EXCELLENT: Cuba's Revolutionary Gov't. Bringing Batistianos to Justice

[magbana]

CUBANOW: Dura lex
Posted by: "Susana Hurlich" [e-mail]
Wed Apr 1, 2009 9:37 pm (PDT)

Dura lex
Salvador E. Morales Pérez
IIH/UMSNH
* Translated by Susana Hurlich

Those who they silenced, screamed. Miraculously they had been cured of
blindness from the previous day. Those who hid the corpses took the dead out
of the closet. The recently premiered and glowing Cuban revolution was
holding summary trials and that horrified them to mournful extremes.
Certainly, the brand new provisional revolutionary government headed by
former Judge Manuel Urrutia Lleó had brought to court hundreds of evil
figures, until a few weeks ago perpetrators of gruesome violations of human
rights.

I attended the first of the public trials. I wished to see with my own eyes
the settling of scores with one of the most sinister of Batista's military
officers in the Sierra Maestra campaign. The name of Sosa Blanco was widely
known for his work in "rural cleansing". He had fallen into the hands of the
revolutionaries and was not able to escape like other war criminals who were
taken in by the Dominican Republic and the United States. The amphitheater
of Havana's Ciudad Deportiva was packed. The atmosphere was tense and
emotional. I was able to be so close to the accused that I saw his arrogant
and sarcastic eyes. The guy was tough. He did not show any sign of weakness,
or remorse, or fear. He maintained himself in that same way when his
accusers condemned his atrocities with aroused anger. There was no question
how much blood, taunts and pain he had sown among the humble inhabitants of
the Sierra Maestra. It was genocide. He had no defense. He was sentenced to
the maximum penalty.

Like him, many military men, police, secret agents, members of armed gangs
such as "Masferrer's Tigers," paid with their lives or long terms of
imprisonment, for the brutal outrages that they had committed during the
eight years of the dictatorship.

So, with agitation and rage all on edge we thought the punishment just that
they had applied to them. They had not been dragged and hung like Mussolini
and his mistress Clara Petacci, nor did the people take justice into their
own hands as in Fuenteovejuna. We trusted in the revolutionary tribunals set
up like a kind of West Indian Nuremberg Tribunal intended to do strict
justice. What else did people deserve who are so hardened in the most
barbarous tortures and in the coldest murders?

The urban and rural outrages of those uniformed or paramilitary beasts are
very well documented: they imposed fear through terror, they ill-treated
dignitaries, they profited through their powers, they broke bones, took out
eyes, teeth and nails; they applied suffocation and strangulation, they
tested electrical coercion, they pounded with blows until they pulled out
the last breath, they killed in cold blood, they wiped out part of a
generation of youth who resisted a regime of tyranny and plunder. When the
police stations were taken on January 1st a veritable collection of
artifacts appeared such as those used by the Inquisition. The captured hired
killers didn't have the right to pardon, because one doesn't pardon so much
sacrilege. To have given them a reprieve would have constituted a
counter-revolutionary reserve perpetrating more crimes, such as what some of
them did who escaped and later were recruited into enemy activity against
the Revolution, coming under the banner of covert CIA operations.

From the United States the first major media campaign was used against the
revolutionary process in the making. They tried to make them believe that in
Cuba "a blood bath" was being carried out. The challenge was accepted and
responded to with a hitherto unknown mechanism: Operation Truth was
undertaken with two actions: a mass concentration in front of the
Presidential Palace and a press conference for Fidel with 380 journalists
from throughout the American continent. From the meeting emerged the need
for one's own news agency. Before long Prensa Latina was founded, with a
team of valuable journalists.

The "clever classes" were quickly scared to see that the old state apparatus
experienced major transformations. The dismissal of all mayors and
governors, the gradual dismantling of soldiers and policemen who had
served - even though without charges against them - the regime. And to those
who had tortured and murdered the maximum penalties were applied just like
to Nazi ringleaders in Nuremberg.

Those processes of Nuremberg, 13 years back, were in the mood of the era.
Nowadays there are ultraconservative sectors, serving a tangle of shysters,
who challenge the validity of the process. The same shysters who they have
called upon to save the skin of Videla, Pinochet, Gregorio Álvarez, Ríos
Montt and that of the members of terrorist gangs who they launched against
their people. Hiding behind the cover of "due obedience", torturers and
murderers have evaded the application of justice in its strictest sense.

Looking with hindsight at those events, Fidel Castro in his interview with
Ramonet expressed certain doubts about the public methods that were used at
the beginning: "It could crash, and actually crashed, with our own
conception of justice. That was greatly exploited in the United States. We
didn't delay in rectifying what was undoubtedly a mistake. But the people
guilty of acts of genocide were tried and punished in accordance with laws
previously approved by the Revolution in the midst of war."

For my part, to think about those same events and from my perspective as an
historian, my thoughts cannot avoid taking into account other
considerations. For example, such as Trujillo's evil hired assassins, Félix
Bernardino and Johnny Abbes, who didn't receive their deserved execution.
And I think of Pedro Estrada in the service of the dictatorship of Pérez
Jiménez, giving exculpatory interviews years later. And I think of Esteban
Ventura, a henchman par excellence who ended his days peacefully in Miami
without showing the slightest remorse for his atrocities. One could arrive
with those reflections up to little Bush, who should be accused for two of
the charges that were applied in Nuremberg: 1. Participation in a common
plan or conspiracy for the perpetuation of crimes against peace. 2.
Planning, initiating or perpetrating wars of aggression or other crimes
against peace.

Many crimes have remained unpunished throughout the painful struggles that
have been unleashed for a little more collective and individual freedom and
against the most absurd oppressions; for a little bread and safety; for a
bit of equality and respect. The debt is huge.

Today, when so many have fought against the death penalty in the world, they
should reconsider those executions. Executions in every sense and rigor of
the term. But when I remember those women reproaching Sosa Blanco for the
blood and life torn out of their loved ones and I see it as if it were now,
his cold smile, his sharp glance, cutting, like a wild beast ready to pounce
on prey, I doubt a change of opinion. As the mother of my first wife said:
"It will be bad killed, but good dead."

*Translated by Susana Hurlich