A 'tropical gulag' indeed
Posted on Tue, Nov. 06, 2007
By MAURICIO CLAVER-CARONE
www.uscubapac.com
On March 9, 1983, Pravda -- the official newspaper of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -- published
front-page excerpts with a scathing condemnation of U.S. President
Ronald Reagan's speech branding the Soviet Union as ``the evil empire.''
Reagan's critics were horrified and quickly labeled the speech
''primitive'' and Reagan a ''warmonger.'' The speech, however, resonated
among dissidents in political prisons and work camps throughout the
Soviet bloc. Tapping on walls and talking through the toilets of their
8-by-10-foot prison cells, the dissidents spread the story of the ''evil
empire'' speech and proclaimed Reagan as freedom's new ally.
Yet Soviet authorities, emboldened by Western leaders who had lined up
to condemn Reagan and believing the American president to be
disconnected from Soviet ''realities,'' continued scoffing at the
''absurdities'' of Reagan's speech, blanketing the Soviet Union with
accounts of what had been said.
From Andrei Sakharov to Vaclav Havel, Soviet-bloc dissidents took heart
and found new energy to step up their resistance to the totalitarian
state. Their success is now history.
This year, on Oct. 25, Granma -- the official newspaper of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba -- published front-page
excerpts with a scathing condemnation of President Bush's speech
branding Cuba's dictatorship, a ``tropical gulag.''
Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov had denounced Reagan's remarks as
deliberately ''provocative'' and a sign that his administration ''can
think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic
anticommunism.'' Similarly Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque
called Bush's remarks the ''equivalent to the reconquest of Cuba by
force'' and indicative of the president's ``level of frustration,
desperation and personal hatred toward Cuba.''
Now as then, scholars lined up to describe Bush's remarks as
''irresponsible'' and ''out of touch'' with reality. Yet, it is probable
that Cuba's imprisoned dissidents -- like the Soviet bloc dissidents of
the 1980s -- are tapping on walls, talking through toilets and using
other innovative ways of spreading the word of Bush's support for
freedom's cause in Cuba.
Conspicuously, the names of Cuba's dissidents and political prisoners --
highlighted in Bush's speech -- were omitted from the excerpts published
by Granma. One of those ''omitted'' dissidents was Dr. Oscar Elías
Biscet, an Amnesty International designated ''prisoner of conscience.''
On Nov. 5, Bush awarded Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
United States' highest civilian award, for his fight against tyranny.
Biscet represents what the Cuban authorities fear the most: an undaunted
commitment to liberty. A physician of Afro-Cuban origin, Biscet
established the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba to promote
nonviolent civil disobedience in support of democracy and basic human
rights. He says he drew his inspiration from Americans Henry David
Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr.
Cuban authorities arbitrarily detained Biscet 26 times between June 1998
and November 1999, mistreating him physically and psychologically. He
was threatened, publicly humiliated and severely beaten. He has been
incarcerated in underground cells and held with common-criminal and
insane inmates. When authorities pressured him to leave Cuba, he
defiantly refused saying he would never abandon his country.
In late 2002, Biscet completed a three-year sentence, was released and
allowed to return to his home. Thirty-six days later, as he prepared to
meet with a delegation of human rights activists from the Matanzas
Province in central Cuba, he was rearrested and sentenced to 25 years.
The omission of Biscet's name from Granma's republication of Bush's
speech, along with the names of other political prisoners whom Bush
mentioned -- including Ricardo González Alonso, Jorge Luis González
Tanquero, Omar Pernét Hernández, Jorge Luis García Paneque, Normando
Hernández González and Omar Rodríguez Saludes -- was no doubt
deliberate. That omission was part of an ingenious -- yet clumsy --
effort by Cuban authorities to try to hide the audience from the speech,
instead of the speech from the audience.
Did Cuban authorities overplay their hand, as did Soviet authorities
decades earlier? Probably. Will the ''tropical gulag'' suffer the same
fate as the ''evil empire?'' Surely. Like the evil empire, Cuba's
tropical gulag will become history -- the sooner, the better for the
Cuban people.
Mauricio Claver-Carone is a director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC in
Washington, D.C.
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