Cuban Dissidents: We Have Nothing to Celebrate on Castro’s Birthday Latin American Herald Tribune/EFE August 13, 2014
HAVANA – Cuban dissidents said on Wednesday they had no reason to celebrate the 88th birthday of former President Fidel Castro, for whom the event is being commemorated with assorted activities.
Castro’s birthday “is more or less the same, it’s as if it was some other person’s birthday because we have nothing to celebrate,” Berta Soler, the leader of the women’s opposition Ladies in White movement, told Efe.
“It’s the people who are committed to the Cuban government who, at this time, are taking part in this theater, this party that many people are not feeling,” Soler said.
“For a suffering people who need freedom it’s quite disgraceful that ... resources are being diverted for this kind of party,” the opposition leader said.
Jose Daniel Ferrer, the coordinator of the Patriotic Union of Cuba group (UNPACU), agreed that he has nothing to celebrate and thinks that if this date is significant it is because of the “damage” that Castro “has caused to the nation.”
Ferrer, a former political prisoner with the so-called “Group of 75” dissidents sentenced to lengthy prison terms during the Black Spring of 2003, said in a Twitter post that within a few years Castro’s birth will be remembered “as is done elsewhere with those of Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini.”
The psychologist and independent journalist Guillermo Fariñas, the winner of the European Parliament’s 2010 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, said that he respects “all Cubans who celebrate (Castro’s birthday) sincerely” but that he feels “sorry for those who pretend to want to celebrate it.”
Fariñas, who is the spokesman for UNPACU and coordinator of the United Totalitarian Front (FTU), said that as a dissident, he sees in Castro “the countryman who has done the most harm to Cuba because he divided the people and instilled political intolerance.”
Fariñas blamed the former leader for the fact that “there are four million Cubans living abroad because they don’t support the system he established in this country.”
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