I came across
this story at
The Washington Post on singer Gloria
Estefan (among others) and the protests she (and they) has coordinated in response to official repression of opposition politics in Cuba. Specifically,
Estefan was responding to the Cuban regime's repressive response over a number of years to protests by the "
Damas de Blanco" (Ladies in White) a group of women whose sons and husbands have been imprisoned since 2003. You can read some of the background on this situation
here in this report from Amnesty International.
A few questions strike me as important here. First, it goes without saying that the Cuban regime is acting badly in all this and that that is part of an ongoing pattern. Will 'progressives' in the U.S. speak out on this? In short, do they see human rights as 'universal' or only as a stick with which to beat the right wing regimes?
The second thing is that it is pretty amazing how the Cuban American community is able to reply to
this sort of rights violation; I wonder whether they mobilize around similar instances of political repression elsewhere? (For instance,
consider the anti-slavery campaign that the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers is now waging right there in Florida; have Cuban Americans expressed their solidarity in an organized way with political-economic oppression the occurs closer than 90 miles away from Miami?) In short, do they see human rights as 'universal' or only as a stick with which to beat the Cuban regime? Just wondering.
Finally, for those who seek to gerrymander art and politics in some strict way, does this count as a border violation? Or is it simply efforts to connect art and politics from the left that draw your ire?
