30 March 2003. Thanks to DH, DM, RH.
The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2003
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
HAVANA (AP)--Cuba's communist-run government announced it had rounded up several dozen opponents and slapped new restrictions on U.S. diplomats' movements as already bad relations between the two countries worsened.
An official statement read on state television's regular evening news program said Cuba's actions were the result of "the shameful and repeated attitude by the chief of Washington's diplomatic mission in Havana, James Cason, to foment the internal counterrevolution."
Offices at the U.S. Interests Section were closed late Tuesday and attempts to reach American diplomats here for comment were unsuccessful. The U.S. State Department last week had reported the travel restrictions on its diplomats in Havana, but the Cuban government did not confirm the new measures until Tuesday.
Havana's actions are just the latest in an increasingly ugly exchange of barbs between the two governments, which have had no regular diplomatic relations for more than four decades.
Veteran human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez said by telephone late Tuesday he had confirmed the detentions of at least 10 dissidents and was working to confirm reports of another 20 or so picked up by state security agents.
"No nation, no matter how powerful, has the right to organize, finance and serve as a central barracks for subverting the constitutional order and violating the law by conspiring, threatening security and destroying the independence of another country," said the Cuban government statement,
Havana in recent weeks has become increasingly incensed with Cason, who last month made a high-profile visit to a meeting of dissidents and spoke with international journalists gathered there. Since arriving here about six months ago, Cason has met with opposition members around the island and last week allowed a group of dissident journalists to use his official residence for a meeting.
Cason has said he is merely trying to promote democracy and human rights in the Caribbean nation.
"The Cuban government is afraid: afraid of freedom of conscience, afraid of freedom of expression, afraid of human rights," Cason told journalists during last month's meeting with the opposition.
President Fidel Castro responded shortly thereafter by criticizing Cason's public appearance and comments. "Anyone can see that this is a shameless and a defiant provocation," he said.
The U.S. State Department in Washington then weighed in calling Castro's criticisms of Cason "derogatory."
Cuban officials have also become increasingly upset about a new solitary confinement lockdown on five convicted Cuban spies serving time in American prisons.
The five were convicted in Miami of trying to infiltrate U.S. military bases and Cuban exile groups in Florida. Their sentences range from 15 years to life.
Cuban authorities have lionized the men as patriotic heroes and say they were merely working to prevent Cuban exile groups from launching terrorist acts against their homeland.
The U.S. State Department last week announced it was restricting the freedom of travel of Cuban diplomats in the United States, responding to curbs imposed by Havana on U.S. officials in Cuba.
American government sources said they believe the Cuban government made the first move as a means of cutting back on Cason's extensive travels across the island.
Updated March 18, 2003 11:03 p.m.
The Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2003
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration expressed outrage Wednesday over Cuba's arrest of dozens of dissidents and also defended the top U.S. diplomat in Havana against allegations that he was carrying out subversive activities.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called the arrests "an appalling act of intimidation against those who seek freedom and democratic change in Cuba ."
He demanded that the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which opened its annual six-week meeting in Geneva on Monday, censure Cuba for the arrests.
"These people have been arrested for simply speaking out, one of the most basic internationally accepted human rights," Mr. Boucher said.
Even by the normally tendentious standards of the public exchanges between Washington and Havana, the discourse lately has been ugly.
An official statement read on Cuban state television's evening news Tuesday accused the chief of Washington's diplomatic mission in Havana, James Cason, of trying "to foment the internal counterrevolution."
"No nation, no matter how powerful, has the right to organize, finance and serve as a center for subverting the constitutional order," the statement said.
The criticism was an apparent reference to the travels around the island of U.S. diplomats, especially Mr. Cason. According to U.S. officials, Mr. Cason has traveled 6,200 miles since arriving in Cuba last summer.
Mr. Boucher said the activities of Mr. Cason and his colleagues are no different from those of U.S. diplomats elsewhere.
Mr. Cason, he said, "has visited with Cuban people in their homes. He's visited independent libraries. He's visited other independent voices."
He added that Cuban government comments suggest that many of the detainees were arrested for meeting with U.S. diplomats.
Mr. Boucher said the crackdown on the dissidents is Cuba's response to the growing opposition movement on the island and the increasing desire of change among the population.
"We call on the Cuban government to release them immediately and for the international community to join us in demanding their release," Mr. Boucher said.
Cuba's best known dissident, Oswaldo Paya, was not arrested. He gained international attention last year through a petition drive aimed at promoting liberal reforms.
The nongovernmental Reporters Without Borders said at least a dozen of those arrested were independent journalists.
President Fidel Castro has delivered personal attacks on Mr. Cason, calling his behavior "bizarre" and sharply criticizing him for meeting with a dissident group in Havana on Feb. 24.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva has been a U.S.-Cuba battleground for years over U.S.-backed attempts to censure Cuba for its rights record. This year is expected to be no exception.
Mr. Boucher called on the commission to condemn the arrests in the strongest terms.
"Cuba has again demonstrated that it is not fit to sit on this commission," Mr. Boucher said.
In an apparent bid to curb the travels of Mr. Cason and his colleagues, Cuba demanded last week that all U.S. diplomats receive prior approval of for travel beyond the 434-square mile unrestricted area encompassing the city of Havana and Havana province.
Beforehand, notification of Cuban authorities was required but not approval. Within 24 hours, the State Department, in the interests of reciprocity, imposed the same restrictions on travel by Cuban diplomats in Washington.
Both countries operate out of small diplomatic missions that are below the embassy level. Formal diplomatic relations were broken in 1961.
Copyright © 2003 the Associated Press
Updated March 19, 2003 8:03 p.m.
The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2003
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
HAVANA (AP)--Cuban state security agents Thursday arrested opposition members completing the first week of a liquid fast to demand the release of a fellow dissident, intensifying a crackdown by Fidel Castro's government on dissent.
The arrests raised the number of detentions during three days of sweeps on government opponents to at least 55, the independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation said. The group was trying to verify reports of at least 15 other arrests.
Relatives of opponent Marta Beatriz Roque confirmed she was among a small group of people detained around 6 a.m. in a home where dissidents began the fast March 11. The identities and the exact number of those detained with her were uncertain.
The group had vowed to consume only liquids - yogurt, soup and juices - until a well-known dissident, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, is released from jail. Biscet was imprisoned in December during a protest in nearby Matanzas Province.
Human rights advocates said the detentions signaled a widening crackdown on Castro's political opponents that began Tuesday after the government accused them of being traitors and conspiring with U.S. diplomats in Cuba.
"It's clear the repression has extended," said Elizardo Sanchez, a leading rights activist.
In Washington, the special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the Organization of American States, Eduardo Bertoni, condemned the detention of journalists in Cuba.
He said the detentions were a violation of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.
More than a dozen of those arrested are independent journalists and press groups around the world have condemned their detention.
The Cuban government accused dozens of dissidents of being linked to Washington's chief diplomat in Havana, James Cason, who has repeatedly met in public with opposition leaders in what he says is an effort to encourage democracy on the island.
His appearances with dissidents has added further strain to already tense U.S.-Cuba relations.
In announcing the first wave of arrests earlier this week, the Cuban government also said it was restricting travel on the island by U.S. diplomats.
Cuba has said it will move to put the dissidents on trial, and opposition activists here fear those arrested will be tried under a much-criticized law passed three years ago called the "Law against National Independence."
The law carries sentences of up to 10 years and makes it a crime to publish "subversive" materials provided by the U.S. government.
The U.S. Interest Section here distributes shortwave radios and a wide range of books and pamphlets throughout Cuba aimed a promoting American culture, democracy and human rights.
Yoel Alfonso, a nephew of Beatriz Roque, said some 30 security agents searched their Havana home early Thursday for more than two hours, seizing books, a typewriter, and a fax machine along with papers.
She said the search was carried out peacefully, and officers told her Beatriz would be carried to the Villa Marista jail in Havana.
Other dissidents and family members have recounted similar accounts.
Cuba's communist government maintains it holds no political prisoners, only common criminals, and generally characterizes dissidents as "counterrevolutionaries."
The precise number of members belonging to organized opposition groups is unknown, but they are believed to be in the hundreds.
"We don't know how far this crackdown is going to go," said Sanchez, a veteran human rights activist. "The Cuban government wants to silence the dissident movement. But that isn't possible."
At least 65 dissidents have been rounded up in the three-day sweep that began after President Fidel Castro's government claimed some of its opponents were conspiring with U.S. diplomats to undermine the island's leadership.
Updated March 20, 2003 11:25 p.m.
The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2003
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
HAVANA (AP)--Cuban state security agents continued their massive roundup of dissidents Friday in a campaign to root out a small, but growing organized opposition that has increasingly challenged the island's Communist system.
While the world was riveted by the blasts rocking Baghdad, the list of dissidents confirmed arrested in the four-day roundup climbed to 72, the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation reported Friday.
Those detained included more than a dozen independent journalists, people with private lending libraries, leaders of opposition political parties and pro-democracy activists who gathered signatures for a reform effort known as the Varela Project.
"Cuban authorities are clearly taking advantage of the war in Iraq to crack down while the world looks elsewhere," Robert Menard, secretary general of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement protesting the arrests.
"Human rights in Cuba can therefore be viewed as one of the first cases of collateral damage in the second Gulf war," Menard wrote. "Human rights in other countries could also soon suffer the same fate."
Several of the island's best-known critics, including veteran rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, Varela Project organizer Oswaldo Paya and Vladimiro Roca, the son of the late revered Cuban Communist Party founder Blas Roca, remained free Friday.
But all three reported they had been under heavy surveillance by plainclothes security agents in recent days and would not be surprised if they were next.
"They are outside my house, on the corner," Sanchez said by telephone late Thursday.
The crackdown marked an end to several years of relative tolerance for Cuba's critical voices.
During that time, Paya and his colleagues collected more than 11,000 signatures of Cubans asking Fidel Castro's government for a voters' referendum on a series of new laws that would guarantee civil rights such as freedom of expression and private business ownership.
The Varela Project initiative, later shelved by the nation's rubber-stamp parliament, also requested electoral reforms and an amnesty for political prisoners.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter described the Varela Project to Cubans in a live, uncensored television and radio broadcast approved by Castro during a visit here last May.
The independent journalists also grew bolder in recent months, launching a new general interest magazine in a nation where virtually all media is controlled by the state.
But U.S. diplomats also grew more active, offering Internet access to the journalists at the U.S. Interests Section here, inviting dissidents to receptions, giving them shortwave radios, books, pamphlets and other written materials the Cuban government considered subversive.
Cuban authorities became increasingly incensed in recent months as the mission's new chief, James Cason, began meeting publicly with the opposition and criticizing Castro's government to international journalists here.
When the government announced its crackdown Tuesday night, it criticized Cason and said it was going after "traitors" with ties to him and the U.S. mission.
"The Interests Section has never been intelligent in its contacts with the opposition in Cuba," said Manuel Cuesta Morrua, of the opposition party Socialist Democratic Current.
Cuesta said that 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.
Ultimately, Cuesta said, the current crackdown threatens to harm all dissident groups, even those such as his that have consciously worked to keep U.S. diplomats at arm's length.
"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.
Although the arrests appeared timed precisely to coincide with military action in the Gulf, there were other political factors that made it clear that Cuba was willing to risk international criticism in its effort to root out internal dissent.
The crackdown began during a meeting in Geneva of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which has voted to censure Cuba every year for the past decade except 1998.
It also came just weeks before a scheduled meeting here with moderate Cuban emigres who Havana hopes can help efforts to end U.S. restrictions on trade with and travel to the Communist-run island.
At the same time, Cuba is hoping to join the European Union's trade and economic aid pact for developing nations.
During a visit here last week, E.U. Development Commissioner Poul Nielson said he would ask European states to welcome the Caribbean nation into the agreement, but emphasized "serious concerns about the respect for human rights in Cuba."
Updated March 21, 2003 2:22 p.m.
The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2003
By DAVID LUHNOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Fidel Castro is fighting a battle against growing political opposition within his Communist state, carrying out the biggest crackdown on dissidents in years.
Ending a period of relative tolerance by the graying regime, state police agents rounded up at least 72 dissidents over the past few days. The group includes several independent journalists, economists and supporters of the so-called Varela Project, a human-rights drive that represents one of the most serious challenges yet to Mr. Castro's 43-year rule.
Although the dissidents haven't been formally charged with any crime, state-run television accused them of being "traitors" to the revolution and plotting with U.S. officials on the island to subvert the one-party state.
The timing suggests that Mr. Castro is acting while the world is distracted by the Iraq war. "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, head of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders rights group.
But in many ways the arrests couldn't have come at a worse time for the regime, suggesting it is worried enough about the opposition to risk the consequences.
For starters, the crackdown began during last week's meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which has repeatedly criticized Mr. Castro's rights record. It also comes as the European Union considers allowing Cuba to join its trade and economic aid program for developing nations -- something the island desperately needs to prop up its ailing economy. The crackdown is sure to hurt that bid.
The arrests also cast a shadow on efforts in the U.S. to end the decades-old trade embargo against the island. On Friday, 10 U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle formed an informal group to fight the trade embargo, arguing it costs U.S. businesses and farmers more than $1 billion a year in lost sales. And only a few weeks from now, Cuba is also scheduled to host a meeting with moderate Cuban emigres that Havana hopes to use as a lobbying tool to end the U.S. trade and travel restrictions.
Blanca Reyes, the wife of independent journalist Raul Rivero, said 16 plain-clothed police officers stormed their tiny Havana apartment on Thursday, ransacking the rooms, confiscating Mr. Rivero's computer and aging typewriter, and hauling him off to jail. Outside, a crowd of some 300 people risked police anger by cheering the poet and publisher as he was taken away, said Mrs. Reyes.
Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com
Updated March 24, 2003
The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2003
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
HAVANA (AP)--The wives of several anti-government activists arrested during Cuba's crackdown on political dissidents visited their husbands Wednesday and said they appeared to be in good health.
Gisela Delgado, the wife of Hector Palacios, a leading organizer of the Varela Project reform effort, said her husband was holding up well after six days in jail.
"He looked a little tired ... but seemed okay," she said.
Delgado and four other wives were allowed to visit their husbands at Villa Marista jail in Havana for the first time since their detention.
Cuban state security agents have arrested 75 people, many of them independent journalists and leaders of opposition parties, in one of the harshest crackdowns on dissent on the island in recent years, according to human rights organizations.
Cuban authorities have accused the dissidents of conspiring with American diplomats in Havana to encourage government opposition. Cuba has said it will try the dissidents, who are accused of being traitors.
The arrests, which began last Tuesday, have drawn widespread condemnation from international human rights groups.
Delgado and the other wives said they were concerned about what kind of legal defense their husbands might receive.
"Getting a fair trial with impartial lawyers will be impossible in Cuba ," Delgado said.
Updated March 26, 2003 9:23 p.m.
The New York Times, March 26, 2003
MIAMI, March 24 — Although dozens of his colleagues are imprisoned and
his house is under police surveillance, Oswaldo Payá vowed today that
his civic movement to bring reforms to Cuba would not be crushed.
Mr. Payá, the organizer of the Varela Project, a petition drive signed
by more than 11,000 people seeking a referendum on personal, political and
economic rights, is among a handful of dissidents who remain free after a
crackdown last week by the Cuban authorities.
He said about 80 people — independent librarians, journalists and many
of his group's regional leaders — were in jail on charges that could
bring lengthy prison sentences after an islandwide sweep that began last
Tuesday.
"They are trying to close the door on peaceful change," he said in a telephone
interview from Havana.
The arrests came after several years of relative freedom in which dissidents
assumed a higher profile as they met with a succession of foreign dignitaries,
including former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly endorsed the Varela
Project in Havana last May. Mr. Payá went on an international tour
that included meetings with Pope John Paul II and the American secretary
of state, Colin L. Powell.
Mr. Payá, who has won numerous international human rights awards,
insisted that the recent arrests would not deter him.
"In no way will the project be stopped," he said. "There had been a flowering
in Cuba of a peaceful movement for rights and reconciliation, to defeat this
culture of fear. Cuba's spring is the Varela Project, which has been sustained
by thousands and which will grow."
Governments and international rights groups have condemned the arrests and
demanded that the Cuban authorities immediately release the prisoners.
The Cuban government has described the dissidents as subversives conspiring
with James Cason, the chief American diplomat in Havana. Mr. Cason has met
often with the island's dissidents and has spoken out publicly against the
government of President Fidel Castro.
Asked if the arrests were meant to derail the Varela Project, a spokesman
for the Cuban diplomatic delegation in Washington said he did not know.
"You have to get to the essence of the problem," said the spokesman, Juan
Hernández Acen. "These groups are a minority in Cuba and represent
nobody. They were not arrested for what they thought, but for acting against
and threatening national security."
Mr. Payá said that he and his colleagues had been prudent in their
dealings with Mr. Cason and that they did not accept money from the American
government. He speculated that perhaps the Cuban authorities were trying
to gain some leverage with the American government, which has imprisoned
five Cubans on espionage charges.
Cuban officials have compared their roundup of dissidents to the United States'
mass arrests after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Mr. Payá said such accusations were part of the government's relentless
defamation campaign against him.
"That mocks people's intelligence," he said. "We are claiming our rights."
But the threat felt by the Cuban government is real, diplomats and political
analysts said, because the project relies on Cuba's own system to bring about
change.
Mr. Payá and his supporters took advantage of a provision in the Cuban
Constitution that says citizens can call for a referendum if 10,000 signatures
are collected.
Yet despite the boxes of petitions that were delivered last May, and Mr.
Carter's nationally televised speech in which he challenged the government
to publish the project's proposals, officials have been mostly silent.
"They do not dare mention the project," Mr. Payá said. "To mention
it will have people asking: `What is it? We want to learn about it.' And
all who know it know it is something positive."
The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2003
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
The terror came after dark. The targets were clear. The strikes were precise.
Opponents were silenced.
I refer not to an al Qaeda foray, but to Fidel Castro's latest assault on
the battered Cuban population. In the same week that the allied coalition
moved against Saddam Hussein, Fidel's goons swept the island arresting over
85 non-violent dissidents, searching their homes in the wee hours of the
morning, seizing books and medicine. Suspects were charged with "crimes"
that carry up to 20-year sentences.
It is unlikely that the events coincided accidentally. In a statement of
protest, the secretary general of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders,
Robert Menard, said, "Cuban authorities are clearly taking advantage of the
war in Iraq to crack down while the world looks elsewhere."
There is indeed every reason to believe that the wily Fidel carefully calculated
that the right moment to slap down Cuba's democrats was while the world's
most important human-rights advocates were at war with the Iraqi dictatorship.
The allied coalition is also at odds with a number of ankle biters, some
of whom happen to have seats on the United Nations Security Council.
Libya now chairs the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Canada and France are
busy teaming up with such moral icons as Vietnam and Syria to try to take
George Bush down a notch or two. When I phoned a Chilean official in the
U.S. to get that country's statement condemning Fidel's crackdown, I learned
there was no statement. Mexico's foreign office in Washington said it had
no statement either.
Castro has demonstrated how clearly world despots understand which countries
have moral clarity on human-rights issues. If those countries are otherwise
engaged -- and particularly if they are under fire from many sources for
their assertive liberation policies -- he can get a pass. As Mr. Menard wrote:
"Human rights in other countries could also soon suffer the same fate."
The details of the regime sweep were graphically detailed by a number of
Cuban journalists who managed to get their story out. Author Laura Silber
compiled some of those reports in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. Among
the Cuban journalists quoted was Claudia Marquez Linares: "There was not
a spot in the house they didn't search. They confiscated 150 books, archives
of the Liberal Democratic Party, a video camera, 36 diskettes, a laptop and
a printer . . . my husband was transferred to the state security headquarters
in Villa Marista."
According to Ms. Silber, other journalists told of the confiscation of a
newborn's medicine. Cuban Rodolfo Damian reported that "It took the proportion
of a pogrom" with "rapid response teams" invading whole blocks where "suspects"
lived.
The crackdown was primarily directed at the Varela Project, a grass-roots
democracy effort led by Oswaldo Paya and Cuba's Christian Liberation Movement.
Varela last year circulated a petition calling for a referendum on electoral
reform, free speech, private enterprise and amnesty for peaceful political
prisoners. More than 11,000 Cubans signed it, no small feat considering that
opposition to the Cuban government carries great risks, including the possibility
of physical harm. Economic security is also endangered because Fidel is the
only employer on the island.
Mr. Paya presented the petition to the Cuban National Assembly last May,
shortly before Jimmy Carter arrived as Castro's guest. In between smiling
poses with the dictator, Mr. Carter endorsed Varela and the petition. Not
surprisingly, as soon as the roving former president left the island to spread
cheer elsewhere, Castro stuck the petition in a drawer and went back to fear
tactics as usual. Since the crackdown, Mr. Carter has signaled that he may
have been overly optimistic about Fidel's potential for rehabilitation. He
condemned the roundup last week and said, "I've been disappointed that the
National Assembly did not accept the Varela petition and act on that petition,
one way or another."
Cuban democrats continued to chip away at Castro's one-man rule, however.
Mr. Paya says that half of the arrested in the sweep were coordinators of
the Varela Project in the provinces. Mr. Paya has so far escaped arrest,
perhaps because of his high profile as a human-rights advocate.
Mart Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia and an authority on communist
repression in Eastern Europe, said this week that "Castro is afraid that
the growing strength of the nonviolent pro-democracy movement could begin
to fragment his regime. Castro has shown weakness and not strength with these
arrests."
Those detained included Marta Beatriz Roque, Rene Gomes and Felix Bonne.
The three leaders of the Cuban opposition were conducting a peaceful fast
protesting the detention of Afro-Cuban physician and human-rights advocate
Oscar Elias Biscet when state security came after them. Raul Rivero, perhaps
Cuba's most important independent journalist and poet was also arrested.
They were thrown in the dungeons with already-jailed human-rights lawyer
Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, who is blind and reportedly held in inhumane
conditions.
The U.S. State Department has issued a statement calling the assault "the
most egregious act of political repression in Cuba in the last decade." According
to Directorio, a Miami-based Cuban advocacy group, 50 Mexican congressmen,
the Christian Democratic Organization of the Americas, some legislators from
Argentina and Uruguay and even France have condemned the crackdown. On Wednesday
the European Union joined the list.
'In no way will the project be stopped," Mr. Paya told the New York Times
in an interview this week. "There had been a flowering in Cuba of a peaceful
movement for rights and reconciliation to defeat this culture of fear. Cuba's
spring is the Varela Project, which has been sustained by thousands and which
will grow."
In recent years Castro had begun to respond to international pressure. That
pressure is what gave some breathing room for a time to these brave Cuban
democrats and what helped them stand up to the regime. But now that Fidel
has reverted to type, they need help again, not just from the U.S. but also
from Latin American leaders like Chile's Socialist President Ricardo Lagos
and Mexico's Vicente Fox. The Cuban democracy movement is a tailor-made cause
for human-rights advocates if they are courageous enough to stand up and
be counted.
Updated March 28, 2003
The U.S. Is Busy Elsewhere,
So Castro Fills His Jails