As Americans celebrated Mother’s Day, Cuba’s communist government was imprisoning the mother of a three-year-old daughter for telling the truth about the regime’s brutality.
In August of 2022, Cubans engaged in peaceful protests to demand an end to the rolling blackouts caused by the nation’s failing power grid and against the communist government. As is its wont, the Cuban regime responded with violence against the protestors. As Christian K. Caruzo of Breitbart reported at the time:
The Castro regime responded to the Thursday protest by holding an ‘act of repudiation’ in Nuevitas [a municipality] on Friday. An ‘act of repudiation,’ which the communist regime sometimes also refers to as an ‘act of revolutionary reaffirmation,’ is a form of mob attack that the Cuban regime uses against ‘counter-revolutionary’ individuals or groups, and consists in swarming a location or group of people, chanting insults and ‘revolutionary’ slogans against their targets, and, in some cases, throwing garbage or projectiles at them.
In one of the regime’s spasms of reactionary violence, “three minors were hit by the regime’s police as they arrested the father of one of them.” But, in the communist regime’s perverse world, it wasn’t the abusers of the three young girls that were arrested; it was the protestors who sought to tell the girls’ story to their fellow Cubans and the world.
The Spain-based Diario de Cuba newspaper reported on Monday that the Castro regime arrested three Cuban citizens, including Mayelín Rodríguez Prado, who was arrested for having filmed and published videos of the protest in Nuevitas on social media. According to Rodríguez Prado’s mother, the Cuban regime is accusing her of “corruption of minors,” “incitement to commit a crime,” “attack,” “sabotage,” and “defamation.”
Through a social media post, the non-government organization Justicia 11J reported on Sunday that at least six more citizens have been arrested for having protested against the Castro regime in Nuevitas.
The deafening silence of the Biden Administration and the international community not only spoke volumes about the entire left’s cynical, despicable coziness with and cosseting of the communist Cuban regime. It sealed the fate of those arrested for the crime of telling the truth about life on that “imprisoned island.” To the Biden administration, the international community, and the entire left, their decades-long hypocritical betrayal of the Cuban people’s liberty is old hat—one more pesky ideology aberration and abstraction to be rationalized away into the ether of cognitive dissonance, whereby once more their warped conception of the “greater good” compels the denial of human liberty to impose economic equity or something. (Do you really believe the rolling blackouts are being equitably applied to the communist rulers’ abodes?)
Yet, how does the left’s support of the communist Cuban regime’s diurnal denial of the human rights and dignity of the Cuban people concretely manifest itself? By steeping a mother’s love with grief and leaving children to pine for a maternal embrace.
Today, at least fourteen people who peacefully protested against the regime received sentences ranging from four to fourteen years. This was not enough unjust punishment for Mayelin Rodriguez Pardo, the mother of a three-year-old daughter. As noted, it was Mayelin who videotaped and released clip of three young girls being beaten by the regime. Again, per Caruzo at Breitbart:
The communist regime in Cuba sentenced 22-year-old Mayelín Rodríguez Prado to 15 years in prison this week for filming peaceful protests in the town of Nuevitas in August 2022.
Rodríguez Prado, sentenced alongside a group of more than a dozen Cubans who had also participated in Nuevitas protests, received a combined 15-year sentence—the highest among the group—for the alleged crimes of ‘continued enemy propaganda” and “sedition.’
One may consider the regime’s “criminal charges” to be pulverized equine manure. Yet, telling the truth about the human rights abuses and economic miseries of the communist Cuban regime is, in fact, seditious. Exposing its brutality and illegitimacy is “enemy propaganda,” because the communist Cuban regime’s true enemy is its people’s liberty, dignity, and equality before the law. To advocate for these eternal principles is to undermine the regime, and the sooner it implodes beneath the Cuban people’s aspirations for freedom, the better for them and the world.
Due to the barbaric Cuban regime and its callous, complicit leftist enablers, one Cuban mother weeps for her unjustly imprisoned daughter; the unjustly imprisoned daughter weeps for her three-year-old daughter; and the three-year-old daughter weeps for her unjustly imprisoned mother. It is a true cycle of violence, perpetrated upon a family for the “crime” of yearning—and working—to breathe free.
It is doubtless why the regime imprisoned Yennis Artola Del Sol. He was “sentenced to eight years in prison on ‘enemy propaganda of a continuing nature’ charges for having taken a photograph of a sign that read ‘Patria y Vida’ (‘Homeland and Life’) during the Nuevita protests.” Like the heartfelt demand of the oppressed, “Cuba Libre!,” the appeal to “Patria y Vida” has become etched in the hearts of the Cuban people.
Why would it not be? As mothers’ know best: where children weep and mothers’ hearts are broken, the hearth of home and life, itself, grows colder; and, on this Mother’s Day, so, too, does the icy grip of the Cuban dictatorship’s fist.
An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.