Innermost thoughts of Raúl Castro president of the Council of State, “tired predator” – Cuba

Innermost thoughts* of Raúl Castro president of the Council of State,
“tired predator” – Cuba

“Although nearly 82, I secured a new five-year term as president in
February 2013. It will be the last one. It is time for me to stand down
after making some concessions… in a manner of speaking, at least. I
definitely want to make some economic concessions, allow the creation of
small private companies, and even lift travel restrictions for my fellow
citizens, including traitors such as that unruly blogger Yoani Sánchez.
But, for the time being, forget about allowing an independent press and
loosening the controls on the Internet.
Think about it. Too much information flowing freely in Cuba could
encourage protests and sedition. Our system is collapsing, as I’ve said
several times at internal meetings. But the Revolution is supposed to be
irreversible, as my elder brother always used to say, and it’s thanks to
this kind of language that the regime has survived until now.
If I legalized independent newspapers and radio stations tomorrow, if I
allowed broadband Internet and if I ratified the two UN conventions on
civil and political rights that I signed in 2008, the collapse would
just come all the faster. Dig our own grave? No way. But we have little
room for manoeuvre. Freedom of information and pluralism are recognized
everywhere else in Latin America, at least on paper. Except in Cuba.
It’s pretty tricky, especially as I am this year’s president of the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
Of course, it wasn’t very subtle of me to have kept this poor Calixto
Ramon Martínez Arias of Hablemos Press in detention for seven months
just for providing information about dengue and cholera epidemics that
we later had to confirm. And it’s not very clever to lock up this Granma
journalist, Luis Antonio Torres, whose reporting I had even praised, or
the netizen Angel Santiesteban-Prats. When I am going to be able to
release those two? Keeping them in detention is absurd, I know. But
political survival has a price.
So? So I allow my State Security to harass and beat up independent
journalists and bloggers.”

*To show how some predators really think, we have presented their
innermost thoughts in the first person. We had to use a little
imagination, of course, but the facts alluded to conform to reality.

Source: Prédateurs – Raúl Castro – Reporters Without Borders –
http://en.rsf.org/predator-raul-castro,44496.html