By José Manzaneda on September 27, 2021
Police attack protest against police brutality in Walnut Creek California, photo Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group
The European Parliament has approved condemnation of Cuba for the “extreme violence and repression against peaceful demonstrators” in the protests that took place in July.
“Brutal repression” on the island, the European press tells us. But if we watch in detail the dozens of videos published about those incidents, and disconnect the sound from the narration, what do we actually see? A little trained Cuban police force that gives a lukewarm response to the aggressions, and whose most violent expressions are almost childish compared to the performance of many police around the world. To begin with, those of Europe itself.
The real police brutality has been practiced, in many protest scenarios, by the Spanish police, for example. Their intervention against the referendum in Catalonia, in 2017, injured nearly 800 people. The Strasbourg Court of Human Rights has issued ten condemnations against Spain for failing to investigate complaints – more than five thousand documented cases – of police torture and ill-treatment. Where are the condemnations of the European Parliament?
They talked about arrests in Cuba for “peacefully demonstrating their freedom of expression”. False. No one denies that there were excesses or irregular actions -several of them investigated by the Military Prosecutor’s Office-, but in general, the police operations responded not to peaceful protests, but to attacks with stones and Molotov cocktails, and assaults and robberies to public property stores.
The European Parliament has never condemned the government of Colombia (70 deaths by repression in the April protests alone), that of Chile (scores dead and thousands wounded in the 2019 protests), or Bolivia’s interim coup government, which caused 32 deaths. In the latter case, the European Parliament recognized the coup as a legitimate government and, months later, denounced the detention of the president imposed as being “arbitrary and illegal”. Nor did the European Parliament condemn, in 2020, the police action in the USA, during the Black Lives Matter protests, which resulted in 30 deaths and 14,000 arrests.
The European Union has extensive trade and cooperation agreements with all these countries. But now its Parliament – in the hands of Washington’s right-wing allies – is calling for the destruction of the EU-Cuba Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement for a police practice that is clearly less repressive than that of all those countries.
They speak out about the harassment in Cuba of “Sakharov Prize winners” such as Guillermo Fariñas. But what would happen to him if, being a European, he would confess in the press that he is negotiating a military intervention in his country with the U.S. Government? He would have been in jail long ago. But in Cuba, except for the arrest for a few hours, absolutely nothing happened to him.
The protests in Cuba were the predictable result of a very prolonged situation of material hardship, blackouts, lack of medicine and food, transport shortages and long lines. But neither the Parliament nor the European media explain their causes. On the one hand, a brutal economic war from the US, with 243 sanctions in the last four years, which have dynamited each and every one of the country’s sources of income (international medical agreements, travel from the US, remittances from emigration etc…) and which have left the Island with hardly any fuel, through sanctions against its main supplier, Venezuela, and against shipping companies from third countries. On then the closure, due to the pandemic, of the country’s only remaining source of income, tourism. And finally, a millionaire social media campaign, financed by US federal agencies, to mobilize against the Cuban government a sector -still small, but already visible- of the island’s population. A campaign in which, in order to inflate the image of repression, countless fake news were used to turn police actions in Brazil, South Africa or the Dominican Republic into images coming from Cuba.
In any case, the balance could not be more “pyrrhic, vile and villainous”, as denounced a few days ago by the President of Mexico, with whose masterful we end with: “It is wrong that the government of the United States uses the blockade to prevent the welfare of the people of Cuba with the purpose that the latter, forced by necessity, have to confront their own government. If this perverse strategy were to succeed -something that does not seem likely due to the dignity we have referred to, I repeat, if it were to succeed, it would become a pyrrhic, vile and despicable triumph. In a stain of those that cannot be erased even with all the water of the oceans”.
Source: Cuba Network in Defense of Humanity