SOS Cuba Advocates For Human Rights On The Caribbean Island
Janet Cuni grew tired of arguing with relatives whose ideologies aligned with the dictatorship in Cuba, so she searched for a way out.
She found her answer in 1997. The then 20-year-old took a job as a crew member for Corsica Ferries-Sardinia Ferries and acquired a temporary living permit in Spain.
Fifteen years later, Cuni entered the United States through the Mexican border and applied for political asylum.
“I went through a lot to get to this country,” said Cuni, who is now 44.
Today, she is a political science student at the Eduardo J. Padrón Campus in Little Havana, but her heart remains in Cuba.
This fall, Cuni helped create the SOS Cuba club, a college-wide organization based at North Campus. Its focus is to spread awareness about the Cuban experience and advocate for human rights.
The idea to start the club blossomed in July after the protests in the streets of Miami and the Caribbean island called for an end to the 62-year-old dictatorship.
Miami Dade College political science professor Richard Tapia, whose parents fled Cuba in 1968, led the charge. He agreed to serve as advisor.
“I felt the right thing to do was to volunteer our time to form this club for the purpose of lending our voice to the freedom of Cuba,” Tapia said.
The club plans to participate in marches, lobbying, phone banking, social media awareness campaigns and collect donations for Cuba.
In the future, they hope to host joint meetings with other MDC student organizations like SOS Venezuela and SOS Nicaragua.
Although SOS Cuba is already an official club—it has 15 members—they hope to eventually have branches at all MDC campuses with about 200 members college-wide.
Cuni serves as the club’s college-wide president and Patricia Urquiola, who is studying biology at Kendall Campus, is the college-wide vice president.
“The Cuban people deserve and demand their freedom and we’re going to do what we can to assist them in achieving that,” Tapia said.
Urquiola understands what it means to break free from a communist mindset.
The 20-year-old was born in Pinar Del Río and recalls seeing her friends and family worship communism while growing up.
“Cuba teaches you to love communism from the moment you are born,” Urquiola said. “[In Cuba] as long as you admire communism and you do more for it, you are seen as the best person ever and it even gets you recognized in school.”
She left the island in 2019 after her mom filed the paperwork for her to come to the U.S. In January of 2020, she enrolled at the College and was astonished at the opportunity to pick her own classes.
“In Cuba, you don’t get to make decisions for yourself,” Urquiola said. “Imagine not questioning the things you are being taught. Imagine not being able to say what you think. Imagine not questioning what you want to do with your life.”
Tapia said his family knows too well about that oppression. His grandfather was a political prisoner in Cuba who was tortured after asking for an exit visa to leave the country and his father’s uncles were held in La Cabaña, a fortress run by Che Guevara.
“We are very passionate because we saw the suffering that our families went through,” Tapia said.
To get more information about SOS Cuba, contact Richard Tapia at rtapia@mdc.edu or (305) 237-6683.
