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]]]]]]]]] FIDEL CASTRO AND HUMAN RIGHTS: [[[[[[[[[[[[[
30 years later (12/18/1988)
By Ricardo Bofill Pages
From The Wall Street Journal, 16 December 1988, p. A15:3
(Mr. Bofill, a former professor at the University of Havana, is
president of the Havana-based Cuban Committee for Human Rights,
which he helped found in 1976. He spent 12 years in Cuban
prisons because of his statements on human rights.)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Earlier this month, while the world commemorated the 40th
anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Fidel
Castro began preparing to celebrate 30 years of revolutionary
power in Cuba. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev unintentionally
pointed out the great gap in meaning that exists between these
two anniversaries in his speech to the United Nations last week.
After making several respectful references to the Dec. 10th
anniversary of the Human Rights Declaration, Mr. Gorbachev
announced: ``The most fitting way for a state to observe this
anniversary of the Declaration [of Human Rights] is to improve
its domestic conditions for respecting and protecting the rights
of its own citizens.'' He then described steps he is taking to
create a new legal framework within which these human-rights
covenants will be protected. However superficial those steps may
end up being in the long run, Mr. Gorbachev's public appreciation
of the human-rights declaration stood in contrast to Castro's
continuing dismissal of any effort to do the same in Cuba. This
dichotomy in the Communist world has precedents.
A few years before Castro's triumphal arrival in Havana on
Jan. 1, 1959, the slow process of de-Stalinization began in the
Soviet Union. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union cracked open the door for the first time, exposing
the massive political crimes of the Stalinist era. But in March
1959, Soviet state security advisers began to arrive in Cuba,
thanks to Anibal Escalante, the KGB's point man in Havana. This
advance team became the first substantial step toward the
introduction on the island of a blueprint of society based on the
classical formulas of the Stalinist police state developed in the
Soviet Union and its Eastern European orbit.
Once the first Soviet ``development technicians'' trained the
repressive forces of Fidel Castro in ``the Resources of Method,''
the Cuban leader saw himself in possession of a transcendental
weapon that to this day has squashed every effort at reform or
political change in the country. The notion was to find and
create guilt among the entire population. Since nobody's perfect
(a truth which Communist ideology denies, but which Communist
leaders apply religiously), everybody is guilty of something and
anyone, therefore, is subject to arrest at any moment. ``The
Terror'' began to intrude upon every facet of national life until
it reached the very bosom of the Cuban family. It created a
polar climate chilled to the bone, placing on stage a
Neo-Cartesian drama -- ``I do not think, therefore I survive'' --
that the majority of the Cuban people have been forced to suffer
ever since.
None of the Soviet efforts to dismantle Stalinism have meant a
tinker's damn to the Cuban political hierarchy. Khruschev's
de-Stalinization efforts were never reflected in Cuba's role as
exporter of this KGB technology to the Third World; the
neo-Stalinism of Brezhnev was useful to the goals of the
Castroites; and Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika
have been summarily rejected by Cuba's Maximum Leader.
Thirty years after Castro arrived to power, the nation
continues to live under a system that attempts to close to all
its citizens every access to thought that is unorthodox or out of
tune with official liturgy. More than a quarter of a century as
a maximum ideological mentor has convinced Fidel Castro that he
holds a monopoly on truth. On the eve of 1989, Havana's Senor
Presidente aspires to a reign of political unanimity on earth,
and it does not matter if this unanimity applies only to
tombstones.
Given such realities, one can imagine Castro's scorn and
irritation at the current universal sensitivity about violations
of human rights. For many years, Castro's revolution enjoyed
absolute impunity before international public opinion.
Atrocities against human rights and fundamental liberties that
take place on the largest island in the Caribbean were largely
ignored:
The massive executions, through secret trials without
procedural safeguards of any type; the disappearances of the
mortal remains of executed political opponents; the imprisonment
of hundreds of thousands of opponents, either through kangaroo
courts that did not even provide defendants with attorneys or
through the so-called ``files of the socially dangerous;'' the
tortures, the cruel and degrading treatment, and the inhuman
living conditions that officially became known as ``The Secret
War of Extermination of Every Form of Deviation or Resistance to
the Cuban Governmental Ideology;'' the implacable religious
persecution; the discrimination -- apartheid-style -- enforced
for reasons of political opinion or religious belief; the denial
of freedom of movement and the forced exile of Cubans who live
abroad; the total disappearance of freedom of speech, of
assembly, of peaceful association, of union rights, and of every
civil and political right that are the bases of modern society.
These are all part of the catalogue of crimes of Fidel
Castro's Cuba that the international community began to notice
only a few years ago. The ignorance of many, and the silent
complicity of others, made possible a net balance of victims and
a much greater catastrophe than would have been true had the
cries for help been listened to much earlier. Although a part of
the truth about the human costs of Castroism have begun to be
known, there still are few places where a just analysis of this
critical period in the existence of Cuban society can be heard.
Recently, some specialized human-rights delegations visited Cuba,
including executives of Americas Watch, the Committee for Human
Rights of the Bar of the City of New York, Amnesty International,
the International Red Cross and the U.N. Commission on Human
Rights. But by examining the reports prepared by the
aforementioned first three organizations, it is clear that they
have done little more than scratch the surface of the national
reality of this subtropical island.
Unlike other countries examined by these groups, in a
Stalinist state there is no access to any independent information
about the government; there are no religious groups that monitor
human-rights abuses, there is absolutely no history of any
independent press, there are no international journalists based
in the country, etc. It is difficult for foreigners just arrived
and without any experience in the context of Stalinist structures
to obtain adequate information that would permit the formulation
of responsible opinions.
Thus, on the eve of 1989, when we celebrate the 200th
anniversary of the French Revolution, and when the leader of the
Soviet Union dazzles the world with his message of hope before
the U.N., Cuba's Fidel Castro remains securely beholden to an
order of things already condemned by history. And yet the ideal
of human rights -- the most progressive, revolutionary and
popular ideal of our times -- will make its home on Cuban soil
eventually.
* * *
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