Interviews with Normando Hernández

Any kind of help that the totalitarian regimes receive, let me repeat – totalitarian regimes – let´s discuss the idea, let´s discuss the term so that we can analyze it. The totalitarian government controls everything, they centralize everything in the country and it is even worse when the country is an island with no other countries bordering it. Any kind of help, any kind of business whether it is from businesspeople or from companies that the Cuban government receives, it only serves to strengthen this type of government.

This type of help only assists to strengthen the state-run businesses. This kind of help serves only to assist the repression within the country. These forms of help serve to repress the opposition, the dissident movement, and it will actually permit this government to continue for centuries and centuries. That´s the reality of the situation. Any type of claim stating that the Cuban people will benefit from these companies, that it will open them up economically, the countries of the world will help open the Cuban government while they are negotiating is naive. It is naive because some people think that the Castro brothers are like a Cinderella story.That the Cuban brothers will allow these foreign businesses and foreign capital to reduce their power.

They have been in power for about 52 years and they have perfected it. They are always perfecting it. We all know about the subsidies from the socialist regime of Russia. All of the assistance that came from COMECON, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which reached astronomical amounts, around one hundred billion dollars. And Cuba developed from this kind of support. The Cuban population had some liberties but most of them have been reversed. Cubans in the ´80s had less freedom than they have today.

It is a form of repression and it is not that visible today because the methods to communicate to the masses and the communication technology made the world smaller. But the Cubans in the ´80s are totally different than what Cubans are today. The Cubans of the ´80s did not have the same awareness of the world like the Cubans of today. Cuba in the ´80s was being assisted by the Soviet Union and the Cuban population of the ´80s had more fear than today. That´s why I say and will always say that any form of economic assistance, any commercial agreement that is done with the Cuban government will only support the government remaining in power and repressing the people. That is the only thing that concerns them.

Normando Hernández is an independent journalist who has dedicated his career to providing alternative sources of news and information in Cuba. In 1999, he co-founded the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, and in 2000, he established the Camaguey Association of Journalists, the first independent organization in Camaguey province since 1959. Declared a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International following Cuba’s “Black Spring” (2003–2010), during which dozens of dissidents and journalists were imprisoned for their activism, Mr. Hernández was exiled to Spain in 2010 and has since resettled in the United States.

The author of numerous articles and publications, including the book El Arte de la Tortura: Memorias de un Ex Prisionero de Conciencia Cubano (The Art of Torture: Memories of a Former Cuban Prisoner of Conscience, 2010), he has received several journalism and human rights awards, including the Norwegian Writers Association’s Freedom of Expression Award (2009), the PEN American Center’s PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award (2007), and a special mention by the Inter-American Press Association for excellence in journalism (2003). Mr. Hernández is currently a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he is examining the Cuban communications monopoly and considering strategies by which independent journalists may combat totalitarianism.