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NEWS
THE NEW YORK SUN
November 30, 2005 Edition > Section: Foreign
Desperation Rises in Castro's Cuba
BY MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 30, 2005
WASHINGTON - Amid a surging wave of repression by the Castro
dictatorship, Cuba's prisoners of conscience increasingly are resorting
to "acts of desperation" - including hunger strikes, suicide attempts,
and self-mutilation - in a cry for international recognition and
solidarity, and to advance the cause of the island's liberation.
According to leaders of the Cuban pro-democracy movement in Havana,
Miami, and Washington, the months since July have witnessed a dramatic
increase in reports of such acts emerging from Castro's gulag. The
prisoners' behavior, activists said, is a response both to increased
crackdowns outside the prisons and new levels of abuse inside, and to
the perceived indifference of the international community, particularly
Europe.
"The prisoners are pleading to the world to pay attention as they work
for liberty," one of Cuba's leading prodemocracy activists, Martha
Beatriz Roque Cabello, told The New York Sun in Spanish earlier this
week in a telephone interview from Havana.
Those pleas are taking increasingly gruesome forms.
Late last month, a lawyer and independent journalist locked away for
more than two years in the Kilo 7 prison in Camaguey, Mario Enrique
Mayo, demanded freedom from his jailers by taking a knife to his face
and body. Mr. Mayo was one of 75 dissidents rounded up by the Castro
regime during the infamous primavera negra, or "black spring," of March
2003. According to an account in El Nuevo Herald, Mr. Mayo has been one
of the most vocal of the dissidents jailed in that crackdown, and, prior
to his acts of self-mutilation last month, twice attempted suicide in
jail by trying to strangle himself with a plastic cord.
Among his many incisions, Mr. Mayo carved the letters "I" and "L" into
his forehead, proclaiming that he was "inocente," or "innocent," and
demanding "libertad," or "liberty." According to the Herald report, one
of Mr. Mayo's cuts became badly infected. He remains in Mr. Castro's
dungeons, condemned to a 20-year sentence.
In another act of self-mutilation, a prisoner of conscience in the
Canaleta prison in Cuba's Ciego de Avila province, Manuel Fiallo, cut
himself to protest prisoners' lack of medical care, according to a Cuban
prison diary published in recent days on a Miami-based Cuban
pro-democracy site,
Payolibre.com.
The diary, signed by another Canaleta prisoner jailed in November 2004,
Hugo Damian Prieto Blanco, was written and illustrated between December
2004 and September. In one of September's entries, Mr. Prieto recounts
and depicts how Mr. Fiallo slashed his veins in protest and was
subsequently thrown into a punishment cell by prison guards and left to
bleed to death as his screams went ignored by prison authorities.
The leader of Cuba's Damas de blanco movement, Laura Pollan Toledo, told
the Sun that other recent examples of those who carried out
self-mutilation included Juan Carlos Herrera and Prospero Gainza Aguero,
two of the 75 primavera negra dissidents. Mr. Herrera, Ms. Pollan said,
has beaten himself repeatedly in prison to protest the horrible
conditions suffered by detainees. Mr. Gainza, she said, sewed his mouth
closed in an act of protest, rendering himself unable to speak or eat.
Ms. Pollan's organization, known in America as the "Ladies in White,"
has brought together the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the
prisoners jailed in the 2003 crackdown for regular demonstrations to
demand their release. The Damas de blanco, along with the international
free speech organization Reporters Without Borders, won this year's
Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded by the European
Parliament, for their efforts to combat Mr. Castro's tyranny.
Ms. Pollan and the Washington representative for Reporters Without
Borders, Lucie Morillon, said Cuba has also seen a proliferation in
recent months of hunger strikes among prisoners, particularly
independent journalists. Concern was mounting yesterday over the fate of
one hunger-striking journalist, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, also known as
"Atunez," as his sister, Berta Atunez, reported that her brother, who
has gone without food for about 20 days, had disappeared from the prison
where he had been kept and could not be located.
The hunger strikes, suicide attempts, and self-mutilation, observers
said, were signs that the conditions both on the island and in its
prisons were worsening; that Mr. Castro had grown increasingly
repressive as a result of both surging domestic discontent and his
backing from Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez; and that recent
international appeasement of Mr. Castro had signaled to Cuba's
dissidents that they would need to intensify their cries for them to be
heard by deaf international ears.
Ms. Roque told the Sun that the changes in prisoner behavior began
around the time of Mr. Castro's annual address to the nation on the
anniversary of his Communist revolution, July 26. In preceding weeks,
Mr. Castro had orchestrated the largest crackdown since the March 2003
roundup, arresting more than 30 democracy activists on July 22, many of
whom still remain in prison.
The roundup came on the heels of the island's largest pro-democracy
gathering under the Castro dictatorship, a May 20 gathering of the
Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba, of which Ms. Roque was one of
the principal organizers. That meeting, along with July protests outside
the French embassy, marked an increase in open opposition to Mr.
Castro's stranglehold on power, and Ms. Roque said it was fear and a
recognition of his loosening grip that had provoked Mr. Castro's
crackdowns.
Ms. Morillon said the Castro regime has arrested at least one
independent journalist a month over the last six months, with a total of
25 journalists now languishing in the dictator's gulag. That figure,
according to Reporters Without Borders, makes Cuba "the second biggest
prison for journalists in the world," Ms. Morillon said. Communist China
is the first, with 31 jailed journalists.
Cuba's population is 11 million. Communist China's is 1.3 billion.
These abuses, Ms. Roque said, "Are simply because the government knows
it is in an untenable situation," adding that the Castro regime saw
itself as suffering from a "terminal illness." The crackdowns on
dissidents, Ms. Roque said, had been matched by an increase in brutality
inside the prisons to which they are condemned.
Ms. Pollan, reached by telephone at her home in Havana, said prisoners'
acts of desperation were also driven by horrifying conditions inside the
jails.
Owing to the large number of prisoners of conscience - which Ms. Pollan
said numbered over 1,000 - space in Cuban jails is cramped. The Cuban
population in general, she said, has been suffering from inadequate
nutrition, stemming from a recent scarcity of fruit and vegetables.
Prisoners, she said, bear the worst of the shortages, and are growing
ill as a result.
Fruits and vegetables are an important source of Vitamin A, and Ms.
Pollan said Vitamin A deficiency among Cuban prisoners is causing
blindness and other eyesight problems. Water for drinking and bathing,
too, is scarce in the jails. A lack of medical attention for ill
prisoners is also presenting an urgent problem, which Ms. Morillon noted
was ironic in a country that touts its "universal health care."
According to Ms. Morillon, the situation in the jails is particularly
harsh for journalists and other prisoners of conscience. The Castro
regime, she said, detains prisoners of conscience among "regular thugs,
who are usually asked by prison authorities to harass the journalists."
Beyond protesting worsening conditions inside the dungeons, Ms. Pollan
said the hunger strikes and similar behavior were also acts of defiance
against the regime, with prisoners showing their contempt for their
jailers using the only methods available to them.
That method of resistance against Communist brutality has a long
history. Americans are likely most familiar with the case of Vietnam war
hero James Stockdale. Admiral Stockdale's Medal of Honor citation
recounts that he resisted his communist captors in Hanoi by mutilating
his face by beating it with a wooden stool, undertaking
"self-disfiguration to dissuade his captors from exploiting him for
propaganda purposes." Stockdale, according to the citation, inflicted "a
near-mortal wound to his person in order to convince his captors of his
willingness to give up his life rather than capitulate," which spared
his fellow prisoners further torture.
According to Ms. Pollan and Cuban-American leaders in Congress, the
Cuban prisoners' self-mutilation represents similarly courageous acts of
resistance against their Communist captors.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, said the prisoners'
recent actions "show their willingness to sacrifice their own lives for
the greater cause of freedom and democracy for their nation and their
people."
"Cuba's internal opposition," the congresswoman added, "is fully aware
that they were born free and that no one is entitled to deny them their
inalienable human rights. This is why I believe that the psychological
transition from an enslaved people to a free people has begun."
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican of Florida, praised the
prisoners, adding that their acts were "a sign of desperation, a cry for
solidarity, and for recognition of the reality" of the Cuban gulag.
Moreover, Mr. Diaz-Balart said, the prisoners' acts were "a denunciation
of the indifference, which really becomes complicity." The willful
ignorance of Cuba's suffering under the Castro regime by the press and
the international community, and their romanticizing of the dictator,
amounted to abetting the Castro dictatorship, the congressman said.
Mr. Diaz-Balart cited Europe in particular, saying the continent's
appeasement of Mr. Castro and their rejection of dissidents in recent
months had fueled a sense of desperation among Cuba's prisoners.
In June, the European Union decided to extend its policy of not inviting
Cuban dissidents to official national day celebrations at EU countries'
embassies in Havana, as the inclusion of dissidents had greatly irked
the dictator. The July crackdowns by the Castro regime were responses to
dissidents' protests outside the French embassy, after the country
unilaterally normalized relations with Mr. Castro's regime, and after
Mr. Castro's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, was invited to the
embassy's July 14 Bastille Day celebration, from which the Cuban
opposition was excluded. And Cuba resolutions adopted at the
Ibero-American summit in Spain in October were generally seen as a blow
to the Cuban opposition and accommodating of Mr. Castro.
Activists yesterday said yesterday that the desperation of the Cuban
prisoners' pleas made it all the more important that such indifference
end immediately.
Ms. Morillon called on the EU to step up its demands for the release of
jailed journalists, saying it was up to the outside world to show
solidarity with the hunger strikers. "We should not let them down," Ms.
Morillon said. If there is outside criticism of and pressure on the
Castro regime, she said, the prisoners "will know that there is some
interest - they will see that what they went to prison for is not in
vain."
Ms. Pollan, too, said it was incumbent on the international community to
respond to the prisoners' cries for support with expressions of
solidarity. She encouraged concerned parties around the world to write
letters to the Castro regime demanding the dissidents' release, and
urged world leaders to use their speeches and other public appearances
to denounce Mr. Castro's tyranny and demand the liberation of his
captives.
"They need to know that the world is clamoring for their freedom," she
said.
A message left at the Cuban U.N. mission in New York seeking comment on
the prisoners' plights went unreturned.
URL:
http://www.nysun.com/article/23693
Collaboration: Maria C. Werlau, President, Free Society Project, Inc.
& Principal, Orbis International Consulting
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