Human rights and sanctions: two sticks
Should countries subject their agreements and cooperation to political and legislative changes that undermine the rights of disadvantaged groups?
by Rafael Hernandez
March 18, 2024
Orginal Spanish text
https://oncubanews.com/opinion/columnas/con-todas-sus-letras/derechos-humanos-y-sanciones-dos-varas/
The current that raises once again the old anti-communist slogan of toughening policy towards the island and conditioning relations to this or that, in Europe or in Washington, believes it has found in the current Cuban crisis the right moment to tighten the screws.
Is it possible that they have not learned how their double standards are processed on the side over here? What is its real effect on openness, reforms, democratization? Have they not looked in the mirror?
Let's take as an example what Amnesty International (AI) says, let's say, about Spain . AI says that the eradication of violence against women has made progress, but it remains a critical problem; that the treatment of prisoners, sometimes inhuman and degrading, includes practices classified as torture. And it puts its finger on the reception of immigrants, where the capacity of the established order to respond to the human security of those who aspire to a better life is tested.
Should Latin American and Caribbean countries subject their agreements and cooperation with that country to making political and legislative changes that undermine the rights of these disadvantaged groups? Would it be the most effective way to achieve desirable progress?
As for giving an example to Cuba, I imagine what would have happened here if fifty years after the dictatorship overthrown in 1959, the thousands of dead of that regime had not received justice and reparation, had not been vindicated by the courts or been in many cases knew for sure where they were buried; and where those guilty of “extrajudicial executions”, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, had not been tried. If almost half a century later a Fulgencio Batista Foundation were maintained, and a law that prevents any judicial process for human rights violations committed during that regime, sealing the impunity of the repressors. Or if the exaltation of Batistato had been reborn in political organizations that celebrate him as a hero, the architect of modern Cuba, whom international communism has unjustly vilified. And, above all, some invoked it as a transition model to guide countries victims of totalitarianism along the path of freedom and democracy.
Let's imagine that instead of being the country in Latin America and the Caribbean with the closest cooperative relations, political-diplomatic alliances and collaboration with Africa, its treatment of Africans who arrived in Cuba were described as serious violations of human rights .
Let's think if every time a delegation from our countries visited Madrid or Brussels they asked that Catalan politicians convicted for political reasons, or imprisoned Basque independentists and anarchists, be at the conversation table.
Although some MEPs are proud of their European supremacy, 40% of Spaniards do believe that there are political prisoners in their country; and 57%, that preventive detention is abused, according to a survey by the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia.
As the well-known Spanish visual artist Santiago Sierra, whose work in favor of political prisoners has been censored, says, the approval of the Citizen Security Law, or “ Gag Law ”, covers opinions and acts of disobedience as crimes, such as, for example, the attempts to collectively paralyze evictions, multiplying complaints and sanctions for resistance to authority.” And it is known that the application of article 155 of the Constitution against the self-determination referendum called in Catalonia unleashed a wave of arrests that led elected representatives to prison or exile.
However, when you ask the politicians there, they say that theirs “are not political prisoners at all.” And they clarify that "in a democracy there are no political prisoners", so in Spain "there have not been any for many years." Or even better: “ There are no political prisoners here, but political prisoners .” If Mario Moreno had been Minister of Justice, he would not have said it better.
Given that the European Parliament does not vote to condition relations with Israel on the cessation of the Gaza massacre; that the Sahrawi fighters imprisoned by Morocco remain incommunicado, without adequate medical care, tortured and held thousands of kilometers from their families, while no one in Brussels seems to care ; that Tunisia does not allow a delegation of MEPs to enter and nothing happens either; that cases of murdered journalists, of contingents of poor people displaced by the violence of organized crime that some States fail to control, proliferate in other countries; Since the victims of police violence in the US reach record numbers in 2023 without the official European institutions opening their mouths, how can we explain the application of such a selective standard to what is happening in Cuba?
This propensity is not only the work of right-wing parties. Other actors enthusiastically contribute to ensuring that political organizations do not measure themselves by their own yardstick. They are those who, by mouth, promote dialogue, freedom of expression, the debate of ideas, the free circulation of information, pluralism, and at the same time carefully exclude those who express approaches that do not coincide with their ideology or line. editorial. Let's say, when a newspaper like El País or Washington Post, and some press agencies based in Havana decide which authors or which “political analyzes” they publish, giving a perfect example of that asymmetry.
I wonder what it would be like if the most high-profile political commentators on China, Vietnam, Russia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, Colombia, in the mainstream media, were exiles from those countries, who identified themselves as activists against those governments, and whose texts They would dedicate themselves to denying or ignoring everything that could be considered valuable and recognizable. And of course I am not referring to the academy that studies Cuba elsewhere, but to what is spread in the most influential newspapers and media in the formation of international public opinion.
Recapitulating all of the above, I draw attention to three issues.
The first, that when some judge the real deficiencies, problems, errors and clumsiness of Cuban policies, they tend to apply a logic that, deep down and increasingly openly, rather objects to the very nature of the system.
Can democratic exercises in our region and beyond be paradigmatic?
As most observers recognize, today's democracies are no more credible, nor do they function better, nor are they more popular than many authoritarian regimes, in Latin America and the Caribbean, and also in Asia, right now. Of course, this does not mean justifying any form of dictatorship, authoritarianism or populism, especially in regions with a record of dictatorships like ours. However, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), democracy in our part of the world has fallen more since 2008 (-10%) than anywhere else.
Except in Chile and Uruguay, according to the EIU, perfect, “hybrid” authoritarian regimes and “imperfect democracies” constitute the majority. The imperfect refers to Brazil, Colombia and Argentina; and hybrids, Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras... If you know what has been happening in those countries in recent years, you will see how democracy, oligarchic concentration and large-scale corruption are taking place.
Comparatively, says EIU, where democracy has fallen the least is in Asia (-2.1%), a region where regimes described as authoritarian prosper, such as China, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia ...
It seems that, adhering to the same parameters, actually existing democracies do not achieve more credibility or respond better than many authoritarians, in terms of human security, equity, poverty reduction, prosperity, access to education and health.
The second issue refers to the belief that imposing conditions, punishments, isolation, pressure or, as they would say in Old Havana, “putting your foot in” those regimes of an authoritarian nature, we achieve greater influence to reach compromises and, at the same time, long, behavioral changes, that through dialogue and constructive engagement.
US policies towards Cuba are a long experiment of error-trial-error-error-more trial-more error that demonstrates not only the ineffectiveness, but the counterproductive effect of that variant. President Obama's recognition of this effect should be sufficiently demonstrative, because of "confession of parties, release of evidence."
Before him, the European Union recognized this, by discarding the so-called “common position” in 2016 . The Italian historian Carlo Mario Cipolla formulated it in his third law of human stupidity: “A behavior is stupid if it causes harm to others without obtaining any gain, or, even worse, causing harm to itself in the process.”
The third is that “putting your foot in” and calling on the other instead of dialogue and commitment has repercussions within the besieged, in their politics and their society, inside and outside. This is because it contributes to reinforcing extremism of all colors, to clouding and festering the zipizape above dialogue, to facilitating the hijacking of the debate by the desire for protagonism, the exchange of ideas by charlatanry, reasoning by speculation, the defense of the national interest through the mentality of a besieged fortress.
I am thinking now of some Cuban problems, not derived from the blockade or the USSR, but contaminated by harassment, which hampers their understanding and in-depth debate. Let's say, corruption.
If I had the evidence and time, it would be worth trying.
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