Cambio Means Freedom in Cuba

Cambio Means Freedom in Cuba
By Mario Loyola
National Review Online
December 1, 2006

In the town of Madrugas on the outskirts of Havana, something
extraordinary happened in the early evening of November 2. Several dozen
agents of the Cuban state security tried to arrest dissident and
community activist "Eddie" Hernández Arencibia. But his neighbors would
have none of it. Several hundred formed a cordon around his house, the
women locking arms in the front rank. When State Security started
beating them, the men came forward and a meleé ensued. Another young
dissident, Fernando López Montero, was seriously injured. A police van
was overturned and set on fire. State security was forced to withdraw,
empty-handed.

About nine days later, in the early morning, they came back — backed up
by several hundred riot police. But the two dissidents were nowhere to
be found: someone from state security had tipped them off. A massive
manhunt ensued, and they were finally captured in international waters —
by the U.S. Coast Guard. Both are now reportedly being held in
Guantánamo pending review of their asylum petitions. Meanwhile, State
Security emptied Hernández's house, throwing all its contents — and his
wife — out on the street. She is now living among neighbors, at least
five of whom have been detained without charges.

While the scale of the confrontation was unusual, such incidents have
become increasingly common. The Directorio Democrático Cubano, a
Miami-based pro-dissident group, keeps a detailed catalogue of
pro-democracy activities in Cuba. Its report on incidents in 2005 alone
fills nearly 400 pages.

News of the incident has spread in Cuba. But U.S. media has hardly
noticed. Indeed, international journalists are so clueless that when
they ask people on the street in Cuba to describe conditions there, they
earnestly quote them saying, "Everything is going well," completely
oblivious to the large signs all over Cuba bearing the Orwellian caption
"Everything is going well." Only the bravest Cubans will say what they
really think to journalists — or even to each other. Huge numbers of
Cubans make their living by spying on their neighbors and even on their
family members.

Castro's Cuba is a nightmare in which the Marxist ideal of social
equality has been achieved through the brutal imposition of universal
destitution. In Castro's "philosophy," the profit motive is the ultimate
evil that leads necessarily to capitalism. From the start, he sought to
replace it with the "revolutionary conscience," which should motivate
all Cubans to work where Castro thinks they are needed, regardless of
personal needs and wants.

Since August of this year, when the increasingly dim and incoherent
Castro nearly died and was removed from power, his brother Raúl, head of
the armed forces, has been seen publicly exactly once: to publicize the
new law against "labor indiscipline," which criminalizes the very
indolence that has been the signal achievement of the Cuban Revolution.
But criminalizing failures of "revolutionary conscience" is nothing new.
Reynaldo Arenas recalls the pitiful sight of peasants hiding chickens
from State Security just two years into the Revolution. And he remembers
the persecution of "dangerous" elements in the society (such as
homosexuals) sent to labor camps for reeducation. Castro's policies
immediately sent the richest economy in Latin American into free fall,
and when those policies failed for all to see, he began insulting the
Cuban people as lazy "worms" and "leeches," worse than capitalists — and
he never stopped insulting them.

Cuba has changed little since then — so little in fact, that what we see
today is little more than the decaying relics of the Cuba that Castro
ruined. It may seem like a quaint and happy third-world country to
visiting journalists of leftist persuasion, but Cubans — here and there
— are well aware that the current poverty, which is worse than in almost
any Latin American country except Haiti, is only the most obvious
evidence of Castro's historic crime against the Cuban people.

Today, the most common word in Cuba is Cambio: Change. When the word
first started becoming ubiquitous in windows, placards, and t-shirts in
2003, the regime sought to crack down. But today, as one prominent
dissident told me, the word is everywhere, recalling the "Solidarity"
slogan of the Polish pro-democracy movement.

Miami, too, is changing. Because of Clinton-era accords which
dramatically expanded the number of visas granted to Cuban immigrants,
some 20,000 Cubans are arriving in Miami every year. They are readily
absorbed into the economy, thankful for the chance finally to work and
get ahead, but they are not so ready to talk. It is heartbreakingly
difficult to convince many of them that they are no longer in danger of
getting arrested in the middle of the night for saying anything about
Castro. But now those who grew up in Miami have a different Cuba to
contend with: not the one in our parents' pictures and stories, but
rather the one that exists now. And it has given us a sense of urgency
to do something now that we never felt before.

In Miami, as on the Island, Cubans yearn for an end to exile — and they
know the end is near. Soon, Cuban Americans will be free to discover the
land in which their culture and spirit is rooted. And Cubans on the
Island yearn for an end to their own exile — from the freedoms of the
modern world. When I asked one dissident whether he wasn't afraid that
his phone was being tapped, he said "What are they going to do? Throw me
in prison? This entire island is a prison."

Alas, while "Change" is sweeping the people here and there, no change
can be discerned in the policies of the Cuban government — nor in those
of the U.S. government. And now the two sets of policies are reinforcing
each other, which can only benefit the Communist regime.

Four of the most important dissident groups in Cuba recently signed a
petition imploring the U.S. government to lift travel restrictions to
the Island. Some will cast this as a unilateral concession to the Cuban
government, but the reality is that the Castro regime wants an end to
isolation like a hole in the head. As one of the dissident leaders tells
me, "We live in a closed society. What we need is an opening." Ending
the travel restrictions, a small but real change, would help bring the
two communities closer together, and expose the sufferings of Cuba to
the light of day. Even the smallest change would be the start of a happy
ending to the horror story that began, one starry night almost exactly
50 years ago, when the young Fidel Castro landed his boat — and Cuba —
in a swamp.

— Mario Loyola is fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=429443