Interviews with Regis Iglesias Ramirez

I was one of the campaign coordinators for the plebiscite on the Varela Project, and in 2003 I was detained during the repressive escalation that was going on. I was travelling in a car with another member of the Christian Liberation Movement [The Christian Liberation Movement is a non-violent Cuban dissident organization advocating for democratic reforms that was founded in 1988. Until his death in 2012, it was led by Oswaldo Paya], Ernesto Martinez Fonseca, when our taxi was surrounded in a police operation, and we were detained in the middle of the road. Ernesto Martinez was released and I was sent to the Headquarters of the Political Police.

After a week of infamous and slanderous accusations, we were put through a judicial process, which I wouldn’t really call by that name, I would call it a judicial farce, or rather a farcical process, because there was nothing judicial about it. I met my lawyer twenty-four hours before this sham of a trial, while others met their lawyers just as the trial was about to begin, when some of them were facing life sentences.

We were pronounced guilty and given long sentences which ranged from six to twenty-eight years in prison under the supposed crime of acts against the territorial integrity and national sovereignty, which is an old law from the penal code, dating from colonial times, and which contained sentences from six years up to the death penalty as punishment for violating this law. We hadn’t violated this or any other law and we were wrongly imprisoned and scattered throughout all the prisons in the country.

Regis Iglesias Ramirez is a Cuban political and civil society activist and a former prisoner of conscience. He was born in Havana in 1969.

He became a member of a dissident group, the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), in 1989. The MCL was founded by the late Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, who died under mysterious circumstances in a car accident in 2012. Regis Iglesias Ramirez became the MCL’s spokesman and a member of its Coordination Council in 1996. He was nominated as a candidate to the Cuban Parliament in 1997, but his candidacy, along with those of colleagues from the MCL, was rejected by the regime’s electoral authorities.

He is a member of the National Executive of the Citizens Committee of the Varela Project, a civil society initiative advocating for free elections and improved human rights in Cuba. The Varela Project gathered signatures from Cuban citizens in favor of a plebiscite, as permitted by the Cuban constitution. The communist government refused to call the plebiscite.

In 2003, Regis Iglesias Ramirez was among 75 nonviolent dissidents and activists arrested by the Cuban regime in what became known as the Black Spring. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison for crimes against the state. In 2010, he was released in a deal brokered by the Roman Catholic Church and was sent into exile in Spain, where he remains as a political refugee.

Regis Iglesias Ramirez has published several books of poetry and contributed to various literary anthologies. His articles have appeared in various publications in Spain and elsewhere. Since the mid-1990s, he has been associated with the Independent Press Bureau of Cuba, the New Cuban Press Agency and the Manuel Marquez Sterling Society of Independent Journalists in Cuba.

www.oswaldopaya.org

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