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Miami Herald: Castro brothers, the suppressors

Last update: November 13, 2009 - 10:23 AM

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Paz y amor. Peace and love. That was the message that 200 young people chanted in Havana last week while holding placards calling for "no more violence" as passing cars honked their horns.

Not among them: Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, who was on her way to the demonstration when she and another blogger, Orlando Luis Pardo, were hauled into a car by three men, likely state security agents. The pair was dragged into the car and beaten black and blue in the head and chest before being dumped miles away as if they were trash.

In a Sunday blog post, Sanchez, who is walking with a crutch post-beating, summed up the "blame the victim" attitude that permeates after 50 years of dictatorship: "The dozens of eyes that watched as Orlando and I were forced into a car with blows would prefer not to testify, and so they put themselves on the side of the criminal.

"The doctor who does not make a record of an act of physical mistreatment, having already been warned that in this 'case' there must be no document to prove the injuries received, is violating his Hippocratic oath and, with that wink, becomes the culprit's accomplice."

With 1 million hits a month worldwide, Sanchez's "just the facts, ma'am" approach to exposing Cuba's reality on her Generation Y blog surely has the communist regime's attention. She has won prestigious journalism awards for her blog -- in Spain and from Columbia University. Her heroic work is known internationally, yet few Cubans know about the growing blogger movement on their island because the government does not allow access to the Internet.

At 32, Sanchez is among a new generation of truth-tellers, born into a revolution that has quashed every basic human right even as the Orwellian Human Rights Council of the United Nations ignores Fidel and Raul Castro's abuses of power. As Human Rights Watch noted after Sanchez was beaten, the international community should condemn Cuba's attacks on peaceful assembly and freedom of expression -- the "only country in the region that continues to repress virtually all forms of political dissent."

FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE MIAMI HERALD

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