Even if you are not catholic, which I am not, pray for Father Reyes and the Cuban citizens:
Father Alberto Reyes posts scathing condemnation of Cuban dictatorship, calls for passive resistance
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02Roi7NV74fuYWXvXkkXmguqmj22fB4dwttLHkkvdmAojWuWf5joS9mjS6oi3CN48Xl&id=100008460667968
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Padre Alberto has issued a scathing, eloquent, and daring condemnation of Cuba’s dictatorship on Facebook that also includes a call to action by the Cuban people. One sentence from his latest “I’ve been thinking” post sums up this very daring call to action, which involves passive resistance rather than violence: “We can make it very clear in our environment that they [the dictators] don’t have us, that we are not going to applaud them, that we are not going to play their game, that we are not going to participate in whatever they propose.” If you are a praying person, please pray for Padre Alberto.
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I’ve been thinking… (LXXXI) by Alberto Reyes Pías
I’ve been thinking that the important thing for a dictatorship is not to win. We already know the basic mechanism of current dictatorships: using the opportunities offered by democracy, they manage to get the people to grant them power, and once in power, they destroy democracy to perpetuate themselves in power.
That is why, once they have “won,” they no longer need to win again. They need not to lose, which is different.
Is there any doubt about Nicolás Maduro’s electoral fraud? Is there any doubt that the will of the Venezuelan people is for Maduro and his clique to leave power? No, no one doubts it, starting with them. But their interest is not in “winning” an election they knew was impossible to win. Their interest is in not losing power over the people, not losing control over the country they have put at their service.
Since 1959, we haven’t had elections in Cuba. We only have “votings,” a sporadic national theater whose outcome doesn’t reflect the will of the people one bit. The power clan in Cuba is aware that, over the years, their ideological proposal has been increasingly diluted, reaching the greatest defeat a system can suffer: defeat in the hearts of the people. Because the Cuban Revolution may have won the press, television, and propaganda… but it has lost the hearts of Cubans.
Therefore, the efforts of this system are never aimed at “winning,” because they know that, no matter what the people say, they will impose whatever they want.
Their real interest is not to lose, not to lose power, to make it very clear that any attempt at questioning will be stopped, that any attempt at “dissent” will be paralyzed.
That’s why they mobilize immediately at the slightest sign of protest: a sign on a wall, a simple peaceful demonstration by a civilian, or the mere announcement of such a demonstration, the call for a public prayer, or the sound of a bell in the middle of the night.
They panic at losing control; they are terrified of ceasing to be the masters, the controllers of the will of a people. Like the biblical Pharaoh, they cannot afford to be without slaves.
The rest doesn’t matter to them. They don’t care about the growing misery and scarcity of basic necessities, they aren’t alarmed by the bloodletting caused by continued emigration, and they mock the deepest desires of this people: their desires for freedom, progress, and democracy… They don’t even care anymore about the collapse of the health and education systems, those bastions that served them so well to sell their ideology to the world.
What can we do while we don’t have elections, while we can’t freely join opposition parties, while going out to protest in the streets remains the prelude to prison?
We can make it very clear in our environment that they don’t have us, that we are not going to applaud them, that we are not going to play their game, that we are not going to participate in whatever they propose.
Because the situation of a country is not changed by complaints at home, nor by curses during power outages. Freedom has a price, and if we are not capable of paying the minimum price of saying what we think and believe, if we are not capable of paying the minimum price of truth, then we will forever be a country without a future..
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