Cuban dissidents push for opening to democracy

A range of outlawed small parties and movements in Cuba have called for a transition to democracy in the country © AFP/File

AFP

HAVANA (AFP) – Leading dissidents in Cuba have launched a reform plan seeking a democratic opening in the Americas’ only one-party Communist-run state.

More than 40 prominent members of a range of outlawed small parties and movements signed and issued the document calling for new laws and a plebiscite as a transition to democracy after more than five decades of communism.

They called upon their more than 11 million fellow Cubans to carry out a “genuine national dialogue and start the process of legal changes that exclude no one, so that Cubans can keep the positive things they have built, and change however they care to, the things they want to change.”

Dubbed the “People’s Path,” the document was signed by dissidents including Guillermo Farinas, Laura Pollan, Martha Beatriz Roque, Hector Maceda, Elizardo Sanchez and Oswaldo Paya.

It calls for Cubans to be restored their freedom of movement inside and outside Cuba; and for freedoms of the press, association, and religion to be guaranteed; and for all people to be eligible for elective office regardless of party affiliation.

“When there is space in which people can participate that will be created by legal changes, citizens’ rights to national dialogue will be respected and free elections will be called for all public posts and an assembly to rewrite the constitution,” the plan text adds.

“The document was drawn up by all of us who have signed, and I think it is viable and a necessary message to the Cuban people,” said Paya, who won the 2002 Sakharov rights prize for an earlier initiative seeking democratic opening that he spearheaded.

Called the Warela Plan, that initiative tried to start reform using the current constitution as a starting point; the government rejected it outright. It did however receive public praise from former US president Jimmy Carter that year on his first visit to Cuba.

Later the Cuban government pushed through a constitutional reform that makes socialism “irrevocable.”

There was no immediate Cuban government reaction to Wednesday’s announcement.

Havana however denies that it has political prisoners, and routinely smears dissidents as “mercenaries” in the pay of the United States.

International attention on Cuba’s human rights situation tends to rise and fall quickly.

But the February 2010 death of dissident demonstrator Orlando Zapata, who died on a hunger strike protesting prison conditions, did draw a vocal international outcry.

Revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, now 84, back in 2006 and then ailing, stepped aside after just under five decades in power. His brother President Raul Castro, now 80 and the island’s longtime military chief, as Cuba’s leader has firmly rejected political opening and meaningful economic reform.

The isolated Caribbean country’s centrally planned economy is in a shambles, propped up largely by support from Havana’s top regional ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

© AFP — Published at Activist Post with license