Spain's delusional self-fulfilling prophecy

Spain's socialist government has taken the international lead, at least in Europe, in kowtowing to the butchers in Havana. Ignoring the Castro dictatorship's DNA — it was born to oppress and repress its own people — and its ability to tell its appeasers whatever they want to hear, Madrid insists Cuba will change its ways if the world would only talk to them.

Or other such nonsense.

The Spanish government has a lot at stake with its soft-shoe approach — starting with billions of Euros invested in Cuban tourism and other trade — so it is not surprising that the government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would jump on a change in a rather meaningless statistic — the number of political prisoners in Cuban jails — to conclude that in recent months there have been improvements in Cuba's human rights records.

Spain is wrong, because in reality the number of Cuban political prisoners should be counted not in the hundreds but in the thousands. But even if you accept that there are only 219 political prisoners, it belies how Raul Castro's stamp on how the dictatorship oppresses the Cuban people.

There hasn't been another "black spring," with dissidents sentenced to lengthy prison terms that would be too difficult for even the weakest appeaser to ignore. Instead, the raulista regime has resorted to more subtle, but just as revealing methods to crack down on the opposition. That the police release you with only a warning after a few hours or few days in detention does not make the dictatorship's repression any less reprehensible.

How anyone can be fooled to think that as long as there is one political prisoner, that Cuba's human rights record has improved, I don't know.

You'll have to ask the Spanish government, which apparently has seen enough.