A hero in Castro's gulag

CASTRO'S TRUE LEGACY IS A TRAIL OF BLOOD

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe 

Monday, January 1, 2007 

    It was on New Year's Day in 1959 that Fidel Castro's guerrillas toppled Fulgencio Batista, and a week later that Castro entered Havana and launched what has become the world's longest-lived dictatorship. This week thus marks the 48th anniversary of Castro's revolution -- and the last one he will celebrate, if the persistent rumors that he is dying prove to be true. Which makes this a good time to ask: What will be said about Castro after his death? 

    For decades, journalists and celebrities have showered Cuba's despot with praise, extolling his virtues so extravagantly at times that if sycophancy were an Olympic sport, they would have walked off with the gold. Norman Mailer, for example, proclaimed him "the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War." Oliver Stone has called him "one of the earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult." 

    The cheerleaders have been just as enthusiastic in describing Castro's record in Cuba. "A beacon of success for much of Latin America and the Third World," gushed Giselle Fernandez of CBS. "For Castro," Barbara Walters declared, "freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on earth." Covering Cuba's one-party election in 1998, CNN's Lucia Newman grandly described "a system President Castro boasts is the most democratic and cleanest in the world." 

    During a 1995 visit to New York, writes Humberto Fontova in *Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant*, a blistering 2005 exposé of Castro and his regime, Cuba's maximum leader "plunged into Manhattan's social swirl, hobnobbing with dozens of glitterati, pundits, and power brokers." From the invitation to dine at the Rockefeller family's Westchester County estate to being literally kissed and hugged by Diane Sawyer, Castro was drenched with flattery and adoration at every turn. 

    When Castro dies, some of his obituarists will no doubt continue this pattern of fawning hero-worship. But others, more concerned with accuracy than with apologetics, will squarely face the facts of Castro's reign. Facts such as these:

    ▪ Castro came to power with American support. 

    The United States welcomed Castro's ouster of Batista and was one of the first nations to recognize the new government in 1959. Many Americans supported Castro, including former president Harry Truman. "He seems to want to do the right thing for the Cuban people," Truman said, "and we ought to extend our sympathy and help him to do what is right for them." It was not until January 1961 that President Eisenhower -- reacting to what he called "a long series of harassments, baseless accusations, and vilification" -- broke diplomatic ties with Havana. By that point Castro had nationalized all US businesses in Cuba and confiscated American properties worth nearly $2 billion. 

    Well before he came to power, Castro regarded the United States as an enemy. In a 1957 letter -- displayed in Havana’s Museo de la Revolucion, Fontova observes -- the future ruler wrote to a friend: "War against the United States is my true destiny. When this war's over, I'll start that much bigger and wider war." 

    ▪ Castro transformed Cuba into a totalitarian hellhole. 

    Freedom House gives Cuba its lowest possible rating for civil liberties and political rights, placing it with Burma, North Korea, and Sudan as one of the world's most repressive regimes. Hundreds of political prisoners are behind bars in Cuba today. Among them, writes Carlos Alberto Montaner in the current issue of Foreign Policy, are "48 young people [imprisoned] for collecting signatures for a referendum, 23 journalists for writing articles about the regime, and 18 librarians for loaning forbidden books." Political prisoners can be beaten, starved, denied medical care, locked in solitary confinement, and forced into slave labor. Castro long ago eliminated freedom of religion, due process of law, and the right to leave the country. 

    He also wiped out Cuba’s once-flourishing free press. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Cuba is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, second only to China in the number of reporters behind bars. 

    ▪ Castro stole Cuba's wealth. 

    While Cubans grew progressively poorer under communism, Castro exploited them to become one of the world's richest people. Foreign companies doing business in Cuba must pay a significant sum for each worker they hire -- but most of the money goes to Castro's regime, while the workers receive only a pittance. Castro also controls Cuba's state-owned companies, whose profits account for much of his wealth. Castro insists that his personal net worth is zero, but in 2006 Forbes magazine estimates the amount to be $900 million. 

    ▪ Castro shed far more blood than the dictator he replaced. 

    According to the Cuba Archive, which is meticulously documenting the deaths of each person killed by Cuba's rulers since 1952, Batista was responsible for killing approximately 3,000 people. Castro's toll has been far higher. So far the archive has documented more than 8,000 specific victims of the Castro regime -- including 5,775 firing squad executions, 1,231 extrajudicial assassinations, and 984 deaths in prison. When fully documented, the body count is expected to reach 17,000 -- not counting the tens of thousands of Cubans who lost their lives at sea while fleeing Castro's Caribbean nightmare. 

    "Condemn me, it doesn't matter," Castro said long ago. "History will absolve me." But Castro's ultimate day of judgment draws near, and history is not likely to be so kind.

ELIÁN, '60 MINUTES,' AND THE PARTY LINE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe 

Sunday, October 9, 2005 

    Like Winston Smith, Elián Gonzalez has learned to love Big Brother. CBS News loves him, too. Elián's excuse is that he is 11 years old and has been brainwashed by a totalitarian police state. What excuse is there for CBS? 

    Last week, "60 Minutes" aired an interview with Elián, the Cuban boat child who survived a desperate escape from Fidel Castro's island dictatorship in November 1999 only to be forcibly turned over to the Cubans by the Clinton administration the following April. The story was a shameless piece of agitprop. From correspondent Bob Simon's opening description of the Elian affair as a conflict on the order of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis to his fawning speculation at the end that Elián "may have a future in Cuban politics," virtually the entire segment had the oily feel of Cuban government propaganda. Which it may literally have been: Simon disclosed that "Castro's personal cameraman" had "helped" put the story together. 

    Anyone who watched "60 Minutes" knows that Elián now has "carefully gelled hair." That he is the president of his seventh-grade class. That he likes math and wants to be a computer scientist. That he thought the best part about being interviewed was getting "a bottle of really cold water and a gizmo in his ear for simultaneous translation." And don't forget that hair. 

    "What's also changed about you is your hair," Simon cooed. "Your hair looked very different then. You didn't have hair like that." 

    Ever since his forced return to Cuba in April 2000, Elián has been exploited endlessly by the communist government's disinformation apparatus. "60 Minutes" showed him being welcomed as a "conquering hero" and delivering a "patriotic speech in front of the cameras and Castro." (An excerpt of that speech, complete with servile "Viva Fidel," is posted on the CBS website.) "Che Guevara was yesterday," Simon intoned, "Elián Gonzalez is today, and that's precisely how the regime is playing him." 

    But Elián was not the only one being played by the regime. "60 Minutes" made much of the fact that Castro came to Elián's elementary school graduation and pronounced himself Elián's friend. "That's quite something, isn't it," Simon gushed, "for the president of a country to say he's honored to have a kid as a friend?" 

Elián: Yes, and it's also very moving to me. And I also believe I am his friend. 

Simon: Do you think of him as a friend? 

Elián: Not only as a friend, but also as a father. 

Simon: If you had a problem, would you call him up and tell him about it? 

Elián: I could. 

    Well, it is good to know that Elián thinks so highly of Castro. And one must admire the restraint shown by "60 Minutes," which somehow managed to avoid mentioning that Elián's friend and surrogate "father" is also the world's longest-ruling tyrant, a sadist who has killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of dissidents, and, not incidentally, the Stalinist thug who drove Elizabet Brotons -- Elián's mother -- to her death in the Florida Straits. 

    Come to think of it, why did Brotons want so desperately to leave Cuba? Why was she willing to risk her and her son's life on such a dangerous -- in her case, fatal -- attempt to cross the 90 miles that separate Cuba from freedom? Was it the grinding poverty, the ubiquitous rationing, the constant shortages? Was it the lack of the free speech? The suppression of religion? The inability to criticize the government without risking years behind bars? Was it the informers on every block? The political dossier maintained on every student's "political attitude and social conduct?" Was it the knowledge that once Elián turned 11, he would be subject to mandatory labor for six to eight weeks every year? Was it the sheer, soul-crushing misery of living in a country routinely ranked as one of the most unfree places in the world? 

    "60 Minutes" had nothing to say about any of that. 

    On the other hand, it did show Elián saying -- when prodded by Simon -- that he had no good memories of his stay in Miami, that the relatives who cared for him "tormented" him by speaking of his mother, and that when he was seized at gunpoint by a federal SWAT team, he "felt joy that I could get out of that house." 

    It bears repeating: Elián is only 11, and was just 5 when these events took place. He cannot be blamed for spouting the Communist Party line. But CBS has no such excuse. "Helped" by "Castro's personal cameraman," indeed. Edward R. Murrow must be spinning in his grave.

A WALK IN HAVANA

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe 

March 14, 2002 

(First of three columns) 

    HAVANA -- "This is the real Havana," Miguel said as we turned from Avenida Simon Bolivar to a gritty side street cratered with potholes.  "Here you see how Cubans live.  Tourists don't come to *this* street." 

    Well, they might if they were simply walking around, as I had been when Miguel came up to me a half hour earlier.  It was my first afternoon in Havana and I was taking advantage of some unexpected free time -- I had missed my ride to a meeting at the Ministry of Culture -- to explore the city.  I had gotten no more than half a block from my hotel when a muscular black man in a bright orange sweater fell in beside me and asked, "Hello, my friend, where are you from?" 

    This, I would learn in the course of a week spent in Havana, is absolutely normal.  Every time I stepped outside, a young Cuban would approach me, sometimes with a black-market offer -- "Amigo, you want cigars?"  -- but often just to talk. 

    Miguel's English was good and he told me that he would love to work as a guide or translator for tourists.  Not only because such a job would be appropriate to his skills -- he is a university graduate and speaks three languages -- but because it would give him a way to earn US dollars.  In Castro's Cuba, living without dollars means living in poverty.  But Miguel has none of the connections he would need to get a into the tourism industry, and so he works instead as a security guard at a cigar factory.  It is a mindless job that pays 225 pesos per month -- about $9, a typical Cuban salary. 

    Miguel opened a door.  "Here is where we buy food with pesos," he said.  Inside is a dingy, windowless room.  There are no aisles or shelves, only a single counter behind which are a couple sacks of rice, a couple more of beans, some oil, and what look like packets of a juice mix.  Above the counter, a chalk board lists the rationed staples that Cubans are supposed to be able to buy, with prices next to those that are available.  Milk isn't available.  Neither is laundry soap.  Or toothpaste.  Or salt.  Or matches.  Not even on the ration list, and never available in shops like this one, are fruit, green vegetables, cheese, and meat. 

    All of these *can* be had in Havana -- at the state-owned stores that cater to customers with dollars.  Or in the tourist hotels that attract the hard currency the regime craves.  While Miguel's family hasn't eaten eggs for months, the dining room in my hotel features a chef-staffed omelette station with a wide array of fillings.  Miguel has never seen it, of course: Cubans may not go beyond the lobbies of tourist hotels, a rule enforced by the security police -- who are everywhere. 

    But there are things here that even dollars can't buy. 

    The hotel gift shop offers a selection of government-approved reading material -- books with titles like "The Salvador Allende Reader" and "The Fertile Prison: Fidel Castro in Batista's Jails" -- but unlike every other hotel I have ever been in, it carried no English-language newspapers or magazines.  I asked the concierge if there was anyplace I could buy some.  "Not in Cuba," he replied. 

    Like all Communist governments, the Castro dictatorship recognizes just one view of the world: its own.  It is the only view published in Cuban newspapers or aired on Cuban radio.  The papers and radio stations, of course, are all owned by the government.  Cubans hungry for opinions other than Castro's have to tune in to Radio Marti -- or approach foreigners in the street. 

    Talk to Cuban officials, and they will rhapsodize about Cuba's "socialist equality," in which everyone is treated alike and there are no egregious disparities in wealth.  But move around Havana with your eyes open and you see the reality.  For Communist Party bigshots there are beautiful neighborhoods like Miramar, with its elegant mansions and gorgeous gardens.  For ordinary Cubans there are the crowded, crumbling apartments of Centro Habana, where families live in squalor it would be hard to find in an American slum.  "Much of Centro is so dilapidated," my guidebook says, "that [it] conjures up images of what Dresden must have looked like after the bombing." 

    Billboards all over Havana extol *socialismo* and *revolucion* and *dignidad,* but the truth is that 43 years after Castro's socialist revolution, Cuba's dignity is in tatters.  Educated Cuban women, desperate for dollars -- or to meet a foreign Prince Charming -- become prostitutes.  Educated Cuban men on bicycles haul tourists around in rickshaws.  Havana swarms with well-heeled foreigners, but to me it was a city full of sadness and frustration. 

    On my last day, I visited 19-year-old Lazaro, who lives with his mother and three siblings in an oceanfront apartment.  It is a single room, grimy from pollution and desperately in need of paint, furnished with a stained divan, a small metal table, and a battered old refrigerator.  There were no lamps, no rugs, no beds, no oven.  The family sleeps on a few mattresses in a dark and airless loft.  Out of his mother's hearing, Lazaro asked if I could help her out.  "My little brother needs milk," he said, "but my mother has no dollars." 

Next: The dissenters

THE KEEPERS OF CUBA'S CONSCIENCE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe 

March 17, 2002 

(Second of three columns) 

    HAVANA -- "There are no banned books in Cuba," Fidel Castro declared in February 1998, "only those which we have no money to buy." 

    Of course, books *are* banned in Cuba; just try to locate one that criticizes Castro.  Bookstores and public libraries here carry works exalting Marxism, but you won't find The Gulag Archipelago or Darkness at Noon on their shelves. 

    So when Ramon Humberto Colas, a psychologist in Las Tunas, heard Castro's words, he and his wife Berta Mexidor decided to put them to the test.  They designated the 800 or so books in their home as a library and invited friends and neighbors to borrow them for free.  And so was born the first of Cuba's independent libraries -- independent of state control, of censorship, and of any ideology save the conviction that it is no crime to read a book. 

    The men and women who run these humble libraries risk government retaliation; several have been threatened, interrogated, raided by the police -- or worse.  Colas and Mexidor were evicted from their home, denounced in the (state-owned) press, and repeatedly arrested.  Their books were confiscated.  They were fired from their jobs.  Their daughter was expelled from school.  Government persecution eventually drove them from Cuba, but the seed they planted bore fruit.  Today there are more than 100 independent libraries in homes across the country, each one a little island of intellectual freedom. 

    In Gisela Delgado's library in Havana, visitors can borrow Spanish translations of Adam Michnik's "Letters from Prison," Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless," or the speeches of Martin Luther King.  On her shelves are everything from art to philosophy, but when I ask which books are the most popular, she doesn't hesitate: "Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four." It does not come as a surprise that readers in this hemisphere's only totalitarian outpost hunger for the greatest antitotalitarian novels ever written. 

    The Castro regime boasts, justifiably, of having wiped out illiteracy.  That makes it all the more unforgivable that it has turned the lending of books into an act of defiance.  Dissent in Cuba takes many forms, but there is none that shames the regime more than this one. 

    Like most communist countries, Cuba is plagued with shortages of everything from food to electricity, but political dissidents it has in abundance.  The government maligns them as malcontents and traitors -- "all these people are financed by the United States," sneers Fernando Remirez, Cuba's deputy foreign minister -- but the dissidents I met here uniformly come across as men and women of integrity and courage. 

    On my first day in Havana, I visited Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an economist who lost his job at the National Bank of Cuba -- and whose wife was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs -- when he began calling publicly for economic reform.  Bluff and good-natured, he describes himself as a former true believer who gradually came to realize the truth about Castro. 

    "He turned out to be someone who did everything for his own power," Espinosa says.  "Life in Cuba is a mixture of Stalinism and caudillismo" -- rule by a caudillo, a Latin dictator -- "and there are no parties, no opposition, no elections, no choices." 

    Another one-time true believer, Martha Beatriz Roque, was a professor of statistics at the University of Havana who fell out of favor for praising glasnost and perestroika.  In 1997, she and three other dissidents released a report criticizing Cuba's communist economy and urging a peaceful transition to democracy.  For that offense, they were arrested on charges of spreading "enemy propaganda," and convicted in a one-day show trial that was closed to the public.  Roque and two of the others spent nearly three years in prison; the fourth, Vladimiro Roca, is still there. 

    Roque has been detained by the police 17 times; her home has been broken into and searched; she assumes her phone is tapped and her visitors spied on.  But she doesn't fear for her safety.  Well-known dissidents like her and Espinosa and the others I met -- Elizardo Sanchez, Oswaldo Paya, Ricardo Gonzalez -- are protected by their international reputations.  If something happens to them, says Roque, "people outside Cuba will make a big noise." 

    What worries her more is the fate of dissidents who aren't as well known.  Juan Carlos Gonzalez, for example -- the blind president of the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, who was abducted by the security police and battered so badly he needed stitches in his head.  Or 70-year-old Juan Basulto Morell, a dissident journalist who was beaten bloody with a club as his assailant yelled, "This is for being a counter-revolutionary." 

    In Cuba, as in all dictatorships, it is the dissenters who sustain hope and keep conscience alive.  On this tormented island, they are the bravest and the best. 

Next: The future

THE U.S. EMBARGO AND CUBA'S FUTURE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe 

March 21, 2002 

(Last of three columns) 

    When Fidel Castro dies, will Cuba's communist dictatorship die too? 

    Absolutely, says a prominent Western diplomat in Havana.  "I believe the whole system will be gone within two or three years after Castro dies." 

    Absolutely not, says Ricardo Alarcon, the powerful president of Cuba's parliament.  "There will be the same system afterward," he recently said, with some asperity, to a group of American journalists.  "Cuba has already evolved.  We aren't going to discover evolution after Fidel leaves us." 

    In truth, no one knows what will happen when Castro shuffles off this mortal coil, just as no one knows when that will happen.  El Jefe is 75 and in seeming good health.  He could remain in power for another year -- or another decade. 

    But why must political change await his death?  Oswaldo Paya, the founder of Cuba's Christian Liberation Movement, derides that attitude as "biological fatalism."  Unwilling to delay all hope of democratic reform until Castro dies, Paya two years ago launched the Varela Project, a massive petition drive in support of new laws that would ensure freedom of speech and assembly, provide amnesty for political prisoners, legalize private businesses, and unrig Cuban elections.  It is based on Article 88 of the Cuban constitution, which requires that a proposed law be put to a public vote if 10,000 citizens sign a petition supporting it. 

    A pipe dream?  Perhaps.  More than 10,000 signatures have been collected (though not yet submitted), but no one really expects Castro to abide by Article 88 and hold a plebiscite.  Yet that just makes the Varela Project (which is named for a Cuban national hero, Father Felix Varela) all the more extraordinary.  The government has arrested, and sometimes beaten, dozens of signature-collectors; Cubans who sign know that they are inviting retaliation.  But they sign nevertheless.  "With great serenity and resolution," reports Paya, "citizens are saying, Here is my name, my ID number, my address." 

    Ten thousand signatures will not topple Castro, but they send a powerful message.  "What the government is most afraid of is not an American invasion," Paya says.  "It is thousands of ordinary Cubans openly demanding change." 

    And what, meanwhile, of the American embargo on Cuban trade and travel?  Whose interests does it serve?  Those of Paya and the countless Cubans who yearn for freedom?  Or those of Castro and the Communist Party? 

    A growing coalition of US critics -- liberal Democrats, Catholic bishops, agribusiness giants, libertarian free-traders -- argues that the embargo is an antiquated relic.  Far from weakening Castro, they say, the embargo props him up: It gives him a scapegoat to rail against and an excuse for all his failures.  By contrast, lifting the embargo would kick away his crutch and expose Cuba to American ideas and influence.  "There is no surer way to undermine the Castro regime," The Economist has asserted, "than to flood his streets with American tourists, academics, and businessmen, with their notions of liberty and enterprise." 

    I understand the argument. But I don't buy it. 

    The embargo has its drawbacks, but the case against it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Cuba may not be inundated with Americans -- though 80,000 of them did visit the island last year -- but the past decade has brought a huge influx of Canadians and Europeans.  *Their* influence and exports and "notions of liberty and enterprise" haven't weakened Castro's grip -- the result, in part, of Cuba's "tourist apartheid," which bars ordinary Cubans from mixing with foreigners in hotels, restaurants, and beaches.  So why would more Americans make any difference? 

    True, Castro blames Cuba's shambles of an economy and endless shortages on the embargo, but there isn't a Cuban over the age of 7 who doesn't recognize that as just another of his lies.  What has wrecked Cuba's economy is communism, not a lack of trade with America.  After all, Castro is free to do business with every other nation on earth. 

    And make no mistake: Doing business with Cuba means doing business with Castro.  There is no private property in Cuba, no private enterprise, no private employers.  Foreign investors *must* deal with the government.  They cannot hire Cuban workers directly; a government agency chooses their workers for them.  The investors pay Castro handsomely -- in hard currency -- for each worker; Castro in turn pays the workers a fraction of that amount -- in all-but-worthless pesos. 

    So long as Cuba's dictator maintains his stranglehold on every aspect of Cuban life, ending the embargo would be counterproductive.  It would do nothing to end the far more restrictive embargo that Castro imposes on the Cuban nation.  It would give him the propaganda victory and the US dollars he craves, but it would do little to bring liberty or hope to ordinary Cuban citizens. 

    Every president since JFK has extended the Cuban embargo; to lift it in exchange for nothing -- no free elections, no civil liberties, no improvement in human rights -- would be a betrayal of the very people we want to help.  "Tiende tu mano a Cuba," says Paya when I ask what he thinks of American policy, "pero primero pide que le desaten las manos a los cubanos."  Extend your hands to Cuba -- but first unshackle ours.