To promote a nonviolent transition to a Cuba that respects human rights, political and economic freedoms, and the rule of law.
Vladimiro Roca's couragous break with the Cuban Dictatorship. A moral example for the nomenklatura in Cuba.
Vladimiro Roca Antúnez 21 December 1942 – 30 July 2023
Cuban dissident Vladimiro Roca Antúnez died on July 30, 2023 at age 80 in Havana. He was a prominent left-wing critic of the Castro regime, and spent five years in prison for co-authoring "The Homeland Belongs to All" with Felix Antonio Bonne Carcasses, Rene Gomez Manzano, and Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello in 1997.
He was the son of Blas Roca Calderio, one of the five founders of the the first Cuban Communist Party, the Popular Socialist Party in 1925, who later went on to be President of the National Assembly of Peoples Power under the Castro regime.
Vladimiro was first a fighter pilot in the Cuban armed forces, after undergoing training in the Soviet Union for about a year and a half.
Cuban journalist Reinaldo Escobar writing in 14ymedio described his first encounter with the future Cuban dissident.
I met Vladimiro Roca in mid-1963. At that time I was a student-soldier at the San Julián Base located in the westernmost part of Pinar del Río. Vladimiro was a MIG pilot who filled us with admiration with his stunts in the skies of Cuba.
In 1971 he left the armed forces, after ten years service, and began working for the government in the civilian sector as an economist, during which he studied economy and international relations. He was expelled from his job in 1992 for dissenting openly with the policies of the Cuban government for stating "I did not believe this was socialism, it could be any other banner but was most similar to fascism, but it that it had nothing of socialism." He also stated that he would use non-violent means to oppose the system.
In 1992 he founded the " Corriente Socialista Democrática" [ Socialist Democratic Current ] and in 1996 he was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in Cuba, that was never recognized by the Cuban government, although it did become part of the Socialist International.
In 1997, together with Felix Antonio Bonne Carcasses, Rene Gomez Manzano, and Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello formed the Grupo de Trabajo de la Disidencia Interna ( the Working Group of the Internal Dissidence) and on June 27, 1997 published La Patria es de Todos [ The Homeland Belongs to All] offering a critical assessment of the Castro regime, and recommendations for a democratic transition. The introduction includes a brief but powerful case for change.
Man cannot live from history, which is the same as living from stories. There is a need for material goods and for satisfying his spirituality, as well as to be able to look to the future with expectations. But there is also a need for that openness that we all know as freedom.
The Cuban government ignores the word "opposition." Those of us who do not share its political stance, or who just simply don't support it, are considered enemies and any number of other scornful designations that it chooses to proclaim. Thus, they have also sought to give a new meaning to the word "Homeland" that is distortedly linked to Revolution, Socialism and Nation. They attempt to ignore the fact that "Homeland," by definition, is the country in which one is born.
The four were subjected to a political show trial, and Vladimiro was sentenced to five years in prison, the longest prison sentence of the four. They were imprisoned a week after the document was released. Vladimiro was held in a six-by-seven-foot cell, with a hole in the ground for a toilet and a table serving as a bed; water would run only three times a day for 20 to 30 minutes. Upon his release in 2002, after serving the five year prison sentence, he took the first communion, and became a practicing Catholic.
He returned to opposition activism, and joined the "Todos Unidos" [ All United] coalition and endorsed the Varela Project, an initiative of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas' and the Christian Liberation Movement named after the Catholic priest Felix Varela.
His co-author in the Homeland Belongs to All, Martha Beatriz Roque provided some context on that time in the 14ymedio report on his death.
“He was always a man of the left,” opposition member Martha Beatriz Roque recalled to 14ymedio . “He was an economist and he realized the big mistakes that the dictatorship had made and he reacted as such,” she emphasizes. “This reaction cost him five years in prison when, together with Félix Bonne, Rene Gomez Manzano and yours truly, we signed the document La Patria es de todos. [The Homeland Belongs to Everyone]”
On October 8, 2002 Vladimiro Roca Antunez received The Civil Courage Prize and a $50,000 cash award at a reception hosted by the Northcote Parkinson Fund at the Harold Pratt House in New York City for his "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk."
In accepting the prize, Mr. Roca issued a statement saying, in part, "I began to oppose the government only when ... I clearly realized that this government's economic system would destroy all the riches of my country ... I continue to peacefully fight for gradual change towards a democratic Cuba, a free Cuba, and to promote a respect for the human rights of all Cubans, even those who peacefully disagree with the practices of the government, as is outlined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other United Nations documents ... I promise I will never let you down as I continue to fight for the change in Cuba that Cubans and citizens around the world desire."
In February 2010 he attended the burial of Orlando Zapata Tamayo in Banes, who died after a 85 day hunger strike on February 23, 2010.
Vladimiro could have continued to live a life of privilege, but broke with the Cuban dictatorship, and over several decades non-violently advocated for democratic change in Cuba and paid a high price for it, but he also demonstrated a moral example for the nomenklatura in Cuba.
