Posted on 08/15/2003 1:07:16 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
MIAMI -- When Miriam Leiva visited her jailed husband Thursday, the Cuban dissident journalist tried to talk but his tongue was sluggish. Oscar Espinosa Chepe, already debilitated and gravely ill from a liver condition, had been given new pills by a government psychiatrist this week.
"Oscar doesn't even know what they gave him. We don't even know what kind of treatment they are giving him," Leiva said by phone from Havana. "They are all-powerful, and we are helpless."
As the health of more than a dozen jailed Cuban dissidents like Espinosa deteriorates, U.S. officials and human rights groups say the Cuban government is purposefully denying them proper medical care.
Their illnesses range from poor circulation to kidney trouble and gastritis, and "the Cuban authorities don't appear prepared" to provide them with adequate medication, said Eric Olson, Amnesty International's Americas advocacy director.
This week, the United States said 75 dissidents arrested this spring are being held in "appalling conditions, with very poor sanitation, contaminated water and nearly inedible food."
"The Cuban government appears to be going out of its way to treat these prisoners inhumanely," State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said.
The United States called on the Cuban government to let independent groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders evaluate the patients.
Doctors Without Borders hasn't had a Cuba program for three years because the group was not allowed to act independently, spokesman Kevin Phelan said.
In raids March 18, Cuban secret police arrested 28 journalists who practiced their craft in defiance of the draconian "Law 88" and other anti-press statutes. Castro may have calculated that world public opinion would be too distracted by the impending Iraq war to care. Instead, furious protests only increased after the journalists were tried in secret and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 14 to 27 years.
More recently, the Miami-based Inter American Press Association (IAPA) convened a meeting of Latin-American diplomats to urge them to increase pressure for the journalists' release. Havana-bound tourists in Paris received postcards titled, "Cuba: The World's Biggest Prison for Journalists" from Reporters Without Borders. The protest is working. The traditionally friendly European Union, for instance, imposed sanctions that so angered Castro he turned a celebration of the Cuban revolution's 50th anniversary into a rally against Europe.
Castro may have felt the deepest cut, however, from a recent action taken by the New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "Castro doesn't care what the U.S. says, he doesn't care what the EU says, but he does care what Latin American journalists think. And what we have done is send a Latin American journalist with a good reputation whose reporting is indisputable," said Carlos Lauria, CPJ's program coordinator for the Americas.
That journalist, Gustavo Gorriti of Peru, is known throughout Latin America for his independence. In the early 1990s when former President Alberto Fujimori imposed his "self-coup" in Peru, Gorriti was one of the first people imprisoned. In exile in Panama, his reporting for the daily La Prensa so unnerved the president there that Gorriti was ordered deported.
Gorriti has quietly visited the families of several of the imprisoned Cuban journalists, including the wife of Raul Rivero, an IAPA board member who was sentenced to 20 years. The prisoners are held in dank prisons far from their homes, fed poorly and are allowed visitors only once every three months. Gorriti found jailers are neglecting prisoners whose health has deteriorated, gravely so in the case of Oscar Espinosa Chepe.
Cuba's independent journalists are not much better off outside prison, Gorriti wrote: "While Castro boasts that no forced disappearances, no physical torture are inflicted on repressed opponents, the intense, widespread harassment, pressure, and jail conditions exerted on those opponents undoubtedly amount to psychological torture."
--Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerlad@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P. [End]
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Freedom Advocacy - Documenting familiar faces helping Castro.
Despicable that this is going on 90 miles south of Florida.
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