04/07/2013
Author of the blog "Generation Y", advocating freedom for Cuba
A sheep who wants to escape can only be threatened by getting her back to the corral, but if she is caught she will no longer be part of the herd. Because the pen has physical boundaries, fences and locks, but the herd is a mathematical abstraction, a number that is unmade with the common will of the participants in the sum. With just one individual who rejects to continue paying with rights what should be respected rights the Repo of their sovereignty will not be able to continue robbing it from them. In many places on this planet, we citizens have realized that in exchange for supposed benefits, but also by inertia or disinterest in politics, we have left in the hands of a few decisions that correspond to many. The fold assembled has been raised, in some cases, with ferrous ideological recitals and in other cases, under the imperatives of consumerism and corruption. One way or another, many of us have been locked within these walls.
However, this is a time to wake up consciousness. Times to question and rethink everything. Some call it crisis. Childbirth is the word used by what those of us who know that pain and disruption are essential to the delivery of a new life. We are witnessing the end of an era, an era in which, for several centuries, some individuals believed themselves to be enlightened, the owners of all solutions and all punishments with which to lead a nation. Happily for us, that era is ending. This is the time of ordinary people, of small people, of those who no longer want to continue being treated like sheep. In spite of regional and political differences, we citizens of the global village have found common ground in our crusades for freedom. An indignant in Spain, a protester in Brazil, a dissident in Havana ... the eternal quest for more space for expression and better living conditions.
As a journalist and a person who works with information and words, I consider that the right to free speech and the right to free association, clearly expressed in a sound legal basis, are the guarantee for the remaining rights to be respected. There is no point in having laws that guarantee the right to work, education, health, equality, if you cannot protest in case of infringement, if people are not allowed to civilly organise themselves to demand respect. The possibility of complaint, of pointing the finger to what we do not like, is an inseparable condition in an environment of citizen liberties, where the individual does not have to auction his or her freedom in exchange for subsidies and privileges.
Dictatorships and totalitarian regimes cannot survive where these rights are fully practised. Indeed, by definition, if these rights are met one cannot talk of dictatorship. To eliminate or reduce these fundamental freedoms, dictatorial governments appeal to armed forces or police persecution; they invoke national security, establish permanent emergency states, and by controlling the media they end up discrediting these freedoms as if they were disease or perversions. Perhaps the most sophisticated resource that an oppressor uses to mask the effects of repression is to show the relationship with their oppressed as a sort of pact of love. In such a way that submissiveness–conquered by way of pain or fear–has the respectable face of the deep commitment that is made out of affection for another person, religious faith or conviction for a political cause.
Many of these authoritarianisms mask themselves behind processes to safeguard national sovereignty, and once in power they eventually blow up citizen autonomy. Freedom becomes a dirty word, quietly mentioned and yearned for in the privacy of homes. The citizens surrender their individual sovereignty and let themselves be locked up in the corral of paternalism and control. All this leads to the strengthening of the cage. However, there will always be one person, hundreds, thousands of them, who will realise that the risk of civic and individual independence is a thousand times more valuable that the dwindling subsidies or comfortable privileges of enclosure. We are living times where the sheep escape.