Guest Post: Criticising Cuba

A guest post by Lucy Rogers:

Today (as of the time of writing) I saw Associate Professor Michael Mawson of the theology faculty at Auckland University advertise on Facebook an event hosting Professor Miguel De La Torre, a Cuban academic specialising in liberation theology. The event is to be held at the Maclaurin Chapel at Auckland University at the apparent invitation of Associate Professor Mawson.

I responded on his post (which was public) making the following six points:

• Cuba is a brutal communist tyranny.

• While Professor De La Torre is a Cuban himself, any public criticisms of the Cuban government seem curiously absent, despite Cuba’s atrocious human rights record. Instead he focusses his attention exclusively on the many misdeeds of the United States (which I acknowledge, by the way, are egregious).

• Professor De La Torre has spoken as an academic at Cuban universities with the blessing of the Cuban government (whereas you can imagine of course the reaction if an academic who had spoken at Nazi universities was invited to speak at Auckland University). 

• Professor De La Torre has “taken students on immersion classes to Cuba” according to his own website: http://drmigueldelatorre.com/

• Professor De La Torre’s area of academic speciality, liberation theology, which he is speaking on at the University of Auckland,  was an invention of the KGB during the Cold War as a device of ideological warfare against the West: https://catholicnewsagency.com/news/31919/former-soviet-spy-we-created-liberation-theologyThe KGB were the secret police of Joseph Stalin, who murdered 20 million people including Christians.

• That accordingly for a Christian institution like the Maclaurin Chapel to host Professor De La Torre was morally wrong. (Having said that, I of course respect the legal right of such a person to speak at Auckland University and would never dream of employing the power of the state to prevent such an event.)

I tagged Professor De La Torre himself in the comments and politely called on him to publicly whakahengia (condemn) the arrest of Sissi Abascal, 23-year-old member of the indigenous Cuban dissident group the Ladies in White, who was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for her non-violent protests against the Cuban government on July 11 2021: https://translatingcuba.com/cuban-prisoner-sissi-abascal-punished-for-refusing-to-shout-slogans-in-favor-of-the-regime/

To my amusement, but not altogether to my surprise, within half an hour Associate Professor Mawson had blocked me on Facebook. He does not want Cuba’s human rights violations to be made known to the public of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

While Nazi atrocities are widely known, the actions of the Cuban government are far less so. Autobiographies of Cuban dissidents, like Against All Hope by Armando Valladares, describe the pono (truth) which is that the revolution in 1959 resulted in mass murder. Thousands more people were sent to labour camps, including LGBTQI+ people who were subject to mass arrests. To this day freedom of the press, freedom of conscience and the rule of law are non-existent.

Mass protests of Cubans on 11 July 2021 against their own government received almost no media attention across the Western world, despite resemblance to pivotal historical events like the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The Cuban government responded with predictable brutality, imposing lengthy terms of imprisonment on non-violent protesters. These events were reported on translatingcuba.com, a blog by indigenous Cuban dissidents which I encourage Kiwiblog readers to peruse.

So I reiterate my challenge to Professor De La Torre: will you publicly condemn both on social media and at your event this Friday the mass arrests of peaceful protesters on 11 July 2021 for protesting the Cuban government, including Sissi Abascal? I extend this challenge also to Associate Professor Mawson.

If you won’t, then what is your real motivation for criticising the United States’ human rights abuses?