Uncommon Sense

Holding dictatorship to its word

From Committee to Protect Journalists:

New York, February 28, 2008—The Cuban government should release 22 imprisoned independent journalists in keeping with an international accord protecting free expression that was signed today by Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

Pérez Roque signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which provides “the right to freedom of expression” along with numerous other fundamental human rights. In a signing statement, however, the foreign minister said his government would submit what he called interpretations and reservations regarding certain provisions, according to international press reports. Pérez Roque did not specify the reservations or say when they would be disclosed.

He also signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights with similar caveats. The agreements, adopted in 1966 by the U.N. General Assembly, expand and codify the fundamental rights first outlined in the landmark 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees that “everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

Cuba is one of the world’s most censored nations , according to CPJ research. The Communist Party controls all news reporting through its propaganda-minded Department of Revolutionary Orientation. Press rights are granted only “in accordance with the goals of the socialist society,” according to its constitution. With 22 journalists behind bars , Cuba is also the world’s second leading jailers of journalists, behind only to China.

“We call on the Cuban government to uphold in letter and spirit the agreements it signed today and immediately release all jailed journalists,” said Joel Simon, CPJ Executive Director. “The actions of the Cuban government should faithfully reflect, without caveats, the fundamental free expression guarantees contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

Pérez Roque had indicated in December 2007 that his country would sign the pacts. Today’s signing was Pérez Roque’s first international appearance since Raúl Castro was officially named president on February 19.

Pérez Roque deflected questions about political prisoners at a U.N. press conference, but he took the opportunity to accuse the United States of impeding Cubans’ rights by maintaining its longstanding trade embargo. He later told reporters during an informal question-and-answer session that his government considers the political prisoners to be “mercenaries” in the service of the United States.

Of the 22 journalists jailed today in Cuba, 20 were detained during a massive crackdown against the island’s dissident movement and independent press in March 2003. They are held in inhumane conditions and their health is rapidly deteriorating, according to a December report by CPJ .

José Gabriel Ramón Castillo and Alejandro González Raga , two independent reporters who had been jailed since 2003, and two dissidents were released earlier this month and expelled to Spain with their families.

Read more about Cuba's imprisoned journalists — I count a few more than CPJ does — by clicking on the names on the right, under "March 18 Project."

Face of the year

Cuban dissident Omar Pernet Hernandez shows his collar-bone that he broke during his stay in prison and that is only partly healed during a press conference in Madrid last week. Pernet Hernandez, one of four Cuban dissidents who were released after spending years in prison in Cuba for their political beliefs and flew into Spain on Feb. 17, were among 75 dissidents arrested in a government crackdown on the opposition in 2003. \(AP Photo/Paul White)

Read more about Pernet, here.

Catholic Church enables dictatorship

What would Jesus have done?

That question rang through my head as I read, and re-read — because I couldn't believe what I was reading — this account of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's assessment of his just-completed visit to Cuba.

I have no interest in getting into a biblical or theological argument with the pope or his ministers. But it is difficult to imagine Jesus, who tossed out the moneychangers and otherwise spoke truth to earthly power, would meet a tyrant like Raúl Castro and as Bertone did, praise him as a "realistic" man, "open to discuss all issues and concerned about maintaining the values, ideals."

Considering the new dictator's "values" and "ideals" — "godless communism," one-party rule, repression of basic human rights, the harassing and jailing of those who dare challenge the regime, etc. — I cannot imagine that Jesus would have stayed silent and not speak on behalf of the oppressed.

However, that is exactly what Bertone on the topic of greatest concern for this blog.

Bertone advocated for the pastoral needs of all Cuban prisoners, not just political dissidents — but he was otherwise silent about the horrors of the gulag.

He did not demand, much less request, the release of prisoners jailed not because of any crime they committed, but because of their beliefs — among them, their faith in Christ and adherence to "values" and "ideals" supposely championed by the church.

Bertone stuck by his diplomatic duties, and not by those I thought came with being a successor to Christ's apostles. Instead, he advocated for the church's earthly interests in Cuba, i.e. greater access to the media, and even gave the new dictator a public relations victory, with a renewed promise that the church would lobby for the "elimination or at least a reduction" of American and European sanctions against Havana.

In praising Castro and remaining silent about political prisoners, Bertone stained himself, and the church, with the blood of the dictatorship's victims.

Almost as horrific as the Cuban dictatorship itself are those individuals, nations and institutions who enable it. Whether by actively supporting it with words and deeds, or as Bertone showed, by allowing its abuses of basic human rights to go unchallenged and otherwise remaining silent in the face of the evil it represents.

I cannot imagine that Jesus would have done the same.

Repression, Raúl style

Cuban police marked the coronation of new dictator Raúl "Little Brother" Castro on Sunday by manhandling a group of dissidents trying to mark the anniversaries of two much more significant events in Cuban history, the Grito de Baire in 1895 and the murder of the four Brothers to the Rescue in 1996. The marchers were led by former political prisoner Jorge Luis García Pérez “Antúnez,” who since his release last year has refused to back down from his opposition to the dictatorship, or to call out those think something has really changed on the island.

“That is the change that Raúl Castro’s regime keeps talking about. That is the change that perhaps some gullible people who visit our country and play the dictatorship’s game have been fooled to believe in. That is the change they speak of: the beatings; the beatings to innocent men and women. Don’t think that with these beatings and arrests, this government will carry-out any changes. On the 24th, while Raúl Castro prepared his assembly and his electoral farce, we, the opposition, were in another province and will continue expanding our civil resistance acts,” Antúnez said.

Cuban Democratic Directorate has the full story.

Vatican falls short

Cuban political prisoners and their families will have to look beyond Rome for high-power support for their cause, if Vatican Secretary of State's tepid expression of semi-solidarity with them is any indicator.

From the Associated Press:

The Vatican's No. 2 official expressed the Roman Catholic Church's concern about prisoners in Cuba during a meeting with President Raul Castro, but stopped short of asking the communist government to free inmates.

Raul Castro's meeting Tuesday with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was the new Cuban president's first with a visiting dignitary since taking over from his 81-year-old brother Fidel two days ago. Bertone is Pope Benedict XVI's secretary of state.

Wrapping up a six-day visit to the communist-run island, the cardinal said the relationship between the Church and Cuba's government "will always be challenging, but also full of opportunities to promote the well-being of Cubans."

He said that during the closed-door meeting, with the "utmost respect for the sovereignty of the country and its citizens, I expressed to President Raul Castro the Church's worries for prisoners and their families."

Diplomatic protocols sometimes require such non-speak. But I've also thought that the church — which is my church — was better than that, willing at any point to use the moral authority it is suppose to represent to speak on behalf of those who cannot be heard, to speak truth to power.

Once again in Cuba, the church has fallen way short of this ideal.

Gay bashing

On top of everything else about it, the Cuban dictatorship is homophobic, too.

Julián Armando Soto, a gay rights activist in Havana, reports that Cuban police Saturday rounded up 34 homosexuals for "putting in danger" security for a Mass being said by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. At the time of the arrests, the detainees were either gathered in a park or in front of a movie theater.

"We were on Prado street, and the Mass was at Cathedral Plaza, which is about 1,800 meters away," said Ángela Gorrero, 37, who identified herself as a lesbian, as she was held at a local police station. "Also, look at the ticket, I was about to enter the theater when I was detained."

Also, there is a separate report that police swept in on homosexuals enjoying a beach north of Havana.

"There is no name for the police abuse. Look at my legs. I fell while running on the reefs on the coast so that I would not be imprisoned. They grabbed me, and it didn't matter to them that I was bleeding," said Rigoberto Soto Espinosa, 23, a university economics student.

The report notes that police left fishermen and straight bathers alone.

It is tempting to dismiss these reports as nothing special. This is how the dictatorship treats all Cubans who dare deviate from the official party line.

But the recent gay bashing — which was not out of the unusual, considering that more than 4,000 homosexuals were fined or jailed last year in Havana alone — also illustrates the hypocrisy that lies in the rot of a so-called revolution.

The Castros have cast themselves as champions for the little guy, and in a macho culture like Cuba's, perhaps no one is smaller than the homosexual. Well, in Cuba — even with the new dictator's daughter talking a good game — the homosexual is not immune from the worst the revolution has to offer.

You don't have to be gay or even accepting of the gay lifestyle to see that as long as gays are oppressed as described in recent report, Cuban society is that much less free. Their challenge is no greater nor no less than that before all Cubans struggling to be free.

(Cross-posted at Babalú.)

Former prisoner refuses deal with police

The Cuban dictatorship, and its apologists, want Cubans to accept a Faustian bargain: In exchange for giving up all their rights — free speech and the like — Castro and Co. give them free health care, etc. The reality of Cuban health care makes that a very bad deal, but on one level, it's understandable that people who don't know better, and/or who are scared to death of being sent to prison, might take it.

Well, former political prisoner Abel López Pérez is not playing.

López, who lives in Guantanamo, on Friday started a hunger strike to protest a police move to block him from traveling to Havana for a medical appointment. The police said they had no complaints about him and would let him go to Havana — if he first took down from the front of his house posters and stickers declaring, "I don't cooperate with the dictatorship" and "I want change," according to a report by independent journalist Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, posted at Bitácora Cubana.

López had placed the signs after he was detained while attending a meeting of former political prisoners.

"State Security harasses me and represses me because of my position against the current regime," López said.

López, president of the Resurrección Martiana human rights group, was arrested in November 2005 and sentenced to 3 years in prison for "disrespecting" Fidel Castro. He received parole before the end of his sentence for health reasons.

Who is Raul Castro?

How to describe the new dictator of Cuba?

Three words.

Cold. Blooded. Killer.

Cuba Archive, via Net for Cuba, has the details:

Raúl Castro, as longtime member of Cuba’s Council of State, has been signing execution orders for years. But, his killing career began early on. In 1956, while in exile in Mexico, he murdered a former comrade. During the revolutionary struggle in the mountains, he executed deserters and informants. In the early days of the Revolution, while in charge of the Oriente province, he had hundreds of men killed. In one day alone, he ordered at least 72 men executed without trial in the city of Santiago. All throughout the night of January 12, 1959 and into the following day, successive groups of men were lined up in front of ditches at San Juan Hill and shot by firing squads. Raúl is reported to have gleefully delivered the coup d’grace on a few. Afterwards, a bulldozer was brought in to cover the mass graves. Among the victims was policeman Benito Cortés, an American citizen born in Puerto Rico and father of five. In 1966, Raúl had the bodies exhumed, encased in concrete, and dumped into deep waters off the coast of Cuba.

Cuba Archive has documented dozens of people, including many children, killed attempting to escape Cuba with Raúl in a leading role. His Air Force carried out the Canimar River Massacre of July 6, 1980, when dozens were murdered. Many more unarmed civilians are believed to have suffered similar fate at the hand of special Air Force units dedicated to spotting and sinking rafts. Like countless others, on January 19, 1994, two young men -Iskander Maleras and Luis Angel Valverde- were killed by Cuban border guards stationed around the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo operating under Raúl’s direct orders to shoot. He rewarded their deed with medals and promotions.

As Defense Minister, Raúl Castro is responsible for war crimes in and out of Cuba. During the rural uprising of the sixties, his armed forces set fire and executed hundreds of prisoners on the spot. During the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, five prisoners were executed shortly after their capture; nine were deliberately asphyxiated in a trailer truck. The toll of victims multiplies over the course of decades with Cuba’s international military incursions in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Intentional attacks on civilian populations in Angola are part of his legacy.

That Raúl’s promotion happens on the anniversary of one of his noteworthy crimes is not without significance. On February 24, 1996, as dozens of members of Cuba’s peaceful opposition were rounded up, Cuban MIGs shot down two unarmed civilian airplanes in international airspace while flying a humanitarian search and rescue mission for the non-profit group “Brothers to the Rescue.” Three U.S. citizens, including a Vietnam War veteran, and a young man formerly rescued by the group perished. The incident was condemned by the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal and the Cuban government was found by a U.S. Superior Court to have committed premeditated murder.

For more information on the dictatorship's victims, visit Cuba Archive.

Fidel's legacy

Still No. 2

He may be "president" in name and for those who think his "election" is a harbinger of real change in Cuba, but the reality is, not so much:

In his first speech as leader, Raul Castro said he would continue to consult Fidel Castro, who stepped down on Tuesday because of poor health, on important decisions of state.

"The mandate of this legislature is clear ... to continue strengthening the revolution at a historic moment," he said.

He added that he was accepting the job on the condition that Fidel Castro continued to be the "commander in chief of the revolution" -- a title created for him during his guerrilla uprising before the 1959 revolution.

"Fidel is Fidel. Fidel is irreplaceable and the people will continue his work when he is no longer physically around."

(H/T for the photo to Claudia.)