Uncommon Sense

Cuban shakedown

Another day, another journalist arrested, questioned and then released by the Cuban secret police.

This time, it was nothing more than a robbery, with the officers shaking down the journalist and his wife for some money.

On March 15, independent journalist Odelín Alfonso and his wife Jacqueline Cutiño Leite were stopped in the street as they tried to visit the home of another journalist, Julio Aleaga Pesant, according to a story by Luis Cino posted at CubaNet. The officers told Alfonso and Cutiño that they had heard that the couple was bringing money to Aleaga from the Miami-based news agency.

When the couple refused to hand the money over, they were arrested and taken to a police station.

At the station, the couple were placed in separate interrogation cells and the officers confiscated 92 pesos. They also stripsearched Cutiño to see if she was carrying any more money.

The couple were released after about seven hours.

That's when Cutiño got mad.

According to Cino's story, Cutiño has written a letter complaining about what happened to top Cuban officials, including interior minister Abelardo Colomé Ibarra.

She said the police officer's actions against her and her husband was nothing more than a "armed assault."

Venezuela, you were warned

Wannabe dictator Hugo Chavez has unveiled his latest plans for the communization of Venezuela:

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez said his administration plans to create "collective property" as part of a sweeping movement toward socialism, and that officials would move to seize control of large ranches and redistribute lands deemed "idle."

The Venezuelan leader, speaking Sunday night on his television and radio program Hello President, said the government was "advancing quickly" with a concept of "social, or collective, property" to be included in forthcoming constitutional changes.

"It's property that belongs to everyone and it's going to benefit everyone," said Chavez.

Of course, as the experience in Cuba and other communist countries shows, when the dictatorship says a power grab is for the benefit of "everyone," it really benefits no one, except for those with the power.

If they don't already know that, the Venezuelans who re-elected Chavez last year will learn it soon enough, and painfully so.

Oscar Biscet, for Cuba

The campaign for Cuban freedom, at least in the United States, is hobbled by several factors, including:

— The lack of distribution, in English, of news reports and other information from island-based independent journalists and other dissdents. Several sites publish Spanish-language versions — my favorites include Payo Libre, Miscelaneas de Cuba and CubaNet — but they go ignored by the English-language MSM in the United States. It's hard to tell the stories if you can't understand what you are reading. Some blogs fill in the gaps, but the reality is that it's still large newspapers and television broadcasters that have the best potential to reach a mass audience in the United States.

— The conventional wisdom that the United States, not Fidel Castro is responsible for the suffering of the Cuban people. This is manifested in efforts to remove the remaining vestiges of what is allegedly an embargo.

— The lack of a widely recognized leader, in which Cubans tired of Castro and communism can place their faith — a Cuban Nelson Mandela, if you will, with the charisma and character to lead a nation out of darkness.

The first two are challenges to address on another day. Instead, let me start with the easy one.

Cuba does have someone like Mandela, with the vision to lead a nation and a personal story in which Cubans, and the friends of Cuban freedom overseas, can place their faith.

His name is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet.

Earlier this month, BosNewsLife profiled Biscet:

HAVANA, CUBA — One of Cuba’s most prominent Christian prisoners, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, has said he has been forced to watch abuses "that threaten the decorous behavior of a civilized society," but stressed he trusts God to one day end his "unjust sentence" in a letter published by BosNewsLife Saturday, March 3.

Dr. Biscet, a Christian pro-life activist and medical doctor who opposes abortion and the death penalty as well as the Communist regime, was sentenced to 25 years on April 7, 2003, in a massive crackdown on human rights activists across the island.

He earlier received a three-year jail term on charges of "disrespecting patriotic symbols ," including hanging a Cuban flag upside down during a news conference.

Human rights group Amnesty International and other organizations consider Dr. Biscet, who also heads the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, a prisoner of conscience. Cuban leader Fidel Castro has reportedly called him a "crazy little man.’’

VERY DIFFICULT

In a letter to his wife obtained by BosNewsLife, Biscet, 46, said it has been "very difficult for common prisoners to serve a prison sentence, all the more so for a man of peace confined for exercising his right to freedom of thought."

He explained that during all these years in prison, he witnessed "ignominious things" he was unable to describe due to their perversity; "acts that threaten the decorous behavior of a civilized society." However despite the apparent difficult situation in the in the maximum security Prison Combinado del Este in Havana, Dr. Biscet stressed he was not giving up his Christian faith.

"I am not frightened nor will I go back a step in regards to my ideas. I am here by my own free will to condemn and not to retract myself and will serve this unjust sentence until God in the Highest puts an end to it," said Dr Biscet who has apparently been pressured by authorities to give up his Christian faith and human rights views.

"Everything has been so excessive and arbitrary that, the tribunal that condemned me, did not pronounce the sentence until three days after the trial had concluded," he also wrote his wife. "At that moment I felt their disloyalty to justice. I am convinced today of the fear they felt when they convicted an innocent man and put him to live with the scum of society," Dr. Biscet added.

Reportedly, there are "elections" scheduled in Cuba next year; Castro, according to his flunkies, is recovering so well from his illness that he is likely to run for "re-election."

There may be no better challenger than Oscar Elias Biscet.

But obviously, he will need some help.

An online campaign to help get elected has begun:

Since there are "elections" in Cuba next year, why not find an alternative candidate, say, a child of the revolution, maybe black (but race was not an issue), but most important, had to be against the system. The person people almost immediately came up with was Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet.

Dr. Biscet is the Cuban regime's worst nightmare, but the biggest challenge remains getting the rest of the Cuban people to learn about him. While its done a good job of raising his profile outside of Cuba, our State Department has failed to raise his profile inside of Cuba - where it matters most. Focus people at Foggy Bottom, think outside the box and do more than hold Cuba Commission meetings. Act.

We must use the technology, resourcefulness, and power of the U.S. to help fuel the passion and ingenuity of the Cuban people. Give them a reason to fight. They will do so. Biscet will give them that energy.

I am reluctant to sign on to such publicity efforts, but publicity is exactly what the campaign for Cuban freedom needs, especially in the United States. One way to do it is to make the story personal. That is, it needs to be made about one person whose name, whether it be a political prisoner like Nelson Mandela, a labor organizer like Lech Walesa or a human rights activist like Oscar Biscet, becomes inextricably linked with a nation's destiny.

No, Biscet's name will not be on a Cuban ballot soon, and I am not ready to say he would make the best president of a newly free Cuba. But that's not the point.

The point is, the world, especially the fickle American public, will not back an alternative to Castro until it can identifty with that one person whose courage and grace represent a viable alternative. Part of winning the struggle is winning the public relations campaign for the hearts and minds of the international, especially the American, public. Do that, and it becomes much easier for the world's democracies to stand up to tyranny.

It happened in the 1980s in Poland, with Lech Walesa, and especially in South Africa, with Nelson Mandela, a former terrorist.

In Cuba, it might just happen again, with Oscar Elias Biscet.

For more about Biscet, visit Free-Biscet.org.

Tricky Ricky has some nerve

Alarcon is a joke

Earlier today, I dismissed a French academic's attack on Reporters Without Borders, and simultaneous defense of the Castro dictatorship, as the work of an idiot. Admittedly, my retort was not too sophisticated, but the piece was not worth much more of time or energy than that.

About the same time, The Nation, one of the bastions of the American left, posted an opinion column by Washington editor David Corn, who similarly dismisses Cuban parliament speaker Ricardo Alarcon's recent commentary on C. Wright Mills, the author of "Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba," a book published in the early 1960s considered sympathetic to Fidel Castro and his revolution.

Corn writes:

Alarcon decries the FBI for having attempted to undermine Mills' book. The Bureau unsuccessfully tried, Alarcon notes, to persuade Mills' publisher to put out a competing book criticizing the Cuban revolution. The FBI was spying on Mills at this time, and Mills, according to FBI files, believed he might be targeted for assassination by the FBI or another American agency. "Mills's friends," Alarcon writes, "recall that he was concerned not only for himself but for his family, and that he had indeed acquired a handgun, which he even kept next to his bed while he slept." After Mills suffered a heart attack, Castro invited him to recuperate in Cuba. Alarcon's narrative: while the FBI chased Mills, Castro sought to help the noble intellectual. "C. Wright Mills paid a high price for his passionate love of truth," Alarcon declares.

Alarcon's hypocrisy, Corn adds, is overwhelming.

Mills was hounded for challenging the conventional wisdom of his day. But Alarcon's concern for the plight of this one author is comical -- in a dark fashion -- for he heads a government that does not allow its citizens to challenge openly the conventional wisdom of the Castro regime. There is no free press in Alarcon's country, no freedom of expression. There is no "passionate love of truth" among the rulers of Cuba. Alarcon is crying for Mills, while his government does even worse to Cuban writers than the FBI did to Mills. (emphasis added)

Corn concludes:

Imagine a Cuban who wants to write and publish a Cuban version of "The Power Elite" (ed note: another book by Mills). That person would be locked up in a modern-day dungeon by Alarcon and his comrades. Alarcon, thus, has no standing to bemoan the harassment of Mills or to pontificate about the glories of pursuing establishment-defying truths. (Stating the obvious about the gross absence of political and human rights within Cuba should not be equated with support for the economic embargo maintained by the Bush administration against Cuba. The wrongs of each side do not justify the other.)

"Today," Alarcon writes, "Cuba forges a path to craft its own unique socialist system, rooted on its own historical experience and with the active participation of its people." Not the active participation of anyone who wants to write or report news and ideas not sanctioned by Alarcon and his colleagues. It takes nerve for a person who runs one of the ten most censored countries to praise a pioneering and influential free thinker. That's why Alarcon's accolade for Mills is best read as farce. (emphasis added)

Read the whole thing at Corn's blog.

It happened in Poland, it can happen in Cuba

As a high school and college student in the 1980s, I never imagined that communism would fall and that Poland and the other captive nations of Eastern Europe would again be free. I was wrong, and thankfully so, and today it is that lesson that gives me hope that one day, perhaps very soon, Cuba will be free.

Those in Cuba who seek that freedom have allies in the form of former Polish presidents Lech Walesa, who stood up to tyranny and prevailed, and Aleksander Kwasniewski.

Here is their "letter to the people of Cuba":

It is almost 20 years since Poland rejoined the large family of world democracies. The events of 1989 and the transformation of the political system of our homeland started at the time have become a historic example of peaceful change. In due course, this became a model for many other nations seeking a new path to follow.

Today, we, the individuals who then sat on the opposite sides of the ''round table,'' are extremely proud of those achievements and fully confident that opting for agreement for the benefit and future of Poland -- despite some resentment and concern among the circles we represented -- was the right choice.

May these words, which we write together, along with the example of a free and progressing Poland, serve as testimony to the victory of agreement over conflict, dialogue over quarrel, good over evil.

While enjoying the prosperity of our own country, we bear no less moral responsibility for all those recesses of our globe where people continue to suffer shortages of freedom and bread, where being in opposition is seen as a betrayal of the raison d'état, where prosperity remains the privilege of the few.

At this time, on the fourth anniversary of the Cuban ''black spring,'' the events that delivered yet another blow against the democratic opposition in Cuba, we send our encouraging message first to all the suffering and humiliated, known and unknown heroes to whom freedom remains but a dream.

The time of change is imminent. The breath of awakening democracy in Cuba can be felt even here, in Poland, thousands of miles away from you. Be persistent and in solidarity, be patient and indomitable, ready to construct common future for all Cubans, so that your beautiful country can become a friendly home to all those of your citizens who today inhabit the island and those who have been forced to abandon it.

We are going to provide you with our support in this effort. Both in word and in action.

Meanwhile, let us remind the Cuban authorities that the time of tyrants and running the country while following ''the only right line'' is coming to an end. A triumphant march of democracy cannot be stopped. We in Poland know this better than anyone else.

Hence, our address to you, which comes from distant Warsaw and appeals to your sense of responsibility, patriotism and love for your nation. You are faced with a great opportunity to restore democracy in Cuba, an opportunity that you must not waste. If you opt for a different solution, this time history will not absolve you!

(H/T to Blog for Cuba.)

Cuba Idiot Watch - Salim Lamrani

The idiocy comes in French, too, in the form of this hit piece on Reporters Without Borders, which has been consistent in attacking Cuban government restrictions on the free press and use of the Internet.

Read RSF's coverage of Cuba here, here and here.

After reading this Palm Beach Post story this morning, I'll put my money with RSF, not Salim Lamrani:

MIAMI — An anti-Castro dissident in Cuba is speaking by telephone to a journalist in Miami.

"Give me your e-mail so I can send you some information," says Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, who lives in Ciego de Avila, about 250 miles from Havana. "But it will take a couple of weeks to get it to you."

"Why so long?" the reporter asks.

"Because we don't have computers and we have to drive to Havana, where one of the embassies lets us use theirs," Gonzalez Leiva says. "It's a long trip for us, and we only do it every couple of weeks."

As Diane Cabrera, a Miami anti-Castro activist in contact with dissidents, puts it: "In Cuba, e-mail and snail mail are the same thing."

Foes of the Cuban government say Internet connection in Cuba always has been difficult, but lately it has gotten even worse.

In June 1996, the first official measure to address Internet use, Decree 209, called it a technology of "selective character" and stressed that national security could be at risk.

By January 2002, it was illegal for private citizens to buy computers or printers without official permission. Government officials eventually announced that unauthorized Internet use was punishable by up to five years in prison.

During the past year, control has become even more explicit. In August, longtime Communist Party hard-liner Ramiro Valdes was named minister of technology and telecommunications. That was shortly after Fidel Castro stepped down from power because of illness.

Valdes, one of Castro's original fighters in the Cuban mountains during the 1950s, previously served as the interior minister, in charge of the secret police and other tools of Cuban political control.

Last month, Valdes made his most extensive public comments about the use of the World Wide Web by Cubans.

The Internet, "the wild colt of new technologies, can and must be controlled," he said Feb. 12.

Read the rest of the story here.

Cuban journalist asks question of the day

Cuban independent journalist Pedro Enrique Martínez Machado and his wife Nancy Fuentes Santan were arrested and detained by Cuban police for about an hour on March 20, according to a story by journalist Tania Maceda Guerra, posted at Payo Libre.

During questioning, officers threatened Martínez, 55, with a long prison sentence if he continued to publish "false news."

Which lead Martínez to ask: "Who accuses the official newspapers, Granma, Juventud Rebelde and Sierra Maestra when they publish their many lies?"

This is not the first time Martínez has been arrested. In November, police detained him for about seven hours, during which they seized his address book and other items.

Embargo? What embargo?

Yes, Cuban purchases of American food mean dollars are going out of Cuba, instead of going in — which is largely prohibited by the so-called "embargo." It's hard to see how the Castro regime benefits, unless, of course, it turns around and sells the food on the black market for a steep profit.

But there is something wrong — American farmers are being paid with money stolen from the Cuban people — or in the very least, bizarre about the United States being the island's No. 1 supplier of food.

The most absurd part is that while one American law is making it possible for American farmers to profit from sales to Cuba, another American law limits the ability of Cuban Americans in the U.S. to travel to Cuba to visit relatives or to send them money.

The priorities are skewed, indeed.

Arnaldo Ramos Lauzerique, Political Prisoner of the Week, 3/25/07 (UPDATED)

UPDATED, Nov. 14, 2010 — Arnaldo Ramos Lauzerique was released from prison on Nov. 13, 2010, under a deal struck by Spain, the Catholic Church and the Castro dictatorship. He was allowed to stay in Cuba, instead of being forced into exile.

In communist Cuba, being independent increases the chances of you ending up in jail as an enemy of the state.

Independent journalists.

Independent librarians.

And in the case of Arnaldo Ramos Lauzerique, being an independent economist earned him a visit from State Security during the "black spring" of 2003 and subsequently, an 18-year sentence in Fidel Castro's gulag.

Ramos, who is in his mid-60s, is an associate of dissident leader Marta Beatriz Roque, also an economist arrested during the "black spring" but later released.

Net for Cuba has more on Ramos' "crimes":

The communist econonic model has failed in every country in which it has been implemented. Cuba has not been exempt from this reality. The government does not divulge its economic objectives nor any information ... regarding the Cuban economy.

Independent Cuban economist Marta Beatriz Roque founded the Instituto de Economía with Ramos Lauzerique and others. This group of economists have exposed the farce that is the Cuban economy. How the communist government uses false statistics when reporting to the people and to international organizations.

In prison, Ramos has suffered brutal treatment by his jailers. In August 2005, for example, two other political prisoners, Adolfo Fernández Saínz and Alfredo Domínguez Batista went on a hunger strike after guard severely beat Ramos, according to Payo Libre.

In February 2005, U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart spoke on behalf of Ramos on the floor of the U.S. House:

Mr. Ramos Lauzerique is a member of the Cuban Institute of Independent Economists and the Assembly to Promote Civil Society. He believes that Cuba should be and will be free from the nightmare that is the Castro regime. He believes that the Cuban people are entitled to human rights, democracy, and freedom from tyranny. Because he believes in freedom and because he actively and peacefully advocates for liberty, Mr. Ramos Lauzerique has been targeted by the despotic regime.

In March 2003, as part of the tyrant's heinous island wide crackdown on peaceful, pro- democracy activists, Mr. Ramos Lauzerique was arrested by the regime. In a sham trial, he was sentenced to 18 years in the totalitarian gulag.

Mr. Ramos Lauzerique is over 60 years old and languishing in the revolting, hellish gulag. However, being confined in these inhuman conditions has not stopped him from continuing to demand justice for the people of Cuba and his fellow political prisoners. Amnesty International reports that Mr. Ramos Lauzerique has participated in at least two hunger strikes while imprisoned in Castro's dungeon. He has undertaken these strikes to bring attention to the repulsive squalor of the gulag, the lack of medical attention, and the barbaric punishment cells; all in defiance of the machinery of repression that has unjustly confined him in these repugnant conditions.

One of the surest indicators of the repressive nature of the Castro regime is the jailing of more than 300 political prisoners. To illustrate that reality, Uncommon Sense each week profiles one prisoner. There also is a Political Prisoner archive on the left sidebar. To suggest a prisoner for a profile, send me an e-mail.

For profiles of imprisoned Cuban journalists and related information, read the March 18 Project.

Burn in hell, already

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