Es justo darle voz a la digna respuesta de Ileana Puig, hermana y esposa de prisioneros políticos castigados injusta y cruelmente por el régimen de los Hermanos Castro, dirigida a los planteamientos publicados el mes pasado en The Miami Herald.
In this letter, ten businessmen who traveled to Cuba in December argue that they saw ‘progress’ in a fledgling entrepreneurial class.
“We saw progress beyond what we could have imagined,” they wrote.
“We saw entrepreneurs with a thirst for knowledge and families benefiting from the newfound freedom of enterprise. It is these ‘everyday’ people who are leading the way to an improved life but not without challenges", they added.
Esta es la carta en que Ileana Puig les contesta en el mismo idioma de la carta original:
On Sunday, December, 20, 2015 The Miami Herald published an open letter signed by ten members of Miami’s business community and paid for by Carlos Gutierrez and Miguel “Mike” Fernandez. With due respect, this is my reply.
The letter stated that the new policy of engagement with Cuba is one that must be met with recognition because they and the world have changed and with that intent they reasserted their point of view based on a trip or several trips made to the Island.
The candor of their statements is surprising, such as, “We wanted to see if people were openly arguing about the system in public places without being arrested.”
Apparently they do not read the newspapers nor while in Cuba tried to meet and walk with “Las Damas de Blanco” (Ladies in White) or met with members of the Civic Resistance Front, Estado de Sats, UNPACU nor others who are constantly being beaten and harassed across the Island of Cuba for simply wanting to express their ideas and beliefs. Apparently they have not read or watched the news about the thousands of Cubans fleeing the island and the regime, many of them young entrepreneurs or “cuentapropistas” who know the system and have no faith in it.
Their letter also calls their “fellow Cuban-Americans” to “demonstrate the courage to receive this policy shift with dignity and open minds,…” Courage? Dignity? No gentlemen, those two words I cannot accept in the context used in your letter.
Courage, dignity is what was shown by the thousands of Cubans that were executed without due process of law before a firing squad, or who died in hunger strikes or who fought for the reestablishment of democracy; courage and dignity is what was shown by the thousands of Cuban political prisoners, women and men, who spent years under sub-human conditions in Castro’s prisons and whose testimonies have been recorded in numerous books and publications for generations to come; courage and dignity is what defines those presently incarcerated and in hunger strikes for trying to express what you are trying to make us believe that exists in Cuba; courage and dignity is what is being shown by the many Cubans who in spite of constantly being beaten, harassed and incarcerated continue to risk everything –even their lives- for the cause of a free and democratic Cuba.
Gentlemen, the reality you need to face is that the ones with whom you want to engage are the same ones who are responsible for violating the fundamental rights and liberties of the Cuban people and whose hands are covered with the blood of innocent victims who at one point in their lives – as young as your children and grandchildren are at this moment – decided to fight with courage and dignity against those who have been oppressing our country and enslaving our countrymen for 57 years.
But the saddest part of your open letter is that the word JUSTICE is not included anywhere. How can you build a future ignoring the crimes and suffering caused and still being caused by those with whom you are dealing; how can you leave a legacy for future generations in which the Courage and Dignity of your fellow Cubans is not recognized? NO, as many others in this exile, I do not live on myths and do not hear the news about Cuba second-hand, and precisely because I lived and know the reality of what is happening in Cuba I do not accept this one-sided engagement with the Castro regime, a regime that has ruined our homeland and brought death, despair and destruction.
I DO want a better future for Cubans; a future with dignity and without hate nor revenge, but a good future cannot be based solely on economics; a good future has to be based first on the restoration of human rights and for that we need Freedom and Justice.
Ileana Puig, Vice President MAR por Cuba
Wife and sister of political prisoners
Sister-in-Law of martyr before the firing squad
Cousin of members of 2506 Brigade
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