‘Awakening in the Cuban the Seed of Freedom’: Oscar Elías Biscet and the Opposition Struggle (Part 3)

This is part two of a three-part series; read parts 1 and 2.

On February 11, 2011, members of the European and Canadian parliaments, the British House of Lords, the United States Congress, and the government of Hungary nominated Oscar Elías Biscet for the Nobel Peace Prize. A month later he was released.

In addition to the negotiations between the Catholic Church and the Castro regime for the released members of the group of 75 to leave the country, Biscet decided to remain in Havana. Upon leaving prison he was invited to a Miami hospital to undergo a rigorous health check, but the dictatorship prohibited him from flying.

In 2013, Biscet published a document for the democratic transition in Cuba, which was endorsed by nine organizations. The Emilia Project, as it ended up being known, was named in memory of Emilia Teurbe Tolón, the first Cuban exiled for political reasons, and designated in 1950 by the Congress of the Republic as the “Incarnation of the Women of Cuba.”

The text calls for a legal system to restore sovereignty to the people, guarantee of basic human rights, free and transparent elections, equality before the law, and balance of independent powers and pluralism, among other key concepts for the promotion of democracy in Cuba.

In a first stage, lasting three to four months, the document was distributed among the population and dissidents. Among the first to support the project were fellow Baptist Jorge Luis García Pérez (Antúnez) and the Pastors for Change Movement, Biscet explained then.

The second stage would involve collecting signatures in favor of the project’s postulates. When asked why the document would be delivered only to international organizations, Biscet answered that national ones are illegal. “If we are saying that the Constitution is illegal, that the National Assembly of People’s Power with its organs of State power are illegal, then what are we going to do by giving them those signatures? We prefer to hand them over to international organizations, so that they know that the people supported this idea.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council, the Criminal Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights were some of the institutions where the signatures would be carried. Biscet referred to the possible movement generated as “a massive non-violent political challenge to national organizations to demand change in Cuba towards democracy and freedom.”

At the same time, he recognized that the work would belong to the Cubans. “We would like international solidarity, but the fundamental objective is to awaken in the Cuban people the seed of freedom that exists in all human beings,” he explained.

Something, for both the doctor and his opponents, differentiated the Emilia Project from others in the recent past of the opposition in Cuba. It was the first to classify the Constitution and the National Assembly of People’s Power as illegal “for not recognizing the freedom and sovereignty of the people.” The other was the method to achieve the objectives: non-violent civil disobedience.

These two pillars of the document were in stark contrast with most other projects, Biscet insisted, which “legalize the regime to obtain its objectives.” He concluded: “Not this one. This takes away legitimacy and proposes a path of contractual change.”

Biscet acknowledged that the reason why he had not joined any other project was because they did not demand the resignation of the leadership. If that were the case, he said, anyone who wants “a total change in the government can have my signature.”

The doctor’s frankness, proven in his actions and ideas, has moral support. With lies and theft, there would be no possible dialogue. Politics is, ultimately, the human administration of morality. And to the same extent that virtue is magnetized towards freedom, perversion is magnetized towards captivity. This moral compass proposes a paradox: it puts both positions on opposite paths, but confronts them.

“With the Emilia Project he made an appointment to give a conference in a park in El Vedado, [but] the [regime] did not let anyone arrive and Oscar stood in the sun for two hours alone as a protest. The police tried to ridicule him by saying that he had no followers,” said Biscet’s wife, Elsa Morejón, during an interview with the author.

She believes that Castroism “hates God [and so] hates Oscar for invoking the name of God in the Emilia Project and in his ideas.” And she laments: “In Cuba there is no opposition from conservatives.” Still, it was on the dissident right that the main voices were raised against the opening of the Barack Obama government towards the Raúl Castro regime, starting in 2014. The Ladies in White, Guillermo “Coco” Fariñas, and Estado de Sats were among the few organizations that denounced the thaw as oxygenating a dictatorship that showed no intention of advancing respect for human rights.

Two years after his release, when the farce of “changes” in Cuba eliminated the infamous White Card in Immigration Reform to attract the attention of the White House, Biscet did not fall into the trap: “They still have control of who can leave the country or not. They are the ones who determine who comes out.”

The doctor foresaw what would be the black list of the “regulated” — Cubans who are prohibited by socialism from traveling outside the country for political reasons. You know when you enter the list, but never when your name leaves it.

After the failed thaw process, Biscet placed greater emphasis on his work with the media, analyzing the Cuban reality from opinion. However, along that path he has been no less besieged. In February 2020, the Cuban Police arrested him and transferred him to “an undisclosed location.” Four police patrols and two motorcycles surrounded Biscet’s house.

On X, activist Martha Beatriz Roque reported on February 20 that Biscet had been released after receiving a fine of 500 CUP (about $44 at the exchange rate at that time) for the alleged crime of “receiving,” and the police “st[ole] all the objects and items in his house linked to the Internet, including his and his wife’s cell phones.”

As in 2014 with Obama, in May 2022 Biscet once again rejected the measures announced by the government of Democratic President Joe Biden to relax the heavy-handed policy of his predecessor towards the Marxist tyranny.

On that occasion, the doctor assured that Cuban dissidents were experiencing the worst persecution in decades. “Far from leaving behind the cruelty of the Castro brothers, Mr. Díaz-Canel is returning to it,” he stated in a context where more than a thousand political prisoners filled the socialist prison system.

“The complacent assumption of the press and the international community is that he is a more benign figure than his predecessors. The brutal events on the ground in Cuba tell a different story,” wrote Biscet, who believes that for democracy to have some opportunity in Cuba, the White House will have to “do more than deprive a handful of Cuban officials of visas, and the international press will have to incessantly show the misdeeds of Mr. Díaz-Canel.”

Yoe Suárez is a writer, producer, and journalist, exiled from Cuba due to his investigative reporting about themes like torture, political prisoners, government black lists, cybersurveillance, and freedom of expression and conscience. He is the author of the books “Leviathan: Political Police and Socialist Terror” and “El Soplo del Demonio: Violence and Gangsterism in Havana.”