Activities
The CDR officials have the duty to monitor the activities of every person on their respective blocks. There is an individual file kept on each block resident, some of which reveal the internal dynamics of each household.
Its defenders note that CDR have other important responsibilities beyond their function to monitor the individual's political and moral background; these include arranging festivals, administrating voluntary community projects, and organizing attendance to mass rallies. Proponents also emphasize that CDR helped to put medical, educational, or other campaigns into national effect and that, being organized on a geographical basis, they also act as centers for many who do not work in farms or factories and hence include a large proportion of female membership. The CDR's also take a role an active role in vaccination campaigns, blood banks, recycling, practicing evacuations for hurricanes, and backing up the government in its fight against corruption.
However, a 2006 Amnesty International report noted CDR involvement in repeated human rights violations that included verbal as well as physical violence. Critics also contend that the CDR's are a repressive tool, giving the government a heads-up about dissident activities on the micro-local level, by tattling on the non-compliant. They identify CDR's as "one of the lead entities responsible for the wave of repression sweeping through Cuba," most recently, the brutal beatings and detention of 75 members of the Ladies in White in Havana in 2011 and 2012.
Elizardo Sanchez, a Cuban dissident, described the CDR as "a tool for the systematic and mass violation of human rights, for ideological and repressive discrimination. They assist the police and the secret service." Whereas Lazaro Sanchez, a CDR supporter, says of the CDR that, "The (U.S.) Enemy as well as Cuban sellouts take advantage of confusion to sow doubts. If we have to act, we are going to act. Our streets cannot belong to criminals, or to counterrevolutionaries. The U.S. Empire has the FBI; the Revolution has its CDRs."
Read more about this topic: Committees For The Defense Of The Revolution
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman’s involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in another. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one’s own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.”
—David Elkind (20th century)