Project Varela: 20 years later as important as ever

In the last few years, thousands of its citizens have participated in what’s known as the Varela Project, overcoming a culture of fear and calling for a national referendum on civil rights, the peaceful evolution of freedom and reconciliation. - Oswaldo Payá, July 14, 2003 

Oswaldo Payá, Regis Iglesias, and Antonio Diaz, walk to turn in Project Varela petitions

Twenty years ago today on May 10, 2002, carrying 11,020 signed petitions in support of the Varela Project, the Christian Liberation Movement's Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Antonio Diaz Sanchez, and Regis Iglesias Ramirez turned them in to the Cuban National Assembly. 

The Varela Project, named after the Cuban Catholic Priest Felix Varela, sought to reform the Cuban legal system to bring it in line with international human rights standards. Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas in a July 14, 2003 essay published in the Los Angeles Times.

"The project’s road map toward these goals follows the country’s legal code. Article 88g of the Cuban constitution allows citizens, supported by petitions signed by at least 10,000 voters, to propose legislation. And, although it’s fraught with contradictions, the constitution also includes articles protecting the rights the Varela Project promotes."

The Christian Liberation Movement followed the letter of Cuban law in organizing the campaign. They exceeded the number of signatures needed, and specifically asked for the following in the petition.

• Guarantee the right to free expression and free association that guarantee pluralism, opening Cuban society to political debate and facilitating a more participatory democracy. 
• Amnesty for all those imprisoned for political reasons.  
• Right of Cubans to form companies, both individually owned and in cooperatives. 
• Proposal for a new electoral law that truly guarantees the right to elect and be elected to all Cubans and the holding of free elections

The Christian Liberation Movement was founded by Catholic lay people in Havana in September 1988, and is part of a non-violent dissident movement that traces its origins and influences to the Cuban Committee for Human Rights that was founded in 1976.

There was a Cuban Spring that started in January 1998 with the Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba that saw the return of Christmas, a holiday that had been banned since 1969,  and ended with a nationwide crackdown on Cuba's civic nonviolent movement on March 18, 2003.

Nearly four months later Oswaldo Payá addressed the end of the Cuban Spring in the following OpEd in the Los Angeles Times. Nine years later on July 22, 2012 he was murdered by State Security, together with Harold Cepero Escalante, youth leader of the Christian Liberation Movement.

Today the Christian Liberation Movement issued the following statement.

"Exactly 20 years ago, with hundreds of political prisoners in jail and a mostly terrified people, 11,020 Cubans peacefully demanded the freedom of political prisoners and free elections, so that Cubans could freely choose their political and economic model. 

The response of the tyranny was repression, exile and even murder. 

Two decades later, political prisoners multiply and terror expands on the island through repression, while the solidarity of many bows to petty interests, providing impunity to the regime, today more tyrannical and more despotic than ever. 

On the 20th anniversary of that civic gesture of the people of Cuba, honoring the memory of Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero and all those who have fallen in this struggle, thinking of the thousands of political prisoners who are today in communist dungeons, living with the Cuban people the lack of freedom and rights, we proclaim our will to continue working indefinitely together with the people, until freedom and democracy arrive in Cuba, which by right belongs to all Cubans. 

ALL CUBANS! 

ALL BROTHERS! 

AND NOW FREEDOM."

Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2003

Cloud of Terror Hangs Over Cubans Seeking Rights

By Oswaldo Payá

 

July 14, 2003 12 AM PT

Cuba finds itself in a grave crisis.

In the last few years, thousands of its citizens have participated in what’s known as the Varela Project, overcoming a culture of fear and calling for a national referendum on civil rights, the peaceful evolution of freedom and reconciliation. But now a cloud of terror hangs over that quest for change.

Since March 18, Cuban state security has detained dozens of human rights activists, independent journalists and opposition leaders. Nearly 80 people have been locked away after summary trials, accused of collusion with the U.S. government. Their families have been terrorized and their homes ransacked -- without turning up the evidence of weapons or violent plots that the government claimed it would find.

The crackdown is an act against civil society, against fundamental rights and against the Varela Project. Among those detained are almost the entire executive leadership of the Christian Liberation Movement, which gave birth to the project. More than half of the detainees are project coordinators.

Through the project, named for crusading priest Father Felix Varela, 11,020 citizens petitioned the National Assembly in May 2002 requesting a referendum to guarantee Cuban civil liberties: freedom of expression and association, the right to own a private business (foreigners can own businesses in Cuba but nationals cannot), the release of nonviolent political prisoners and the right to directly elect representatives in free elections (the current system allows only for the endorsement of candidates selected by the government’s committees).

The project’s road map toward these goals follows the country’s legal code. Article 88g of the Cuban constitution allows citizens, supported by petitions signed by at least 10,000 voters, to propose legislation. And, although it’s fraught with contradictions, the constitution also includes articles protecting the rights the Varela Project promotes.

Since the project’s earliest days, the Cuban government has responded by unleashing a campaign of intimidation, confiscating signed petitions and encouraging violence and vandalism against the families and property of signature collectors. Agents have visited the homes of thousands of Varela petition signers. Some have been subpoenaed to appear at state security offices, some have lost their jobs or been expelled from universities, some have been blacklisted. Campaigns attacking the project and its leaders unfolded in Cuba. Also, a vocal and powerful minority within the Miami exile community took to the airwaves unleashing verbal attacks against the project and its leaders. They shared many of the same ideas, voiced with strikingly similar pejorative words and phrases.

And the response to the 11,000 signatures? Through the Communist Party, citizens were ordered to the streets to participate in massive marches against the project’s goals, though the project was never named. The government also began its own petition initiative using well-oiled methods of deception and intimidation; it claims to have gathered 8 million signatures for a constitutional amendment that makes the present one-party system “irrevocable.”

Still, the amendment didn’t nullify Article 88g, and the Varela Project survives.

In 2002, shortly before the signatures went to the National Assembly, former President Jimmy Carter visited Cuba. He praised the project in a nationally televised speech, introducing it to millions who had never before heard of it. More names were added to the project’s lists. Parallel efforts for change on the part of journalists, human rights activists, priests, nuns and others gained momentum. Never before had so many citizens organized from within Cuba to claim their rights.

And then came the latest crackdown.

Yet the government’s actions only promote confrontation as a means of resolution. We are determined to continue the Varela Project until the changes Cubans need are realized. Cuban citizens must be permitted to exercise their constitutional rights.

Support from nations, churches and human rights organizations around the world is vital to our success. This is the time to put pressure on the Cuban government. This is the time to insist on the release of all political prisoners and detainees. This is the time for solidarity with the Cuban people and their quest for change.

Oswaldo Paya is the national coordinator of the Citizens Committee for the promotion of the Varela Project in Cuba and an activist in the Christian Liberation Movement. In December, he was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jul-14-oe-paya14-story.html

Where were you when Cuban prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died nine years ago today?

"October 20, 2003 [Orlando Zapata] was dragged along the floor of Combinado del Este Prison by prison officials after requesting medical attention, leaving his back full of lacerations." - Amnesty International, January 25, 2004

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, May 15, 1967 – February 23, 2010

Do you even know who Orlando Zapata Tamayo was?

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was a Cuban bricklayer and human rights defender who worked with human rights defenders Oscar Elias Biscet, and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas in separate campaigns respectively to educate Cubans on human rights and to reclaim those rights in the Project Varela petition drive.

He was imprisoned in 2003 and continuously beaten and tortured for seven years for continuing his defiance of the dictatorship and defense of human rights behind bars. In late 2009 in order to protest mistreatment he went on hunger strike and prison officials responded by taking his water away in order to break his spirit. Instead they killed him. Amnesty International said "Cuban authorities responsible for activist's death on hunger strike."
 

Cuban human rights defender and martyr Orlando Zapata Tamayo

The uproar caused by his death was a key factor in the later release over the course of 2010 and 2011 of the remaining prisoners of conscience imprisoned since 2003.

Returning to the original question in abbreviated form: "Where were you the day Orlando Zapata Tamayo died?"

The Canadian punk rock band I.H.A.D. asked the question in a song simply titled "Orlando Zapata" and we after requesting their permission produced the video below accompanying their song.


On Sunday, February 24, 2019 at 3:00pm sharp join us at the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC to protest this and other crimes of the Castro regime. Ni1Mas! Not1More

Did you know that your tourist dollars in Cuba help to directly finance the Cuban military?

What travel agencies don't mention about Cuban tourism

 Tourism funds Cuban military 

A large chunk of the Cuban economy is run by the company Gaviota that deals with tourism and is controlled by the MINFAR (the military)  and Castro’s Ministry of the Interior (MININT) that runs a hotel chain, an airline, taxi company, marinas, shops, restaurants and museums and is under the control of another general. The tourist group Cubanacán was founded at the beginning of the 1980s and is also under military control. This means that tourist dollars go directly to strengthening the Castro regime's repressive apparatus.

The first American ship to cruise from the United States to Cuba in over half a century is partnering with Havanatur that is heavily penetrated by Cuban spies from the Ministry of Intelligence (MININT).Christopher P. Baker in his travel guide Havana explains the nature of the staff that tourists will be encountering.

"The Cuban government looks with suspicion  on U.S. travelers entering on religious or humanitarian licenses, and U.S. "people to people" programs are handled exclusively by Celimar, a division of Havanatur that is said to report to MININT and is heavily laden with ex-MININT staffers."

Secondly, since Cuba is a totalitarian communist dictatorship that is the tenth most censored country on Earth according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, information of interest to traveler is often unavailable or misrepresented.

Can purposeful travel outweigh supporting Castro's repressive apparatus?

If you are going to travel to Cuba and put hard currency into dying communist institutions that prolongs the life of the dictatorship then you have to ask yourself what would serve as a counterbalance to that? What does purposeful travel to Cuba look like? One could argue that it looks like this: members of the Miami-based non-governmental organization, the Cuban Democratic Directorate, traveled to Cuba in 2002 and took humanitarian assistance to Cuban dissidents and signed the Varela Project in the living room of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas.

Courageous human rights activists from Europe and Latin America have risked all to assist Cuban human rights defenders. Is this something that you'd be willing to do? Would you be ready to assume the consequences?

Project Varela: 12 years later as important as ever

Twelve years ago today, carrying 11,020 signed petitions in support of the Varela Project, Oswaldo Paya, Antonio Diaz Sanchez, and Regis Iglesias walked with the bulky card board boxes labeled Project Varela to the Cuban National Assembly.



The Varela Project, named after the Cuban Catholic Priest Felix Varela, sought to reform the Cuban legal system to bring it in line with international human rights standards. They had followed the letter of the law in organizing the campaign and yet the dictatorship's response to a nonviolent citizen's initiative was to first coerce Cubans into signing another petition declaring the Constitution unchangeable and quickly passed it through the rubber stamp legislature without debating the Varela Project, which according to the Cuban law drafted by the dictatorship meant that it should have been debated by the National Assembly.



Less than a year later beginning on March 18, 2003 the Black Cuban Spring would begin with a massive crackdown on Cuba's civil society with many of the organizers of Project Varela, imprisoned and summarily sentenced up to 28 years in prison. The 75 activists who had been imprisoned with long prison sentences became known as the "group of the 75."

The dictatorship announced, at the time, that the Cuban dissident movement had been destroyed. First, the remaining activists who were still free continued gathering signatures and would turn in another 14,384 petition signatures on October 5, 2003. Furthermore, the wives, sisters and daughters of the activists who had been detained and imprisoned organized themselves into the "Ladies in White." A movement that sought the freedom of their loved ones and organized regular marches through the streets of Cuba, despite regime organized violence visited upon them.

The Economist in its December 14, 2005 issue published a conversation with Oswaldo Paya titled "An unsilenced voice for change" that outlined what had taken place:

Between 2001 and 2004, Mr Payá's movement gathered 25,000 signatures in a vain attempt to persuade Cuba's National Assembly to change the constitution to allow multi-party democracy. Activists of his Christian Liberation Movement made up more than two-thirds of the 75 dissidents and journalists rounded up and jailed for long terms in April 2003. [...] Spain is “complaisant” with Mr Castro's regime, Mr Payá says. “We need a campaign of support and solidarity with peaceful change in Cuba” of the kind that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa and to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

It took over eight years, but the last of the group of the 75 were eventually released. Many were driven into exile but  a core group remain in Cuba and are still defiant. One  of the Project Varela leaders still active and mobilizing large numbers today is Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, but others  lost their lives defending human rights and dignity who had also gathered signatures for the Varela Project, such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo.
On July 22, 2012 all evidence points to a state security operation that ended the lives of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante. Now signatures continue to be gathered for Project Varela inside Cuba and everywhere for an international investigation into the deaths of Oswaldo and Harold.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo: Four years later

"I come on behalf of the 75, I come in the name of Freedom ... Long live the internal opposition. Long live the Ladies in White"... On the anniversary of our murdered brothers, our brothers sunk on July 13, 1994, our brothers of February 24th ... and on behalf of all of Cuba and the exile, long live the homeland of Varela, of Marti, of George Washington, of Barack Obama, democratic and free forever. Long live a Free Cuba. Down with Fidel Castro. " - Orlando Zapata Tamayo, 2009 from a Cuban prison

Orlando Zapata Tamayo (1967 - 2010)

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was born on May 15, 1967 and died a victim of the Castro regime on February 23, 2010. He was an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and as a human rights defender collected signatures for the Varela Project collaborating with Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and the Christian Liberation Movement. Orlando Zapata also collaborated closely with Oscar Elias Biscet and took part in teach-ins on human rights in what were called "human rights circles".  It is important to mention this because the Cuban dictatorship has engaged in a slander campaign against this man.

Oswaldo Payá pays homage to Orlando Zapata in 2010

 Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas had campaigned to save the life of Orlando Zapata and spoke out on his behalf in a Spanish television program in January of 2010, a month prior to his death. Tragically, two and a half years after Orlando Zapata Tamayo's death, on July 22, 2012 Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero were killed under suspicious circumstances that implicate State Security.



*Original text in Spanish: "Vengo en nombre de los 75, Vengo en nombre de la Libertad ...  Viva la oposición interna. Vivan las Damas de Blanco". ...En el aniversario de nuestros hermanos asesinado, nuestros hermanos hundido el 13 de julio del 1994, nuestro hermanos del 24 de febrero ... y en nombre de todos y del exilio de Cuba, viva la patria de Varela, de Martí, de George Washington, de Barack Obama, libre y democrática para siempre. Viva Cuba Libre. Abajo Fidel Castro".