The resurrection of Osvaldo Paya

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 19/03/2024

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On the eve of Holy Week, restorative energies are activated that announce the proximity of the mystery of the sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth that occurred more than three thousand years ago.

These energies manifest themselves in meteorological phenomena; anomalous behaviors of animals and collective reactions of human beings.

This year we are witnessing a popular uprising never seen before in Cuba. For sixty-five years the Castro brothers have maintained an oppressive and opprobrious regime in the nation that since colonial times had enjoyed a special economic boost in the Caribbean. This Easter it seems that he has summoned the presence of the spirit of Oswaldo Paya to guide his people in a popular revolt that could put an end to that tragedy. Since May 18, the people of Cuba have attacked the signs of power of the regime in a determined and almost suicidal attempt to depose it. And although the regime's response has been forceful, time is on the people of Cuba.

Because while it is true that the state of economic prostration to which the regime subjected Cuba had an immense palliative beginning in 2002 when Hugo Chavez took refuge in the leadership of Fidel Castro at a time when civil society and the Armed Forces of Venezuela will join together to demand his resignation. From that moment on, Chavez handed over the keys to power to Castro. And Castro sucked Venezuela's economic energies like a leech, destroyed its armed forces and subjected civil society to a survival regime that was the effective recipe for maintaining power in the long term.

Today, however, this policy of economic extermination has destroyed Venezuela's potential to create wealth for itself and for Cuba, with which the Cuban regime has lost its base of support.

Without this support, it will be difficult to resist a prolonged popular struggle because the time will come when there will be no possibility of replacing personnel, ammunition and war arsenal.

To this table we must add the average age of the Cuban leadership is 73 years and to the natural wear and tear of age is added the absence of freedom to develop development or defense plans, which prevents innovations from being introduced into the government system. or repression.

Finally, there is the absence of leadership capable of trying paths other than the already failed centralized planning of the economy. Because once Fidel discovered the Golden Fleece in Venezuela, he disrupted the renovation team led by Carlos Lage, paralyzing and prohibiting the continuation of economic experiments based on the free market.

Today, an insoluble economic crisis and a popular rebellion that follows the pattern created by Oswaldo Paya coincide in Cuban territory. For Paya, only the Cuban people organizing themselves in a civic manner could put an end to the dictatorship of the Castro brothers. And at the time when the 21st century was awakening, he demonstrated that the constitutional resource of making amendments supported by 12,000 citizens could be activated. And when he achieved that goal he was murdered.

In the current crisis, civil society has resorted to Paya's methodology to warn about the direction of the deployment of repressive forces; provide refuge to the persecuted; circulate valuable information about the government's violence plans. Thus waves of civilians take public places to evaporate when the forces of repression arrive; They circulate throughout the country without being detected and interfere in government agencies without being identified. In short, it is a civil society expert in tactics of peaceful resistance.

And to the extent that Venezuela sinks into the swamps of economic chaos and the whirlpools of political control that transnational organized crime exercises over that nation, the Cuban regime will weaken significantly. And assuming that Cuban civil society does not give up in its attempt to achieve freedom, perhaps we could witness an outcome like that of many Eastern European nations.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».