Martin Luther King Jr. and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas: The continuing relevance of their shared human centered global vision

From the Mountaintop to Strasbourg the season for nonviolence continues

57 years ago on April 3, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last speech on the eve of his assassination, in which he rejected violence and doubled down on a nonviolent strategy that holds great relevance for Cubans today.

“We don't have to argue with anyone. We don't have to insult anyone or go around acting badly with our words. We don't need any bricks or glass bottles; we don't need any Molotov cocktails. We need to go around these stores, and these massive industries in our country, and say: 'God sent us here to tell you that you are not treating your children well. And we have come here to ask you to do the first item on your agenda: fair treatment for God's children. Well, now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for the withdrawal of your economic support.' And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis.”

The political, economic, and social situation in Cuba has reached a moment of heightened injustice. On the one hand, the repression that for decades has sought to stifle and destroy demonstrations of dissent with the Communist Party regime, led by a mafia of commanders and generals who have usurped power for more than 66 years.

With the assistance of the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, Castro’s revolutionary forces seized power violently in 1959, and have maintained it with violence to subject Cubans, most of whom live in extreme poverty, under total control, while this ruling mafia manages billions of dollars in its accounts and their families live the "dolce vita" in the United States or Europe.

The small and battered opposition groups have remained a testament to perseverance and resistance, employing strategies of nonviolent struggle that the regime and its political police have been unable to completely destroy, despite attempts to eliminate their promoters.

In general, Cubans, who began to take steps to demand their fundamental rights at the beginning of this century, as they did in 2002 and 2003 when tens of thousands of Cubans demanded a referendum on the Varela Project, an initiative promoted by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, the Christian Liberation Movement, and several independent organizations from the emerging civil society, are no longer hiding behind expressions of their discontent with the dictatorship, but are also demanding their rights in a civic manner through popular protests.

The only constant is repression.

But this repression no longer subdues Cubans, and the regime knows it. However, this awakening on the island is lacking a more forceful response from the free world, which must express concrete solidarity with those Cubans who no longer need a borrowed voice because they have decided to raise their own.

We must all take responsibility for ensuring that their cry resonates like a thunderous echo to the ends of the earth: the diaspora of exiles who cannot return to their own country, and the democracies that have a moral duty to support all the victims of totalitarian, segregationist, and criminal systems like the one in Cuba.

The world is in turmoil, but precisely when it is darkest, the moment of dawn is closest. It may seem redundant, but it is necessary to remember: Cubans are also human, we are children of God, and we do not want to continue being subjected to the Caesars of nations because our dignity and our freedom are the most precious gift we have, and they have tried to take it away from us.

Cubans do not want to continue being subjected to tyrants while the world looks the other way, nor do Cubans want to continue being trapped in the geopolitical interests of the great powers.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. understood this demand for respect rooted in human dignity; he called for a boycott, for the withdrawal of economic support from those who had stolen the people's dignity because their oppressors had suffocated them into misery, dependence, and helplessness.

In Cuba, the lives of citizens depend absolutely on the dictatorship's control, and except for small sectors, especially farmers who still work their limited lands and can somehow provide for themselves and a few neighbors, it is unlikely that freedom will come hand in hand with more capitalism, which in Cuba, or rather in the mindset of the communist regime, means more foreign investment and more dollars or euros for its sustenance and the maintenance of the privileges of the ruling elite.

Therefore, contrary to the policy of rapprochement with the military-economic junta in power, the world must, if it wants to show solidarity with the Cuban people's yearning for freedom, subjected to segregation, misery, and lack of freedom for 66 years by that same communist regime, implement an international boycott to isolate the mafia from the Cuban Communist Party in solidarity with our people.

In his last speech, Reverend King said he didn't want the residents of Memphis to buy Coca-Cola. In Cuba, only the regime, which expropriated that soda factory in 1960, can do business with the important soda brand today, and generally foreigners and the privileged natives, who are the ones with foreign currency, can buy them and refresh themselves under the tropical shade.

Despite the fact that the State, which on the island is equal to the regime, is the sole employer, the one who decides what you eat, what you wear, what you drink, and has such control, citizens have survived to manage and somehow eat, wear, drink, and live outside this quasi-absolute control, but one that is rife with its own set of loopholes.

Therefore, the greatest impact that implementing a boycott to isolate the Cuban Communist Party dictatorship would have to be the one on the ruling group and its privileges.

If the world were to apply boycott and isolation measures like those applied to Apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the white supremacist National Party kept the majority of Black citizens subjugated, to the dictatorship of the Cuban Communist Party—the only political party legally permitted and with the rector's control of society according to the dictatorship’s constitution—this would result in a burst of solidarity for the persecuted and impoverished dissident groups on the island and for Cubans in their civic protest for freedom.

It's time for the international community to hold accountable the band of deadbeats who don't repay what they borrow, and recognize that it isn't in the best interests of the countries’ subsidizing this hostile dictatorship in this time of crisis.

Therefore, as called for by the Christian Liberation Movement, founded by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, the assassinated dissident leader, the free world should take the step of implementing a boycott and isolating of the Cuban Communist dictatorship, not as a unilateral measure by one country against another, but as a global solidarity action by democracies against the tyranny that has segregated, imprisoned, exiled, and murdered Cubans, sponsored international terrorism around the world for more than six decades, and subverted democracies and turned both Nicaragua and Venezuela into client states and dictatorships.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? in 1967 in which he meditated on what he called “the World House” reflecting on a human centered global ethic. Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas addressed the European Parliament in 2002 with views congruent with Reverend King’s.

“We now know that any method or model which purportedly aims to achieve justice, development, and efficiency but takes precedence over the individual or cancels out any of the fundamental rights leads to a form of oppression and to exclusion and is calamitous for the people. We wish to express our solidarity with all those who suffer from any form of oppression and injustice, and with those in the world who have been silenced or marginalized. The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized.”