Castro Jails Cubans as Eyes Turned Toward War in Iraq

HAVANA - Ending several years of relative tolerance for Cuba's critical voices, Fidel Castro is showing American diplomats and the dissidents they courted that he can only stand so much.

Increasingly irritated by the top American diplomat's contact with government opponents, Castro chose the eve of the Iraq war to launch an offensive of his own. By Friday night, Cuban state agents had rounded up and jailed at least 72 dissidents.

The crackdown marked an end to the comparative lenience Cuban officials showed in recent years as independent journalists filed dispatches to Miami without government intervention, dissidents held news conferences and activists collected thousands of signatures for a petition calling for democratic reforms.

But on Monday, the government here accused dissidents of conspiring with U.S. Interests Section Chief James Cason and other American diplomats. On Tuesday, it announced it was going after "traitors" it accused of being on Cason's payroll — something the dissidents deny.

The detainees included more than a dozen independent journalists, owners of private lending libraries, leaders of opposition political parties and pro-democracy activists who gathered signatures for a reform effort known as the Varela Project.

The crackdown alarmed international rights and press advocates, including former President Jimmy Carter, who called on Cuban authorities to respect human rights and "refrain from detaining or harassing citizens who are expressing their views peacefully."

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders accused the government of taking advantage of the world's preoccupation with the U.S.-led war in Iraq to carry out the roundup.

"Human rights in Cuba can therefore be viewed as one of the first cases of collateral damage in the second Gulf war," said Robert Menard, the group's secretary general.

On Friday the non-governmental Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation reported 72 people had been detained. It was still trying to confirm reports of additional detentions around the country.

"The only crime committed by these prisoners is the promotion of ideas that are forbidden in Cuba," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.

The leadership of the Inter-American Press Association, currently meeting in San Salvador, El Salvador, expressed concerns about the arrest of contributors to De Cuba, a new monthly magazine with articles by independent reporters.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors sent a letter to Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque urging the release of those detained.

Meanwhile, some of the island's best-known critics remained free, including veteran rights activist Elizardo Sanchez; Oswaldo Paya, organizer of the Varela Project reform movement; and Vladimiro Roca, son of the late Cuban Communist Party founder Blas Roca.

Paya and other Varela Project activists collected more than 11,000 signatures of Cubans asking Fidel Castro's government for a referendum on new laws guaranteeing civil rights such as free expression and private business ownership.

The Varela Project initiative was later shelved by the nation's rubber-stamp parliament.

Independent journalists had also grown bolder in recent months, launching a new general interest magazine in a nation where virtually all media are state-controlled.

American diplomats also grew more active, offering Internet access to journalists at the U.S. Interests Section here, inviting dissidents to receptions, and giving them radios, pamphlets and other material the government considered subversive.

Cason, the mission's new chief, began meeting publicly with the opposition and criticizing Castro's government in comments to international journalists here.

Such assistance often does Cuban opponents more harm than good by giving the communist government an excuse to accuse them of collaborating with the enemy, said Manuel Cuesta Morrua of the Socialist Democratic Current, an opposition party.

"What could happen is that this could be used to close all the political spaces that the opposition has opened" in recent years, Cuesta said.

Fair Play for Cubans
Jay Bryant

August 4, 2003

In 1854, the despicable Franklin Pierce administration attempted to purchase the island of Cuba and make it a state – a slaveholding state. The idea was eventually to take over the whole Caribbean and create a sufficient number of slave states to offset the creation of the new free states which anyone with a map and a brain could see were on the western horizon.

A better chance for the annexation of Cuba came about in 1898, when the splendid little Spanish-American war resulted in U.S. control of that island, along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines; that same year, we also acquired Hawaii.

Think for a moment about those four island countries. Rank order them in terms of where you would prefer to live. Unless you're weird or something (or have an ethnic relationship to one place on the list), your list will go Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Cuba. In other words, the longer and closer the relationship of the islands with the United States, the better off they are.

(Hawaii became a full-fledged state; Puerto Rico continues in a commonwealth relationship; the Philippines were governed by the U.S. for half a century and then granted independence; Cuba became independent almost as soon as Teddy Roosevelt got back down San Juan Hill and has remained so ever since.)

Today, Cuba, that huge, beautiful and fertile island, fatherland to some of the most talented people in the world, is a place so awful that its citizens again and again risk death at sea in desperate attempts to escape.

Tourism, the island's largest industry, is abysmal, down 5% in 2002. This year's sugar cane harvest is so poor it may be the lowest since 1933. Thirteen percent of the population is clinically undernourished; official unemployment is around 12%, and that is almost surely understated; real wages are down 50% since 1989; university enrollments are down 46%; the credit rating is abominable (Moody's Caa1 -- "speculative grade, very poor"), and no wonder with defaults, missed payments and suspended credit lines glued to the nation's financial ship like barnacles.

A group of intrepid Americans is desperately trying to save a priceless trove of Hemingway manuscripts in the basement of Finca Vigia, Hemingway's hilltop retreat outside Havana, which have been left to molder in the humid Caribbean air. Cuba can't even manage to preserve its national treasures.

When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, President Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations and instituted the beginnings of the embargo, which persists to this day. The Kennedy Administration bungled the one serious attempt to wrest power from Castro, the amateurish Bay of Pigs invasion.

Ever since, the Cuban population of South Florida, growing year after year and never losing its dream of a free Cuba, but even so becoming Americans through and through, has been a bastion of Republican strength.

The three Cuban-American representatives in Congress are all Republicans, and it is estimated that the Cuban vote in Florida went 80% to George W. Bush in 2000.

That means, of course, that the Cuban vote in Florida is responsible for the fact that he is President today. One can go even farther; had it not been for the unconscionable actions of President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno in the Elian Gonzales case, Bush would have lost. He might still have received 80% of the Cuban vote, but there can be no doubt that the passion engendered by the case resulted in a sufficiently increased turnout to more than account for the handful of Florida votes by which he won.

Many people think that because of the importance of Florida politics, Bush should intervene with the bureaucrats in the State and Justice departments who have returned one group of twelve freedom-seekers to Cuba on July 21, satisfied that they had plea bargained Castro down from a death sentence to ten year prison terms. A second group of nineteen is awaiting its fate aboard a US Coast Guard cruiser.

We expected this sort of kowtowing to Castro from Clinton; that it persists in the Bush administration is little short of astonishing; brother Jeb, for one, is angry. "It's just not right," he says.

And that, in the end, is the point. Not that the President may lose the Cuban vote by his uncharacteristic timorousness. It is simply that it's just not right to send people back to slavery in a police state country when they have risked so much to escape. It's something Franklin Pierce (who famously sent escaped slaves back to their owners) and Bill Clinton (as with Elian) would have done, but, as Jeb says, it's not right.

Back in the early Castro days a bunch of left-wingers formed a communist front group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (Lee Harvey Oswald was a member) to build support for Castro in the US.

Today, fair play for Cubans means letting them into the US if they manage to get out of Cuba. It's hard to imagine there isn't some way to set up a system that keeps al- Qaeda terrorists out and lets freedom-loving Cubans in.

Veteran GOP media consultant Jay Bryant’s regular columns are available at www.theoptimate.com, and his commentaries may be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

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