In Cuba, hundreds take to the streets in rare protests as economic crisis deepens

[EX500rider]

9. Well admit it or not, Cuba is a Police State according to HWR

CUBA
Human Rights Developments

The Cuban government continued to systematically deny its citizens the right to exercise their fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression, association and assembly, the right to privacy and due process, and the right to travel. The guarantees written into Cuba's laws do more to hinder than to protect those rights. And in any event, Cuba lacks institutions independent of the government and the governing Communist Party that could ensure respect for basic rights. Although all Cubans are affected by the institutionalized suppression of civil and political rights by the 32-year-old military government of Fidel Castro, the target increasingly has been the fragile "civil society" that began to emerge in 1988 when international scrutiny of Cuba's human rights practices was at its height.

There is no free press in Cuba. All media are state-owned or state-controlled. Nothing is permitted to be published on government-controlled printing presses that is not "in keeping with the objectives of socialist society." Attempts by human rights and other independent activists to distribute newsletters, type-written and reproduced on carbon paper, have been relentlessly suppressed under the law against "clandestine printing."

Cuba is a one-party state. Opposition political parties and independent civic groups are illegal. Cubans are permitted to belong only to officially controlled "mass organizations," which serve as little more than a medium for them to demonstrate their "revolutionary integration." Rights advocacy groups have been repeatedly denied official recognition. Members of such groups are imprisoned for "illegal association."

Freedom of movement is restricted. Only Cubans over a certain age -- 40 for women and 45 for men (recently reduced from 50 and 55) -- are free to travel abroad and return to Cuba. Cubans apply to emigrate at the risk of losing their jobs, belongings, and homes. Those who try and fail to flee illegally by crossing the Florida straits on a boat or raft are imprisoned.

Cuba is also a police state that denies its citizens' right to privacy. Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), neighborhood surveillance groups, monitor and report on Cubans at home, at work and at school. The CDRs were created, according to the Cuban press, "with the sacred mission of defending the revolution and blocking the political action of its enemies." As part of this mission, they twice in 1990 organized huge mobs of people to gather at the homes of human rights monitors where meetings were being held, to chant slogans, yell insults and assault those who dared to leave, in a demonstration of their ostensibly spontaneous "repudiation" of "counterrevolutionaries." Cuba lacks an independent judiciary. The judicial branch is subordinate to the executive. In the courts, Cubans are defended by lawyers whose loyalty is to the state, not to their client. Judges upholding "socialist legality" enforce the will of the government. In addition, there is no independent legislature, and no legally recognized independent labor unions or other civic organizations.

https://www.hrw.org/reports/1990/WR90/AMER.BOU-05.htm

Yes, yes I know, all Miami slander, at least according to the DGI, (the Intelligence Directorate is the main state intelligence agency of the government of Cuba.) and you can trust those guys I am sure, right?