“Those without rights”, the first-person testimony of Cuban opponents

The documentary “Those without rights”, “an irrefutable complaint” against the Cuban regime starring about twenty opponents, including an activist subjected to a mock shooting, opens in Miami on the occasion of International Human Rights Day.

Directed and edited by filmmaker Daniel Urdanivia, “Los sin Derechos” intertwines archive images such as the executions in the early years of the so-called Cuban Revolution with testimonies from different time frames.

The first to appear is Ricardo Bofill, founder in 1976 of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights (Ccpdh), who died in Miami in 2019.

“In many countries human rights are violated, the difference with Cuba is that (..) it is carried out from an institutional angle; it is part of the laws, ”Bofill begins by saying in the film.

Bofill is followed by a score of writers, journalists and political exes who offer their testimony of why they were taken to prison and how their jailers treated them.

One of them is Annete Escandón, admitted to a psychiatric hospital where, according to her narration, she was given electric shocks “in an almost open caesarean section wound.”

“It was necessary to collect in a graphic way testimonies of people who have suffered the violation of their citizen rights,” says the producer of the documentary, Pedro Corzo, founder in 1999 of the Institute of Cuban Historical Memory Against Totalitarianism.

“They are representatives of different social backgrounds and different generations, not so much biological as political,” adds Corzo, also a journalist.

“Remembering Ricardo Bofill”

The presentation of “Los sin Derechos”, lasting more than an hour, and with some images recorded even with mobile phones, will be this Thursday, the eve of International Human Rights Day, during the event “Remembering Ricardo Bofill” ,

It is one of the 15 documentaries made by the institute.

For Corzo, 78 years old and who was “eight years in prison for attempting against the security of the Cuban state”, Bofill “gave context and concept to a reality that is the violation of human rights in Cuba.”

“He was able to synthesize that idea and spread it,” he says of the dissident whom Amnesty International adopted as a prisoner of conscience in 1985.

In an open letter written in 1986, Bofill said: “We have nothing to do with the CIA. We do not participate in violent acts. We have no other weapon than the word. And we are going to use it as long as we have a breath of life left ”.

Mock executions, the cruelest “technique”

For Corzo, the strongest testimony, due to the cruelty it contains, is that of Gloria Argudín, “a very brave woman, now older”, who suffered a mock shooting.

“I knew a man who had eight mock shooting, and he said it was one of the most cruel experiences you can have,” says the producer.

“Around dawn they took me out barefoot. They put me in front of the hole, they pointed a submachine gun at me and told me: ‘if you don’t speak we’ll kill you.’ I told them: kill me, it seems incredible that you were born of a woman, ”Argudín tells the camera.

“She, who we hope will attend the screening, is” one of the first women who took up arms against the Castro dictatorship in the Escambray (mountains in the center of the island), “says the producer.

“The first type of censorship was fear”

José Ignacio (Pepín) Rivero, who was director of the expropriated Diario de la Marina, narrates how the rebels “broke the copper cylinders that were going to be put in the photoengraving machines.”

“The first type of censorship was fear: telling horrors to those who expressed their opinion against the revolution,” says Rivero, already deceased in exile.

Rolando Cartaya, a former journalist for Juventud Rebelde, the newspaper founded by Fidel Castro in 1965, tells Efe that the documentary “takes on renewed validity these days.”

“The Cuban government, discredited by the violent repression of 11-J, is once again launching mobs organized by the political police against this generation of young people who laugh in their face,” says Cartaya, who “paid” two years in prison for denouncing the “acts of repudiation” organized by the State in 1980.

“I wrote a letter denouncing the traits of fascism at that time. A traitor handed her over. They summoned me to the newspaper and from there they took me to the Central Park of Havana where colleagues and friends hung up a poster and beat me, ”recalls from Miami Cartaya, another of those interviewed in the documentary.

According to a report by Prisioners Defenders released last Tuesday, 805 political prisoners and convicts in Cuba have added to its list in the last 12 months.

The NGO based in Spain has been able to verify that 562 cases belong to the repression related to the 11J in Cuba.

Corzo, who has produced other historical documentaries such as “Zapata lives” and “Boitel, dying in installments”, insisted that “historical memory is not worked with relics or with the stories of third parties, but with the direct experiences of people” .