Interviews with Regis Iglesias Ramirez

The Christian Liberation Movement was founded in 1988 by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas [Oswaldo Paya was a Cuban dissident and democracy activist. He founded the Christian Liberation Movement and established the Varela Project to advocate for democracy and human rights. He died in a mysterious car crash in 2012.], his wife Ofelia Acevedo, and a group of laical Catholics from the El Salvador del Mundo Parish in El Cerro, a neighborhood of Havana. Oswaldo and Ofelita come from Catholic families that opposed the regime from day one; since 1959.

Oswaldo is a very committed Catholic who was taken to forced labor camps in 1968 due to his student protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. He was expelled from the education center and was taken to forced labor camps for three years in Isla de Pinos, Camagüey, and Las Villas. And so, this became part of the education of the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement.

Around 1986, 1987, he founded the Christian Circle of Cuban Thought in the parish, but after a while they had to stop those activities because they were deemed as subversive, and the publication of a very modest little newsletter titled People of God also had to be put on hold for a while. People of God was one of the precursors of what would later become independent Cuban journalism, but already since 1986, 1987, this group of committed laical Catholics gave their critical and opposing opinions on the regime through People of God.

In 1988, the movement was founded by Oswaldo with this group of laical Catholics, and ever since then they have been fighting for Cuban rights by being very persistent on processes that demand public participation.

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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