By Jesús Zúñiga, Independent Press Agency of Cuba (APIC)
HAVANA, December - The reasons encircle a very simple one: at stake is the coming about of a collectivity which has a name, a term attached to a sentiment: Cuba.
Totalitarian regimes are becoming extinct, traditional speeches are perishing. Now is the time, otherwise it may be too late, to rise above the differences that divide us – those arbitrary categories, good and bad, with which the regime has tried to divide us, distancing us from our common objective: to recover our independence, our Cubanism, and rescue the country from the tragedy it has endured for 38 years.
The key, the most constructive alternatives, are within Cuba. We, journalists, intellectuals, artists, doctors, scientists, architects, economists, university students, workers and professionals, in independent groups and together with the internal dissidence, form the civil society emerging in Cuba. In peaceful ways, our only purpose is to educate and teach democracy, and in answer all we get is unpunished and unrestrained repression from the government. We must continue to try to bring about a civic constitutional state that guarantees the free expression of all possible creative thoughts and constructive social criticism.
Fighting for free and unconstrained speech, for a constitutional state that provides full freedom for political expression, for the ability to disseminate information without being subject to personal attacks; fighting to restore the breakthroughs previously achieved by the workers, and putting an end to the instituted social misery, is a task of giants without precedent in Cuba. But because of the extremely drastic and dramatic experiences we have been through, we know that we can achieve this task.
The international community would show their solidarity with our intent to re-establish in Cuba a genuine collective civil society, and the people of Cuba, who admire and respect us, are demanding that we do so.
Distributed by Cubanet