Cuban Eliécer Ávila asks tough questions that scare regime

Posted on Saturday, 05.11.13

Cuban Eliécer Ávila asks tough questions that scare regime
BY MIRTA OJITO
Mao35@columbia.edu

Eliécer Ávila is up with the roosters every morning, shoveling pig
manure in the modest farm in the province of Las Tunas, Cuba, where this
graduate of the country's only computer science university raises pigs
for a living. He sold nine in late January just before he left the
island for the first time to visit friends in Sweden.

At 27, Ávila carries himself with the square-shouldered and serious
demeanor he must have learned from his father, a former member of the
Special Brigades of the Ministry of the Interior. It was jarring to hear
this former member of the Union of Communist Youth (UJC in Spanish)
speak of creating a movement on the island where dissent can flourish,
along with a free press and what sounds like social democracy; he
insists on the importance of free healthcare and education for all.

He calls the movement Somos Más, (We are more) and calls himself " un
cubano más." Just another Cuban.

"I'm a dissident," he told me with evident pride, noting that he
resigned from the UJC about three years ago. "What we want is to give
Cubans the opportunity to do at home the things that now they can only
do outside."

Five years ago, Ávila became an overnight sensation on YouTube when he
challenged Ricardo Alarcón, then the president of the National Assembly,
with a series of questions rarely — if ever — heard in a public forum on
the island.

Why can't we travel? he asked Alarcón.

Why can't we fix the economy?

Why can't we have a decent and reliable transportation system?

At the time, he said he wanted to travel to Bolivia to visit the place
where one of his heroes, Ché Guevara, had been killed.

Alarcón responded what he could. Famously, he said that if everyone who
wanted to travel did so, there would be a collision of airplanes in the
skies. He also said "the north" wasn't as appealing as some people
believed. "I know. I lived there for 14 years," he said referring to New
York, and went on to say that his own wife had not been allowed to go
into stores on Fifth Avenue, because it was obvious that she was Latina.

Note to Alarcón: Many of the employees at Fifth Avenue stores, as well
as their clients, are Latinos. But Alarcón doesn't matter anymore. What
matters is what young people like Ávila are doing.

Since Feb. 2 he's been traveling through Europe and now the United
States — he arrived in Miami Friday — adding his voice to the choir of
dissidents who have been able to leave the island after the Cuban
government changed the rules allowing most citizens to travel abroad
without an exit visa. Like Yoani Sánchez, Berta Soler, Rosa María Payá
and others, he's been challenging all our notions of what's possible
inside Cuba.

When we spoke last week for about an hour at Columbia University, where
he had been attending a two-day conference on press freedoms in the
Americas, I told him that for someone like me, who lived in Cuba at a
time when dissent was swiftly and harshly punished, his trajectory and
ambition seemed like science fiction; his courage, unimaginable. In our
minds, many of us live in the Cuba we left behind — whether that was 50
years or three months ago — not in the Cuba that is.

And it is that Cuba that remains a puzzle: On the one hand, Sánchez,
Soler, Ávila and others are not in jail, as they would have been in,
say, 1972; on the other hand, they are often harassed and detained and
even beaten.

Ávila says he was detained once when he went to help a friend in
Santiago de Cuba; occasionally, he has been approached by the police.
Let's talk, they say. When he responds that he has nothing to discuss
with them, they taunt him, Are you afraid? That always works, and Ávila
follows them for a chat.

One of the things they want to know is why he affiliates with
terrorists. It's unclear who the so-called terrorists are, but Ávila
says the government has a special distaste for Yoani Sánchez.

No doubt. If I were trying to cling to power after 54 years of a failed
regime, I, too, would dislike Sánchez and Ávila and Soler and many
others like them who are breaking barriers — real and psychological — to
live as free men and women on an island where the jail bars remain
firmly in place and the jailers ever alert and averse to change.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/11/3391480/cuban-eliecer-avila-asks-tough.html