Interviews with Bertha Antunez

I would like to send a message to the international community on how to do the right thing for the Cuban people. And this is very simple. I would say to them that they must support the Cuban people in different ways. The Cuban people need — and the opposition on the island needs — for them to support them with resources, that they support them spiritually, that they spread that voice of pain and that eagerness for liberty and Democracy all over the world.

They should say it to all people in the world, and they should say, “We must help those people. Those people must be free.” Or that they ask themselves why the Cuban people are not free? According to the responses, they should decide to help the Cuban people. I think this is the time to help them.

They are ready to receive help. This is the time. And all the people of good will of the world, all those democratic governments, all those NGO organizations like Amnesty International and others, that they realize in this moment that this is the time to help the Cuban people. Lend your hand to the Cuban people who, for more than 50 years have been suffering a horror, a dictatorship by people who have always hated their own people and have not wanted to do right by them.

They should not put themselves on the side of a tyrannical government like the Castro brothers´ government. They should not believe the lies that are told by the government of Fidel Castro. They should not believe in the supposed changes they say they will make. They should not believe in relations, in improvements for the people, because none of that is true. And the saddest thing is that the world knows — even the allies of the Cuban government know — how evil it is.

Bertha Antúnez Pernet was born in 1959 to a family of limited means. She began to become politically aware in 1990 when her brother, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez (“Antúnez”), was unjustly charged with “enemy propaganda” for saying in a public square that Cuba should experience the same political changes that were taking place in Eastern Europe. He was incarcerated and then charged with additional political offenses during his confinement, which extended his sentence until 2007.

Antúnez Pernet became increasingly aware of the gravity of the human rights situation in Cuba through visiting her brother in prison and learning about the conditions to which he and other prisoners of conscience were subjected.

In 1997, Antúnez Pernet and other family members of political prisoners founded an organization called the National Movement of Civic Resistance Pedro Luis Boitel to fight ill-treatment in prison. By 1999, the movement had collected over 5,000 signatures for a general amnesty of political prisoners in Cuba. It has also carried out protests in front of various prisons throughout the island.