They are the faces of evil says Willy Allen and Luis Fernandez, and they have about 60 of those faces posted on the website of spanish language America TeVe Channel 41, Miami. The two Miami attorneys are on a mission. They are involved in a project that documents the government organized repression of Cuba's Ladies in White.
"It is terrorism," says Fernandez.
The Ladies in White march every Sunday in support of friends and relatives that are in Cuban jails. Most of the prisoners are political activists, dissidents, or independent journalists. Each time the Ladies make their way through the streets of Havana they are surrounded by hostile, pro-Castro crowds. What Allen and Fernandez have found is that the same faces consistently show up in the "spontaneous demonstrations." They have highlighted the faces in the video and posted it on the Channel 41 website, www.americateve.com.
The Ladies in White have been subjected to physical abuse, shoved, dragged, punched. Most of the hostility has be captured by foreign news crews, cell phone cameras, and home video recorders.
Allen and Fernandez have assembled visual evidence that the the Castro intelligence service calls the shots.
"There is a guy that wears different colored guayaberas that is at every rally, he is the guy calling the shots and he is with Cuban intelligence." It appears that a majority of faces posted on the website are Cuban government agents, or police officers who are dressed in civilian clothes.
What is the purpose of the project? Two-fold say the lawyers. The first hope is those directly involved in the harassment might have second thoughts after they find out their pictures are being spread worldwide and that they someday might be held accountable. The second purpose is to gather evidence for future action. There are international courts and legal systems in some European countries that deal with human rights abuse. There are courts, according to Allen and Fernandez, who will deal with claims of crimes against humanity.
For now Allen and Fernandez are analyzing video, having the images posted, but the say there are additional phases of the project which they are not ready to discuss.
The website asks viewers to submit any information about those in the gallery of suspected government operatives. But Allen and Fernandez are not after what they call "true believers."
"We are not interested in the guy that loves and supports Fidel, that's his right of free speech, what we are looking for are the government agents that are systematically abusing the rights of Cuban citizens."
And do the pictures get back to Cuba where the internet, television, and newspapers are government controlled? To some degree the answer is yes. Illegal satellite dishes take in the signal from Channel 41 and information from the internet is circulated on DVDs and flash drives.
Will the project stop the abuse? Probably not, but the government-sponsored action is being documented beyond just the video and some day that evidence might be valuable in a court of law not just the court of public opinion.
