Cuba's dissidents need their own Helsinki
Posted on Tue, Apr. 22, 2008
By MAURICIO CLAVER-CARONE
www.uscubapac.com
In 1975, leaders from 35 countries -- including the United States,
Canada and most of Europe -- gathered in Helsinki to sign the ''Final
Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.'' Article
VII of that Helsinki Accord pledged each country to ``respect human
rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought,
conscience, religion or belief.''
Earlier this month, government officials and nongovernmental
organizations from many of those same countries gathered with Cuban
opposition leaders at a conference in South Florida to discuss the
relevance of similar principles for neighboring Cuba, only to earn a
scathing editorial attack from the ruling Communist Party newspaper, Granma.
''There is no space for the dreams of adversaries, internal mercenaries
and fifth columnists,'' reads the editorial.
Granted that signatories from the former Soviet bloc had no intention of
honoring the ''dreams'' of Article VII over three decades ago either. At
the time, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev dismissed the human rights
provisions as ''rhetorical'' and not binding. The Soviets signed
asserting the document's overarching security and disarmament
provisions, which they believed would further strengthen and legitimize
their dominance of Eastern Europe.
Absent any enforcement, it was left to a small band of democracy
advocates, writers and critics who came to be known as ''dissidents'' to
promote the Helsinki Accord's human-rights provisions and to ensure that
those rights were not lost in the red-tape and bureaucratic inertia that
so often envelops international diplomacy.
A year after the accord was signed, the Moscow Helsinki Group was
established. It consisted of 12 diverse men and women dedicated to
pressuring the leadership of the Soviet Union to implement the human
rights commitment. The group inspired like-minded dissidents in Eastern
Europe, beginning with Czechoslovakia and, in 1977, Poland. The
dissidents believed that the Helsinki Accords empowered them to
challenge injustice.
Through years of repression, imprisonment, discrimination and forced
exile, these human rights movements evolved into political-opposition
movements and served as catalysts to the liberating events that
culminated within the next decade.
Much has been reported about the Cuban regime recently signing both the
U.N. Covenant on Political and Civil Rights and another on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights. The first reaffirms such basic freedoms as
the right to assemble peacefully, to practice one's religion, to equal
protection of the law, to privacy and to leave one's country and return
to it. The economic covenant requires signatories to ensure fair wages
and the freedom to form and join independent trade unions. Cuba's
single-party, totalitarian, communist state, not only signed the
covenants; it proclaimed itself to already be in compliance. All but the
politically naive find this claim of compliance to be laughable.
The international community has repeatedly denounced Cuba for its
continued abuse of human rights. Unfortunately the United Nations has
already up-ended the credibility of its own covenants by allowing Cuba
and other notorious violators of human rights to sit on its Human Rights
Council, a weak and dysfunctional enforcement agency.
So where -- if anywhere -- lies Cuba's Helsinki? Perhaps we need not
look so far.
After decades of civil wars and strife, the 21st century began with 34
out of 35 countries in the Western Hemisphere enjoying the freedoms that
multiparty democracies foster. Cuba remains the exception. To strengthen
democratic institutions, the hemisphere's democracies adopted the
Inter-American Democratic Charter during a 2001 summit in Lima. The
charter encapsulates the conviction that freedom and representative
democracy should be preconditions for political and economic engagement.
Failure of the region to enforce that principle would threaten to reopen
an all-too-familiar door to authoritarianism throughout the hemisphere.
While the Castro brothers were juggling titles, the general secretary of
the Organization of American States -- under whose auspices the charter
was signed -- failed to promote, or even spotlight, the need for Cuba's
''new'' regime to open its tightly shut door to representative democracy.
Because the OAS missed its opportunity, the burden of challenging
repression in Cuba remains regrettably and squarely on the shoulders of
Cuba's embattled dissidents, just as -- years ago -- the burden was on
the dissidents of the former Soviet bloc. It is a heavy burden for
people to bear alone.
Central and Eastern Europeans have proven the Helsinki Accord to be a
historic beacon of hope, freedom and enlightenment. In the Western
Hemisphere, it behooves the countries that signed the Inter-American
Democratic Charter to hold up their own beacon of hope to the oppressed
who need it most -- namely, the Cuban people.
Mauricio Claver-Carone is a director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC in
Washington, D.C.
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