The structural vulnerability imposed by the Cuban regime has turned citizens into hostages of the state and permanent victims of systematic human rights violations.

Por Michael Lima Cuadra (lationamérica21)

HAVANA TIMES – I was in eighth grade at a junior high school in Havana when I first heard the term “human rights” in the 1980s. I heard it clandestinely, through the short-wave signal of Radio Martí in the voices of Gustavo and Sebastián Arcos Vergnes, founders of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. That powerful idea changed the course of my life. It shaped my political awareness, fueled my questions about the totalitarian system around me, and pushed me to challenge the pillars of Marxism that the regime demanded we accept without hesitation.

That discovery carried a price. By the time I finished junior high school, my expediente acumulativo—the record used to measure a student’s ideological “combativeness” and loyalty—already contained more than sixteen citations for ideological deviance (diversionismo ideologico). The regime used that label to punish any behavior, preference, or attitude deemed contrary to official values. Simply mentioning an article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was enough to receive a citation. That file, transformed into a political weapon, permanently barred me from entering university. It was then that I understood a fundamental truth: powerlessness in Cuba begins in the classroom, where the State controls education to prevent the emergence of free citizens.

What struck me most about the concept of human rights was its essential premise: that we possess inherent dignity and inalienable rights by virtue of being human—rights superior to any ideology or narrative of national sovereignty. This vision stood in stark contrast to that of the Cuban regime, whose political design reduces citizens to a voiceless mass, expected only to obey the interests of the Communist Party. The ideal of the “New Man” demanded dissolving the individual into the collective and renouncing one’s own judgment. This ideological design is not accidental; it is the first cornerstone of structural........

© Havana Times