor children, plus the seizing of cash, computers, cell phones and other legally acquired work devices from detained opposition members.”

The commission revealed that the country has encountered an increasing amount of “poverty and despair” because of such political repressive actions and that the people have been illegally migrating to other places away from Cuba to escape the troubled situation.

According to the news agency, the Cuban government has considered the commission as the most dissident since the U.S. funded mercenaries. The most current news from the dissident group revealed that “political repression” continued in 2015 “despite the well-known expectations awakened by the announcement of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations” between Havana and Washington, AFP reports.

No further statements have been released from the Cuban government.

by FRANCES MARTEL

BreitbartNews

Vladimir Morera Bacallao, a Cuban dissident allegedly freed as part of President Obama’s deal with Cuba but sentenced to four years in prison shortly after being released, is currently on his 81st day of a hunger strike that has left him in critical condition.

“He does not recognize us,” his wife told the U.S.-based Martí noticias, and is in extremely grave condition in a hospital in Villa Clara. He reportedly weighs 93 pounds, and relatives expressed little hope for his survival. “He is very grave… [but] they say he is a prisoner so we are not allowed to see him,” Morera’s sister told AFP.

Morera was arrested in April for hanging a sign on his window condemning the communist Castro dictatorship. The sign read “I vote for my freedom, and not in one of those elections where I can’t even choose a president.” The sign was mocking Cuba’s legislative elections, in which only Communist Party officials are allowed to compete. After his second arrest, family members described the incident, noting that his children and wife were also beaten by state police.

Morera had been freed in January from prison, where he was serving an eight-year sentence for defending a fellow dissident from a violent communist mob, as part of President Obama’s “normalization” deal with Cuba. International supporters of the Cuban government and human rights groups that oppose isolating the Castro regime celebrated the liberation of 53 political prisoners that months as a sign that President Obama’s attempt to make concessions to the regime would help dissidents. Most of those dissidents, however, have been rearrested for crimes similar to Morera’s act of disobedience.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner issued a statement saying the United States is “profoundly concerned” for Morera’s health.

In the year since President Obama announced that the United States would make a series of concessions to dictator Raúl Castro, including removing Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, in exchange for, in the words of Castro, “nothing at all,” the situation for political dissidents has deteriorated significantly. In addition to the re-arrests of dozens of prisoners of conscience, leaders of dissident groups such as the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) are arrested on an almost weekly basis, most for attending Sunday Catholic Mass. Political arrests increased by 70 percent between January and March 2015 in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. The announcement also triggered a flood of Cuban refugees attempting to flee to Central America, fearing that the Obama administration would repeal the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows the federal government to treat all Cubans as political refugees. About 8,000 Cuban nationals are currently stranded in Costa Rica after relying on a human trafficking ring shut down by the Costa Rican government.

Morera previously survived a 68-day hunger strike in April 2014, which he was forced to end after doctors found a tumor in his stomach.

Dissidents using Twitter have reported that a congregation of anti-communist activists that had gathered in front of the hospital currently treating Morera have been violently arrested.

Why Is Rahm Emanuel Vacationing in Repressive Cuba?

Elliot Abrahams in Newsweek

Here’s the  news out of Chicago:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is cutting short his family vacation in Cuba and will return to Chicago on Tuesday to deal with the latest crisis involving the city’s Police Department.

While the press is paying attention to the shootings, I’d like to ask another question: what is he doing taking a “family vacation” in a viciously repressive communist country?

Think of it: the liberal Democrat ignores suppression of freedom of the press and speech and religion. The elected mayor frolics in a place where there has not been one free election since Fidel Castro took over in 1959, nor will there be while he and his brother Raul live.

The island’s prisons are full of political prisoners, but Emanuel ignores this. There are plenty of human rights activists and former political prisoners who would be happy to talk with him about Cuba’s future, but that won’t happen: he’s on a “family vacation,” you see.

Can you imagine a “family vacation” on South Africa’s beautiful beaches while Nelson Mandela sat in prison on Robben Island? A fun time in Russia while Sharansky was in the Gulag? No. So why is Cuba different?

Emanuel’s visit to Cuba is an expression of indifference to human freedom. Cuba is surrounded by democracies whose people do not live in a police state and do not go to jail for asking to vote or trying to publish a newspaper–and their beaches are equally beautiful.

Chicago’s mayor chose to hand some badly needed cash to the Castro regime, and there is simply no excuse for it. But there is a considerable irony here: just as  Amnesty International is pounding Emanuel over protection of human rights in Chicago, he’s off sunning himself on an island that is famous precisely for the violation of human rights.

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the   Council on Foreign Relations.

Cuban Activist Freed in Obama Deal, Then Arrested Again, Now in Grave Condition

PJ Media

BY BRIDGET JOHNSON DECEMBER 29, 2015

The Obama administration is calling on the Cuban government to free a political prisoner — one of the dozens released from prison a year ago as a rapprochement gesture, only to be re-arrested a few months later.

Vladimir Morera Bacallao, 53, is reportedly near death due to the hunger strike he started behind bars in October.

Morera Bacallao, a labor activist, was arrested in April in the run-up to the regime’s sham municipal elections for posting a sign outside his home stating: “I vote for my freedom and not in an election where I cannot choose my president.”

A month ago, he was sentenced to four and a half years behind bars.

Around the same time, another one of the political prisoners whose release was hailed by the Obama administration as a grand gesture of the Castro regime toward human rights was sentenced to another prison term. Jorge Ramirez Calderon received two and a half years behind bars for “joining a peaceful protest asking for improved sanitary conditions and water in his community,” the State Department acknowledged at the time.

“Respect for human rights is a cornerstone of our foreign policy, and we call on the Cuban government to respect its citizens’ rights to free expression and peaceful protest,” the State Department said Nov. 24.

Morera Bacallao was transferred from his prison cell to an intensive care unit last week. At today’s State Department briefing, spokesman Mark Toner told reporters the activist is in “very serious condition.”

“The United States is deeply concerned about the deteriorating physical condition of Vladimir Morera Bacallao, who has been on a hunger strike since October to protest his imprisonment for peacefully expressing political dissent,” Toner said. “Mr. Morera Bacallao was one of 53 prisoners of concern released shortly after the December 2014 announcement of the president’s new policy direction on Cuba, but detained again in April of 2015 for hanging a sign outside his home in protest of municipal elections.”

“…The United States urgently calls on the Cuban government to release Mr. Morera Bacallao.”

Amnesty International noted on Dec. 10 that 1,477 arbitrary politically motivated arrests by Cuban officials in November — “the highest monthly total in many years.”

“For weeks on end, the Cuban authorities have used a spike in arrests and harassment to prevent human rights activists and dissidents from protesting peacefully,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) noted that during President Obama’s time in office “activists Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Wilman Villar Mendoza died under uncannily similar circumstances” as hunger-striking Morera Bacallao. “Activists Laura Pollan and Oswaldo Paya also perished at the hands of Castros’ thugs during this administration.”

“Morera Bacallao has risked everything for the basic right to have a voice in his government. His unjustifiable imprisonment and mistreatment are further indictments of the brutal malevolence of the Castro regime, and the utter failure of Obama’s appeasement of Cuba’s dictators,” Diaz-Balart wrote on his Facebook page. “I urge human rights organizations and the Obama administration to bring attention to the urgent case of Vladimir Morera Bacallao, and to demand that he receive immediate medical attention. We must not remain silent while another courageous activist hovers on the brink of death.”

Obama’s Cuba policy makes life worse for Cubans

The Boston GlobeWhen President Obama declared 12 months ago that he intended to normalize relations with Cuba, he claimed that rapprochement with the Castro regime would uphold America’s “commitment to liberty and democracy.” Liberalizing US policy, the president predicted, would succeed “in making the lives of ordinary Cubans a little bit easier, more free, more prosperous.”

He affirmed that message seven months later, as he announced the reopening of the US embassy in Havana. Life on the island might not be “transformed overnight,” Obama conceded, but he had no doubt that more engagement was the best way to advance democracy and human rights for Cuba’s people. “This,” said the president, “is what change looks like.”

Reality-check time.

The Obama administration’s year-long outreach to Cuba has certainly been frenetic. The American flag was raised over the US embassy in August, and in Washington the Cuban embassy was reopened. President Obama held a face-to-face meeting with Raul Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama. The State Department removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Restrictions were eased on travel to Cuba by Americans, resulting in a 54 percent increase in trips this year. Three Cabinet members — the secretaries of state, agriculture, and commerce — were dispatched on separate missions to Cuba. And plans have been announced to resume direct mail service and commercial air travel between the two countries.

The Castro brothers snapped up all these treats. They will gladly pocket more of them. But there has been no hint of the expanded freedom and democratic reforms that Obama’s engagement was supposed to unlock.

Cuba remains the only dictatorship in the Americas, as repressive and hostile to human rights as ever. More repressive, in fact: Over the past 12 months, the government’s harassment of dissidents and democracy activists has ballooned. In November, according to Amnesty International, there were nearly 1,500 political arrests or arbitrary detentions of peaceful human-rights protesters. That was the highest monthly tally in years, more than double the average of 700 political detentions per month recorded in 2014.

On Dec. 10 — International Human Rights Day — Cuban security police arrested between 150 and 200 dissidents, in many cases beating the prisoners they seized. As is usually the case, those attacked by the regime’s goons included members of the respected Ladies in White, an organization of wives, mothers, and sisters of jailed dissidents. The women, dressed in white, attend Mass each week, then walk silently through the streets to protest the government’s lawlessness and brutality. Even the United Nations, which frequently turns a blind eye to the depredations of its member-states, condemned the Cuban government’s “extraordinary disdain” for civil norms, and deplored the “many hundreds” of warrantless arrests in recent weeks.

But from the Obama administration there has been no such condemnation. One might have thought that the White House would make it a priority to give moral support and heightened recognition to the Cubans who most embody the “commitment to liberty and democracy” that the president has invoked. But concern for Cuba’s courageous democrats has plainly not been a priority. Particularly disgraceful was Secretary of State John Kerry’s refusal to invite any dissidents or human-rights advocates to the flag-raising ceremony at the US embassy in August. To exclude them, as The Washington Post observed, was a dishonorable gesture of appeasement to the hemisphere’s nastiest regime — “a sorry tip of the tat to what the Castros so vividly stand for: diktat, statism, control, and rule by fear.”

For all the president’s talk about using engagement and trade to promote the cause of liberty and civil rights in Cuba, his policy of détente has been wholly one-sided. In an interview with Yahoo! News this month, he was asked what concessions Havana has made over the past year. He couldn’t think of any.

“Look,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “our original theory on this was not that we were going to see immediate changes or loosening of control of the Castro regime, but rather that, over time, you’d lay the predicates for substantial transformation.”

Cubans aren’t holding their breath. Tens of thousands of them, realizing that normalization will do nothing to loosen the Castros’ grip, have fled the country. More than 45,000 Cubans arrived at US border checkpoints in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30; thousands more are trying to reach the United States by traveling through Central America or taking to the sea. It is the largest wave of Cuban migrants in decades. The American president may believe in “predicates for substantial transformation” and other such amulets and charms. Cuba’s people know better.

We should know better too.

As a candidate for president, Obama promised a Cuba policy that would “be guided by one word: Libertad.” If the regime in Havana wanted the benefits of normalization, he vowed, it would first have to accept democratic reforms. But Obama’s foreign policy toward Cuba, like his policies toward Iran and Russia and Syria, turned out to be far more about accommodating despots, far less about upholding Western norms. His years in office have coincided with a worldwide retreat of democratic freedoms; why would Cuba be an exception?

It is clear now that the only change Obama craved in Cuba was a change in America’s go-it-alone stance. Normalization was desirable for its own sake, not as a means to leverage freedom for Cuba’s people.

Last week, 126 former Cuban dissidents wrote a letter pleading with Obama to reconsider his approach. Showering the Castro regime with so many benefits, they warned, will “prolong the life of the dictatorship,” even as it “marginaliz[es] the democratic opposition.” Alas, that doesn’t trouble the president nearly as much as it troubles them. He’s on his way out, and no longer has to pretend to care about the fate of beleaguered democrats.