Press group indicts Cuba, Venezuela

CHICAGO - (AP) -- Freedom of expression and freedom of the press are violated, or at least threatened, throughout the Western Hemisphere, an organization of newspaper publishers said Tuesday. The Inter-American Press Association concluded a five-day meeting in Chicago saying the situation is the worst in Cuba and Venezuela.

The Miami-based umbrella group of nearly all newspapers in the Americas said Cuba is the country where freedom of the press ``is violated most systematically and completely.''

''Twenty-eight independent journalist are serving prison sentences ranging from 14 to 27 years in subhuman conditions, far from their families, with no medical attention and no respect for their other basic human rights,'' the IAPA concluded in a report.

Venezuela was also mentioned as a concern for harassment of Venezuelan journalist by sympathizers of President Hugo Chávez.

Receiving the award on their behalf, Humberto Castelló, executive editor of El Nuevo Herald of Miami, asked Jack Fuller, the Chicago Tribune publisher IAPA president, ``not to allow Venezuela to become a new Cuba with the press.''

The IAPA also said national security is being used as a pretext to clamp down on the media in the United States.

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

Fidel Castro - Cuba

Zimbabwe police to charge journalists at independent newspaper (They missed an opportunity to highlight Zimbabwe.) - Under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), signed into law by President Robert Mugabe soon after his re-election last year, all media organisations and journalists must be registered with a state-appointed media commission. The Daily News, a fierce critic of Mugabe's government, applied for a licence last week after the Supreme Court ruled that it could not hear its application challenging the constitutionality of AIPPA until it was registered. But the application was rejected.

Bush's Cuban quandary***The issue dividing these carefully jousting factions is how Cuba should represent itself to the outside world at a time when its economy is in tatters and it desperately needs foreign friends to come to its aid. Recent arrests, imprisonment of dissidents, and even political executions have soured opinion in European countries like Spain, Italy, France, and Germany where Castro once could find some sympathizers. Meanwhile, President Bush is hanging tough against the normalization of relations between the US and Cuba, which might open the floodgates to trade and travel and generate an inflow to Cuba of desperately needed American dollars.

One Republican senator, Norman Coleman of Minnesota, visited Cuba a few weeks ago in a mind to vote for lifting the sanctions. But after meeting with dissidents, he changed his view. The crackdown in Cuba has also caused slippage of support in the House for lifting the US ban on travel to Cuba, which some economists think could funnel more than $500 million a year into that country. Last month, the House voted 227 to 188 to lift the ban, but support is down from 262 who favored it last year. The president is opposed to such liberalization and, last week, pledged tighter enforcement of the embargo.

"Cuba must change," Mr. Bush told Cuban exiles and anti-Castro groups, and he said he is setting up a government commission to help move Cuba to democracy whenever Castro leaves power. Cuban exiles are a critical Florida voting bloc in the upcoming presidential election.

This was not the softening in the US position that Castro deems essential if he is to ease his terrible financial crisis. One former confidant of Castro says the Cuban leader is now confronted by a dilemma. On the one hand, he could woo Bush by offering a carrot with the concessions apparently being advocated by some of the more pragmatic supporters in his entourage. This could involve going forward with the referendum urged by Oswaldo Paya and the other petition signatories.

The alternative, says this source familiar with Castro's thinking, is to brandish a stick at the US by "raising the ante." He could unleash a flood of Cuban refugees in the direction of the US, thus creating a "massive migration crisis" in the midst of the presidential election campaign. That is a prospect the president cannot afford to take lightly. ***

Out of about 200 nations of the world, 199 are free to trade with Cuba. If they don't, it could be that Cuba has nothing that they want, or it could be that they like getting paid, who wants to do business with someone that doesn't pay? Or it could be that they don't like paying a first world wage for a worker knowing he is only receiving about a dollar a day of it.

There are a lot of reasons why the 199 countries that are free to trade with Cuba would rather not do so. Its easy enough to blame the embargo, that only applies to the US, when in fact there are companies operating in Cuba. They have made their investments free of any US competition. There was nothing to stop them. Any other country that complains of the US embargo is free to do the same.

There are arguments for ending the embargo that might have made sense at the end of the Cold War. But at this late date, I see no reason to vary from our course. Castro will be gone in a couple of years, and Cubans will have an open road ahead of them at that time. Why try to build trade relations that will only be perverted by this guy? What does Cuba have that we need that we can't wait two years for, having waited 40 already?

And if he decides to open the flood gates, and the refugees start swarming in, how does that hurt us? If we abort a million Democrats every year, and we do, I think that makes room for a few people who want to live and live free. And you couldn't pick a better class of people.

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