[News] State Department’s latest prefab Cuban “dissident”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://machetera.wordpress.com/

U.S. State Department’s latest prefab Cuban “dissident:” Darsi Ferrer

Posted: 24 Mar 2010 11:26 AM PDT

This morning the U.S. State Department revealed 
its latest pawn in the overthrow game it’s 
playing with Cuba: Darsi Ferrer, a Cuban doctor 
currently under arrest in Cuba, to whom it 
granted Honorable Mention in its 2009 Defender of 
Freedom Award sweepstakes.  A few questions come 
to mind.  Who won First 
Prize?  Second?  Third?  Is this sweepstakes the 
State Department’s best kept secret, only pulled 
out for public display when Washington worries 
that the media buzz is starting to dry up on its 
prefabricated Cuban dissidence campaign or the 
hunger strike recruitment is flagging?

The story put out by the anti-Cuba lobby on 
Ferrer is that he was arrested for possessing a 
couple of bags of stolen cement but that this is 
a cover for the real reason for his arrest, which 
has more to do with his “dissident” 
activities.  I have no idea what Ferrer was 
actually charged with but I’m guessing that 
dissidence isn’t a reason for arrest in Cuba 
either
treason is, however.  Atilio Boron explains:

Dissidents or Traitors? – 
<http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2010/03/23/cuba-disidentes-o-traidores/>en 
español

<http://www.atilioboron.com>Atilio A. Boron

Translation: Machetera

The “free press" in Europe and the Americas - the 
one that lied shamelessly about the existence of 
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or described 
the putschist regime of Micheletti in Honduras as 
“interim” ? has redoubled its ferocious campaign 
against Cuba. As a result, it’s important to 
distinguish between the true reason for it, and 
the pretext.  The first, which establishes the 
global framework for this campaign, is the 
imperial counter-offensive launched near the end 
of the Bush administration, and whose most 
resounding example was the reactivation and 
mobilization of the Fourth Fleet. Contrary to the 
predictions of certain gullible people, this 
policy, dictated by the military-industrial 
complex, was not merely continued but reinforced 
by the recent treaty signed by Obama and 
Colombia’s President Uribe, through which the 
United States is to be granted the use of at 
least seven military bases in Colombian 
territory, diplomatic immunity for all U.S. 
personnel affected by these operations, license 
to bring in or remove any kind of cargo without 
authorities in the host country being able to 
register what’s coming in or going out, and the 
right of U.S. expeditionary forces to enter or 
leave Colombia using any kind of i.d. card 
whatsoever attesting to their identity.  As if 
all that were not enough, Washington’s policy of 
recognizing the “legality and legitimacy” of the 
coup d’etat government in Honduras and the 
subsequent fraudulent elections is yet one more 
example of the perverse continuity that links 
policies implemented by the White House, 
regardless of the skin color of its principal 
occupant.  And in this general imperial 
counter-offensive, the attack and destabilization 
of Cuba plays an extremely important role.

These are the true, underlying reasons.  But the 
pretext for this renewed attack was the fatal 
outcome of the hunger strike of Orlando Zapata 
Tamayo, now reinforced by an identical action 
initiated by another “dissident,” Guillermo 
Fariñas Hernández and one which will no doubt be 
followed by those of other participants and 
accomplices of this aggression.  As is well 
known, Zapata Tamayo was (and continues being) 
presented by these “media of mass deception” – as 
Noam Chomsky adequately described them ? as a 
“political dissident” when in reality he was an 
ordinary prisoner who’d been recruited by the 
enemies of the Cuban revolution, and 
unscrupulously used as a mere tool of their 
subversive projects.  The case of Fariñas 
Hernández is not the same, but even so, it holds 
certain similarities and deepens an argument that 
must be viewed with complete seriousness.

It’s important to remember that there’s a long 
history to these attacks.  They began at the very 
triumph of the revolution but, as official and 
formal policy of the United States government, 
they began on March 17, 1960, when the National 
Security Council approved a “Covert Action 
Program” against Cuba, proposed by the then CIA 
Director, Allen Dulles.  Partially declassified 
in 1991, this program identified four main 
courses of action, with the first two being 
“opposition building” and the launching of a 
“powerful propaganda offensive” in order to 
strengthen and make credible that opposition.  It couldn’t be clearer.

After the resounding failure of these plans, 
George W. Bush created a special commission 
within the State Department itself, in order to 
promote “regime change” in Cuba, a euphemism to 
avoid the phrase “promote 
counter-revolution.”  Cuba has the dubious 
privilege of being the only country in the world 
for which the State Department has designed a 
project of this sort, thus confirming the 
unhealthy Yankee obsession with annexing the 
island, and on the other hand, confirming that 
José Martí was right when he warned our people 
about the dangers of U.S. expansionism.  The 
first report from this commission, published in 
2004, had 458 pages and explained in the most 
minute detail everything that should be done to 
introduce a liberal democracy, respect human 
rights and establish a market economy in 
Cuba.  To carry out the plan, $59 million dollars 
a year was budgeted (in addition to the money set 
aside for undercover action) of which, according 
to the proposal, $36 million was earmarked for 
the fomenting and financing of “dissident” 
activities.  In summary, what the press presents 
as a noble and patriotic internal dissidence 
seems rather to be the methodical application of 
the imperial project designed to complete the old 
dream of the U.S. rightwing: a definitive takeover of Cuba.

Having said that, a conceptual clarification is 
necessary.  It’s no accident that the mainstream 
press speak so casually of “political dissidents” 
incarcerated in Cuba.  But are they “political 
dissidents” or something else?  It would be 
difficult to say for all of them, but it is an 
absolute certainty that the majority of those who 
are in prison are not there for being political 
dissidents but for something far more serious: “treason.”

Let’s examine this closely.  In Norberto Bobbio’s 
famous Diccionario de Política [Political 
Dictionary], the political scientist Leonardo 
Morlino defined dissent as “any kind of 
disagreement without stable organization, and as 
such, non-institutionalized, that does not try to 
exchange an incumbent government for another, 
much less topple the existing political 
system.  Dissent is expressed solely through 
exhortation, persuasion, criticism, pressure, 
always with non-violent methods, in order to 
induce decision-makers to prefer certain options 
over others or to modify preceding decisions or 
political directives.  Dissent never questions 
the legitimacy or fundamental rules upon which a 
political community is based, but only very 
specific rules or decisions.” (pp. 
567-568).  Further on, he points out that there 
is a threshold that, once crossed, turns dissent 
and dissidents into something else.  “The 
threshold is crossed when the legitimacy of the 
system and the rules of the game are questioned, 
and violence is used: or when intentional 
disobedience becomes a norm; or finally, when 
disagreement is institutionalized in an 
opposition that may include the toppling of the 
system among its objectives.” (p. 569).  In the 
former Soviet Union, two of the most notable 
political dissidents, whose actions were 
consistent with the definition suggested above, 
were the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer 
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn; the same 
applies to Rudolf Bahro in East Germany and Karel 
Kosik in the former Czechoslovakia.  In the 
United States, the outstanding example from the 
middle of the last century is Martin Luther King, 
and in the Israel of our time Mordechai Vanunu, 
the nuclear scientist who revealed the existence 
of the atomic arsenal in that country and was 
condemned as a result to eighteen years in prison 
without the “free press” taking note of the affair.

The Cuban dissidence, unlike that of Sakharov, 
Solzhenitsyn, Bahro, Kosik, King and Vanunu, fits 
in the latter definition because its purpose is 
the subversion of constitutional order and the 
toppling of the system.  Furthermore, and this is 
the essential point, it is trying to do so by 
putting itself at the service of a powerful 
enemy, the United States, which for fifty years 
has gone after Cuba using every imaginable 
medium; with an integrated blockade (economic, 
financial, technological, commercial, computing), 
with permanent aggressions and attacks of all 
kinds and with migratory legislation developed 
exclusively for the island (the Cuban Adjustment 
Act) which encourages illegal immigration to the 
United States by endangering the lives of those 
who wish to reap its benefits.  While Washington 
constructs a new wall of shame along its border 
with Mexico in order to stop the influx of 
Mexican and Central American immigrants, it 
grants every imaginable benefit to those who, 
coming from Cuba, set foot on its territory.  Can 
those who receive money, advice and directions 
from a country that is an objective enemy of 
their homeland and act in congruence with its 
aspiration to precipitate a “regime change” that 
would put an end to the revolution really be considered “political dissidents?”

In order to answer this, let’s leave Cuban laws 
to the side for a moment and look at the laws 
established by other countries.  Article III, 
Section 3 of the constitution of the United 
States says that “Treason against the United 
States, shall consist only in levying War against 
them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving 
them Aid and Comfort.”  The punishment for this 
crime rests in the hands of the U.S. Congress; in 
1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 
the electric chair, accused of treason for 
supposedly having “adhered to their Enemies” by 
revealing the secrets of atomic bomb manufacture to the Soviet Union.

In Chile’s case, Article 106 of that country’s 
Penal Code establishes that “Anyone who from 
within the territory of the Republic conspires 
against its foreign security in order to 
encourage a foreign power to declare war on 
Chile, will be punished with a life sentence in a 
maximum security prison.  If war has begun, the 
penalty will be increased to a death sentence.”

In Mexico, a country that has been victimized 
throughout its history by U.S. interventionism in 
its internal affairs, Article 123 of its Penal 
Code defines a wide variety of situations as 
treason, such as “acts against the independence, 
sovereignty or integrity of the Mexican nation 
with the goal of subjecting her to a foreign 
person, group or government; take part in hostile 
actions against the nation, through warlike 
actions at the orders of a foreign state or 
cooperation with it in any way that could harm 
Mexico; receive any benefit, or accept a promise 
to receive it, with the goal of realizing any of 
the acts indicated in this article; accept a job, 
task or commission on behalf of the invader and 
dictate, agree or vote in such a way as to 
support the intruding government and weaken the 
national one.”  The penalty for the commission of 
these crimes is, depending on the circumstances, 
imprisonment for from five to forty years.

Article 214 of Argentina’s Penal Code says that 
“[Treason] shall be punished with imprisonment 
for ten to twenty-five years or life, and in one 
or another case, absolute perpetual imprisonment, 
unless the act has not been covered in another 
provision of this code, all Argentineans or 
anyone who owes obedience to the Nation by reason 
of their employment or public function, who takes 
up arms against it, who unites with its enemies 
or lends them any aid or comfort.”

It’s not necessary to continue with this brief 
review of comparative legislation in order to 
understand that what the “free press” calls 
dissidence is that which in any country in the 
world – starting with the United States, the 
great promoter, organizer and financier of the 
anti-Cuban campaign ? would be plainly and simply 
characterized as treason, and none of the accused 
could ever be considered a “political 
dissident.”  In the case of the Cubans, the great 
majority of the so-called dissidents (if not all) 
are involved in the crime of uniting with a 
foreign power that is openly hostile to the Cuban 
nation and of receiving from its representatives 
- diplomats or otherwise - money and all kinds of 
logistical support in order to, ass the Mexican 
legislation points out, “support the intruding 
government and weaken the national one.”  In 
other words, in order to destroy the new social, 
political and economic order created by the revolution.

Washington would not characterize a group of its 
citizens any other way, had they been receiving 
resources from a foreign power that had been 
hounding the United States for half a century 
with the directive to subvert the constitutional 
order.  None of the above mentioned genuine 
dissidents brought an infamy of this kind upon 
their countries.  They were relentless critics of 
their governments, but never did they put 
themselves at the service of a foreign state 
whose ambition was to oppress their 
homeland.  They were dissidents, not traitors.

* An abbreviated version of this article was 
published by Página/12 (Buenos Aires) on March 23, 2010



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